A room from Airchat's 2023 version, recorded as a video. The room's name is the title; the transcript below follows the video, and every time in it plays the video from that point.
Play videoTranscriptmachine transcription · 1:23:15
Transcribed from the recording by machine (Whisper): it may contain errors.
0:00 I spent some time in the last few months in nost and here are some reflections of my time in there first of all uh it has or it used to have at least it already changed a bit in the last month but it had that um early small village type of a community fa which you uh have here in air chat but also uh in the early days of internet as well in the early 90s when there was uh excitement everything was possible people were quite polite it was a time of Innocence if you will in a sense but also time of Discovery and uh you didn't ask permission to build stuff you could put up your website and and if you came up with an idea you could build it and that's the spirit uh in no at the moment because the protocol is so simple you don't need any permission if you've been playing around with the uh the Technologies in the last 20 years uh internet technologes I mean it's so simple to do anything in there and that's an empowering feeling which has been missing quite a bit already uh in in a lot of these Silo web uh 2.0 even web 3 uh applications and uh uh developments later L the strength of nosta is uh its community at this point um it's early adapters uh have been the Bitcoin communities um the demographic uh how I been figuring out based on the nostri the first un conference in Costa Rica sponsored by Jack doy um and and others is middle-aged um tech people some of them
2:03 are Bitcoin maximalist or just uh from that gen but in general there's a lot of Builders those people who been around those who actually been seeing the open source movements uh coming along Linux uh lonus building Linux uh Red Hat all these type things even going further to the 80s where it it was the bit of the libarian movement uh the basic values where openness and uh equality and U freedom of speech and uh all all these things uh which um are under the continuous uh pressure and uh if you were building um any Tech in the late 90s uh before the dot bom boom busted you probably felt um sense of urgency sense of or in a way that there was so much happening things were moving so fast it was exciting it was thrilling um but there was a lot of missing foro as well and all these other other sides of it as well um nosta has been gaining rapid development and advances in the last uh well basically since the mid uh December when Jack Dy um gave 14 Bitcoin to the development of uh of nosta ecosystem so after that a lot of activities picked up and uh
4:07 there's been uh numerous uh prowers tools the ecosystem value chains been catching up and uh it's already supporting a lot of different use cases even though the regular browsing uh the Twitter type of um Prower experience uh is the dominant one at this point but uh it it's starting to support also uh other activities and uh I would say also native nostr Native uh initiatives which are not derivatives of the uh well copy cutting the the previous uh Tech or applications is also starting to emerge one of the KY laabs if there any other use cases is the combination of uh uh payments and uh messaging and and because everything is signed it's uh in a sense more secure even though everything is uh public at at this at at this stage on the notes um you can have uh direct messages the metadata is at this point at least uh public but the messages are encrypted but uh but the fact that you can send U lightning payments U basically uh without any transaction costs natively with the one or two TS uh is a powerful concept which has been missing from the early internet even though there was this 402 uh 404 is so famous but 402 is not and uh this is one of the things which might help help the adoption and U use cases for for nost obviously it's also sensor resistant um the clients are working at least some of them are
6:09 working either with or or on top of T in China and Russia and places where the government is suppressing and monitoring the IP traffic uh there's been also some famous people somewhat uh or for one or other reason famous people like Snowden and and few other ones joining now later on um in the April to the to the platform so these are pushing more people which are coming out of the Bitcoin circles to the to the nosta platform there's no one common view you how to build nost and and there's a lot of these new initiatives called nips um Nostra implementation possibilities uh basically which are the the protocol level um instructions um and this is something where it's the strength of the nost but also it's weakness in a sense that it seems to be getting harder and harder to get concept tensions what's supposed to be in the protocol level what needs to be implemented and and what not uh if you're building any of the clients or relays or something substantial it's getting uh it's becoming a full-time job to actually just follow the the GitHub issues and discussions so this is clearly not possible uh the first nost Wars if you will have already been uh flaming actually this week uh because some of the implementations were breaking the previous compatibility backward compatibility in in some of the uh protocol implementations like
8:14 imates uh so the fragmentation is already happening there are also some shortcuts um the infrastructure is a bit challenging even though it's really simple um because there's no blockchain underneath there's no one common state um it's hard to build a reliable fast extensive uh client messaging system where you can fetch all the notes all the messages uh for the user and uh building on top of that still emerging wobbling uh back end if you will is a challenge which you will you see it while you're using it that it's is not as good as using Twitter or any of the centralized databases at this point uh yet the bigger challenges will come when the payment needs to be involved now everything is being more or less free there's been some paid relays and you can pay for the relays if you like but you don't need to um hosting of images rich media will and is expensive um that's not sustainable in the future the Temptation is always to go through the advertising model going for the centralized Services um make the protocol in a way redundant that you will Silo everything have a few aw uh instances or big players coming in and and serving all the content absorbing all the costs obviously with their own business model but if if you really want to build something which is uh sensor resistant something which is uh based on
10:18 the the values and uh really not building the or repeating the mistakes of the previous generation of the internet Technologies it's getting hard uh it's not obvious uh the easy path and there are players who are coming in and cutting corners and uh most of the users many of the users don't care it's not important for them they take whatever is the easiest whatever is the most convenient where the onboarding is the best where you don't need to worry about anything and this is the struggle of anything if you want to stick on some more sticky principles and um it takes uh quite a bit of Courage from the developers as well uh the easy way is to take some easy money take some investor money and and build something which you will scale and and and then you Val you monetization model needs to support uh the investor intake of money in order to to pay it back so this will reflect on the choices you will make um the early clients have been resisting so far this temptation but they are already teams coming in uh turning the existing products from alternative um use models or or underlying Technologies to this this use case and obviously the big boys are also looking for it VP WordPress uh not even talking about the biggest big dech uh they they are all observing but at this point this is just too early to friends to be con concerned about but um it's clear we need something like nost to where the user owns the the keys
12:25 owns the content owns the data and is free to move and that's the brilliant user experience or Insight when you can use the same username and password if you want to use the regular language um when you have signed up for any of the no clients you can use the same same logins to um by by any any of the other applications and um this obviously brings some challenges for the uh developers because uh the mold is non-existing or it's different from the previous one most of the the clients are anyway built on MIT or open source licenses so that's uh that's also making it easy for anyone to fork and and and start to build on top of already existing code but it's it's also strength if you compare it to the other Alternatives uh to Twitter and Instagrams and and and and these um forast I think they have between 10 or 20K users they've been around a few years Noster is now is it three years um Blue Sky building protocol as well having a demo app as they call it but now it's becoming a a thing itself uh having more funding I would guess than the total Nostra ecosystem at this point I don't think they have much well they've been closed better and it's hard to get an invite for them same thing with lens and and few of the other initiatives at this point so where to go what to do must done the bigger one the the big elephant in the
14:29 room um I think it's it's a really nice idea but um the user experiences we' seen also from the data um from last year I don't think too many people have actually kept uh posting on keep on posting there after the initial sign up and the shock of the of the Elon Musk um following people from different instances is difficult it's still some somebody else's computer you using somebody else's compute storage and at any time you can be kicked out there's a lot of these points in the in the nost GitHub uh mentioned why why why not is needed it's getting tiome to always uh sign up and and then somebody else own your data and you have to start from scratch and uh you you cannot build leverage on the on the things you're doing um this definitely needs to change also the government regulation is getting tighter for anything and everything related to the freedom of speech uh Commerce and uh all those issues where government wants to have a tight [ __ ] it's not getting easier it's getting harder these are the things which are challenges and I think we need some um principal positions uh like what's happening with the Bitcoin uh in the fundamental level at this point what are the big challenges with nost I think the ecosystem can it keep it together can the small village um let's do it together spirits still um keep going there's already a no from one of the early clients uh the developer started to do something else
16:32 so we starting to see that people are starting to burn out the initial thrill the initial influx of uh new users at the moment is is also going down the the statistics are not looking that good uh but all together I think things are getting getting there getting up all the time new people are joining but it's taking its time so the ecosystem at the moment doesn't sustain the development efforts unless there's some investor money or some other means of uh substituting the the the the Gap uh before things are in the certain level um the fragmentation what I already mentioned uh then the big challenges like the rich media how to host it how to actually introduce the payments um these issues but I think the biggest issue of all is the the use case how to introduce new people now the Twitter situation has been um calming down so the immediate urge to find something else is not exactly there so the network effect is is the biggest thing why should I go to some new place if nobody sees my post why should I talk here when aat has only a few people in uh um early adapters there's only so many of them uh but after after the uh after we run out of them in a way or they get tired how to get the next next wave of people who are more pick in way they need more smooth elegant processes in place they are more impatient um this is the the the biggest challenge in some sense nost is already um going Beyond what's usually possible in the regular social media platforms
18:35 not because it's technically hard but just because uh they don't want to implement these things uh for example here in the picture there's a apple podcast uh player which uh well you can play podcast on your feed the similar features like playing Tik toks Instagrams uh Spotify podcast music uh opening PDFs um pretty much all the file formats are soon available uh playing on your nostr browser and this is just one example of the of the speed uh when a lot of people can do stuff without asking anyone anyone's uh permission uh to implement and have fun and explore open Innovation uh pushing new releases daily or almost hourly um a little bit of competition but also collaboration and ambition to build something open and new and great uh y's results amazingly fast and uh I think this is if if you look and hopefully you can see the um the text in the picture uh what's actually now been discussed how you combine payments and uh share file formats and uh um so much to come in a in a short period of time even uh replacing GitHub which obviously has also some other um urgent uh pressures to be uh done due to the Bitcoin core attacks uh at the moment happening uh there's been a lot of discussion and actually action as well in the no network in the last few well I would say this year about the views the function of the views and because a lot of the stuff is coming from the advertising model and it's not
20:37 really needed if you don't have an advertising model or even if you cannot count the views properly because well there is no Central State um it has gone so far that uh it became almost like the chap Wars uh chapping meaning the tipping in the in NOA world and uh the leading iOS client damos uh removed the like button and wanted to indicate that hey um if you want to a knowledge the order of the of the note uh send a little bit of a fraction of a uh sent uh over and it's way better signal than just liking something so there was only zaps mode you could take it off if you didn't uh like uh but the thing was that you couldn't see the likes either for the other people notes and there was a lot of people who were like oh no I don't want that want to have that at all uh I'm stop using damus um then actually Iris um implemented the option that you can take them all way all the reactions chaps likes retweets and even replies uh and now it's optional you can pick and choose whatever you like and um this is basically I think is a really good question to ask what are the ways to acknowledge what our ways to show your appreciation show you your presence uh when we are not really present but not taking the advertising or revenue or business models uh imposing things on us which probably lead to the wrong signals and uh well what do you measure that's what you were going to get Jack do just announced his 10 million donation out of which 5 million goes to the development of nost um it's quite a bit of money considered that uh the teams are small mainly usually one person maybe fulltime half time and then others
22:42 supporting uh the ecosystem consisting of uh clients tools and uh relays and uh ever growing uh part of uh different aspects of but uh nevertheless this is the time when the support is needed before the uh fully commercialized products are ready and the user adoption is in the level that it can support the teams and the products this is a pretty exciting uh New Era Avenue Universe whatever word you want to um use combining not the decentral ized public uh note service with payments uh and then you have ai World which is uh open sourced if you combine these two together it opens up a lot of possibilities where you don't have to ask permission from anyone and you can explore and it just takes ideas Innovation brilliant people and a weekend and you can probably do something that big guys haven't uh managed to do in a months or years before on no there's a few interesting features uh one of them is uh well that's in the Irish client iris. you can view um anyone's um profile um as them so basically um it's a well it's it's a feature you you can see the notifications you can see the feed who they following how how does it look like well that's how the protocol works you you cannot see the private stuff you cannot change anything but you can see things so so that's rather interesting to see for example that uh for those um high-profile accounts who have a lot of uh people following how how does the world look uh in their eyes well that's more like the lurer mode but
24:46 uh another thing which uh came just a few weeks ago uh was called highlight.com and it's a really fascinating idea uh basically you can highlight anything if you browsing the web there's a Chrome extension and you just uh select some text and it becomes a note of itself or like a tweet if you will and uh it can start to live its own life people can comment it uh they can tip it uh and and you can also as far as I recall uh it also functions like if you know the Kindles uh function where you can see what other people have been highlighting so it works similarly so you you can see the highlights in the text as well if I remember correctly but that's really fascinating idea and and coming back also to the 20 years back days of bookmarking and was it dick and deal isues and all these things so yeah I I love the idea but I also take the notes from uh Naval that yeah it's nice to collect but how how often we go back to those things so I don't know enough about AI uh to map if this is possible I hope somebody on air chat who knows about AI could chime in would really appreciate it um but the idea would be what if you could talk to an AI with encryption so like I'm talking to this Ai and uh it has my public key and everything it says is encrypted and only my private key can decrypted and that public key could be my Bitcoin address too so it's like two birds in one stone I pay them with my public key and that same public key is used to encrypt the data that it is sending me um this way you could have thirdparty providers run a giant llm like I heard that chat gp4 cost $700,000 a day to keep online and
26:52 that's probably because of how many users they have too but it's also probably because of how complic ated it is to sustain a model that powerful so the beauty of this is instead of just having an open- Source llm on all of our computers at home we could still Outsource it to warehouses uh and you know Big Data Centers but these Big Data Centers couldn't see what the AI was helping us with and it also couldn't see what we were talking to the AI about I think that is probably the most realistic um outcome for quote unquote decentralized a I that is not controlled by huge corporations um and not a huge privacy concern for everyone that's worrying about that right now but the real trouble is like how do you encrypt what's going on inside the AI so that uh the data center owner can't peek in um and I talked about this in another room possibly using tees but those uh suffer from side Channel attacks and it's not exactly um do not exactly perfect so I'm curious you know is there a way to encrypt llms or l or encrypted llms a thing and you know how would that all work I think that's a highly vi vi uh valuable application if it's viable I don't think it's the computer it's the the quer itself can you do it without uh exposing what you asking for can you encrypt it before you send it or anonymize it somehow before you send it and I'm not sure whe that's possible unless you um anonymize the the the user in that sense uh but on the other hand uh like the link shows the local models are coming they're already running on a highend mobiles at the moment and open source Community is making it available soon so I think it's becoming feasible I
28:55 don't know whether it's actually Mak sense to have a still big in gigabytes um um models in your local phone but uh hopefully we have that option soon yeah I have some ideas about this this is the I think this is the conversation we were having the other day somewhere else um it should absolutely be doable there should be able to be a layer of encryption now I don't know if it's smart contract that sort of sends the result via a crypto currency transaction to a vault which is then only accessible by the person with a private key u maybe that's where the payments happens but there's all sorts of verification a verification of privacy that's trustless a verification um to the model company that they can look at the functioning of their model for functional information but not specific identifying information and crucially it's important for bias because I think one of the querying antagonization techniques for detecting what's going on with the model will be querying it with a series of preset specifically formatted prompts that maybe this is where the neuron analysis gets in actually because maybe you can test for whether some of these obscure neurons are firing when they should fire so this is a whole thing that could be useful and I'll uh I'm not going to die on any Hill um but Ai and crypto natural natural bed partners and this reminds me of a conversation I had early on with Nal where there's a function to memes and that they're a shth and there are means of communication so um if I take Satan Nal no time for Ling Dr Jones he knows that's Temple of Doom if I say return the map return what you've stolen from me he knows that's Time Bandits so that simultaneously lets him know that we're on some common generational wavelength um and it also confirms that you know I also you know I'm not I'm probably not impostering that situation and I bring it up here because I wonder if that same sort of uh meme based content could be
30:59 used to query these models like for instance a model trained up to a certain point wouldn't know what um bif Felicia would mean let's say as an example so what are those Alpha numerical memes that um models can be used to can can be used to antagonize in query models for uh the authenticity of their underlying compute so here somebody actually already had this idea before we did on air chat um and they explain how you can use homomorphic encryption to do this but the problem is we need Advanced Hardware to speed up homomorphic encryption um operations because they're very slow so uh the author of the article is saying that over the next five years that hard that Hardware should develop and this should become possible and um then perhaps yeah we can have like the payments and the encryption be allinone um but I'm not sure if you would need a special type of encryption key maybe with dids you could uh make the payments and encryption all in one uh but uh yeah it's a it's really interesting idea and I really think it's the future um Beyond self-hosting AIS because who knows how powerful these lolms can be could become you know and uh if more comp reputational power helps get better results than um you know Outsourcing it to Big Data Centers and preserving a privacy at the same time probably would let us get the best of both worlds uh it's just like kind of like the user server model in noer so you know you don't expect users to run the llm you know you have servers do it and then you get all the magic and trust minimization that you can so it seems like we're going to need specialized Hardware that is still
33:03 General like can perhaps do homomorphic encryption and zero knowledge proofs um so that way we can get uh fruits from both Industries you know decentralized networks and AI um in the sense of uh preserving encrypted connections and um just being able to you know verify uh that things occurred is is very useful being able to pay for that so these proofs are extremely expensive to compute you know homomorphic encryption and especially Zer knowledge proofs so if we have Hardware that can improve that and there's a huge demand for it and both Arenas you know that could possibly lower Hardware costs in the long run if they are more people buying the hardware and you can do larger manufacturing runs so I'm I'm hopeful and I know fpgas are already popular but I heard there's some new technology being developed called a vpu uh not so sure about it so it'll be interesting see uh what the future holds but I think those are probably the most promising directions for people looking around like how to advance this industry in a cyberpunk way in the meanwhile while be waiting for these more sophisticated uh models to come affordable uh Palm 2 was announced by Google uh which has also mobile llm that runs offline and the Next Generation should be even smaller and and faster then the other alternative probably is to have a trusted third party like mulad vbn type of provider or maybe one of the big ones if you trust apple or somebody else to do your compute and then the local run do it yourself self hosting like hosting your
35:09 WordPress just uh buy some cheap VPS and run the thing yourself just a guest uh on somebody else's server that's the concept in fediverse but the same happens also in nosta in a sense that uh relays are not obliged to host your content so it can disappear you still have your keys but the data can be Gone With the Wind so how how to prevent that um you could always host your own relay backup things is that feasible at the end how many people will do that we already saw some of the early initiatives in no the like the well I don't want to name the names but there was one browser for example well my guess is there's more than one where the developer was really active and then uh started to do something else at least for a while so burnout and uh not enough monetary incentives uh are the real risks and in in this article case it just became too popular and too expensive for the um host maintainer to uh Finance um him or herself and uh this led to the closing of the server unless the donations are enough and that's usually a hard Hill to climb to have it sustainably uh in the level that uh you can do it for a long term are program on is making really good points so uh if you consider not uh just in quotation marks a Twitter alternative a social media uh alternative that's an opportunity and exciting as it as it is but if you start to consider it as a
37:15 infrastructure for an app ecosystem um maybe even alternative for iOS and uh Play Store then you may start to get more excited so here list a few things which are already available and I will just C them for you here um there's an open Cloud database with a standard API you have authentication with Tamp proof of all events documents files records uh well- defined data types um types you have a decentralized monetization Bitcoin at least but it doesn't matter you can put something else there as well you have web of trust uh as a potential solution to app safety issues you have shared open network effect for the benefit of any new app so there's something to think about I wonder whether we could actually use nost uh because it's basically just Jason files uh pure simple web socket uh with text uh as a way for the computers to communicate with each other over Network without anything else and they to spill it upon that basis each and every new community new protocol is facing some um growing stages and nor already has some uh human-based DDOS troll spam attacks early on and uh blue sky is experiencing something at the moment the D obviously is that blue sky is one instance and not a protocol yet not is a protocol from the GetGo but here are some good uh ideas how to how to build the communities how to build build the moderation tools and what it really requir to to have a decentralized uh Network going adding my buddy who just joined air chat he's done a bunch of work in crypto including at library at strike and most recently did some work on Noster Apple decided to remove damos the leading IOS nost app from the app
39:22 store because it allows tips um so because tips can be used for many things even purchasing digital content which the app doesn't provide it's like a Twitter except that Twitter provides subscriptions directly um nost doesn't do no such thing it doesn't uh host any content it doesn't have any content it's beyond its control with anything to do with content so the platformization it is it's odd Apple will only allow zapping if it's on the profile page like I can zap you if I go on your profile but I can't zap your tweets and notes to me that just doesn't make any sense because I can pay somebody to buy content from them even by zapping their profile I could just talk to them in the DMS and buy something so it's just nonsensical reasoning used to disrupt and hinder uh this movement uh alas I don't know what their issue with it is but as long as it's not banned for speech that's what I care about most if that happens then it really is war Twitter's dip function is the same so in that sense it is at least consistent this whole Fiasco has made me realize that apple is currently untenable I mean I doubt that they would even accept you know some method to send 30% of every zap to them uh I don't think that is even what they want I'm not sure what they want so to me it seems like the best route forward right now is to focus on desktop and making this all work you know like a decentralize web on desktop and any browser and then after that moving to building an Android browser because Android already allows for custom browsers on the Play Store so it would
41:26 be pretty hard for them to ban a browser um I mean it's always possible but they might even run into the legal trouble since they're already opened up uh but don't take my word on that um that was just from a conro I had with somebody uh who worked at Microsoft and Mozilla and was kind of intimately involved in all the drama of the Android play store in the browser um so it seems like that's a better bet for now and then later on hopefully Apple will come along especially if Apple realizes that they can run a node and make money uh essentially the business that is GitHub and Twitter are currently monopolized by Microsoft and Elon Musk uh so if Apple realizes that they can make money hosting tweets and hosting GitHub repos then maybe they'll open up the decentralized web uh and allow for a browser because then they can become competitors in these businesses that they're currently not allowed in because we would have turned those businesses into protocols by building browsers on mobile instead of individual apps I think we gain a great Advantage so instead of building a Twitter and a GitHub and a Dropbox and whatever else you just build this browser that can do all of those things and now if Android wants to declare war they have to do it in one swoop they have to ban everything but if you create a bunch of individual apps instead of a browser well then they can just nip the apps in the bud that they don't like they can just ban this the ban the apps they don't like so I think a browser is a lot smarter especially since it seems like Android's Play Store already has made a a huge commitment to allowing for any types of browsers
43:29 potentially even a legal uh commitment I'm not sure entirely on that but um that's what that one guy was making it sound like so it sounds like a much better point of Leverage and it's not there for Apple yet um I think Apple like I said is we're going to have to woo them or build a new Os or just ditch them all together uh you know so it's funny though I have this inkling that the only way apple is going to come along is if some new open- source phone actually starts gaining traction and gets popular enough or if they start losing tons of users to Android then they will come along uh and it's basically like once we've guaranteed our freedoms enough and once once once it gets big enough to where we don't need Apple anymore that's when they finally will come along and it's so frustrating because you know that's that's what it's going to take and it it should be that way because wooing apple is pointless if they can just pull the rug underneath us at any time like we really need uh to build the castle on a solid foundation you know on an open source OS on mobile devices that is like IOS as clean as it but uh you know open source that is the future I mean all of civilization relies on these phones like how is there not a good open- source OS out there it blows me away I mean I know there's graphine OS and all these Android mods but they all are not that nice to me I am addicted to the iOS gestures and all of that so hopefully we will build that one day sounds like at the end of the laundry list but it's certainly important it's a foundation yeah I like that approach um
45:37 sort of uh taking Pro decentralization because the hosting is so important so if if your iCloud would uh accept and allow and be a little bit customized for hosting your videos hosting your Rich content hosting your uh tweets or whatever they call it in different platforms uh that way I think you could own your own content as well which is the the preferred way because now in nost and other places you uh squatting somebody else's servers and you never know what's going to happen with your data so it's natural in a way that one of these big ones would uh come to this space and do something uh hopefully positive in that sense and I don't know who else could it be maybe Microsoft but um somehow Apple sounds a better candidate but they are so laid on things usually that it may take years maybe 5 years before they realize that this is Big Market enough so in that sense the discovery phase and the problems are already solved by by some other means on the other hand Apple was introducing more options and um features on pwa's Progressive web apps so in that sense uh the browser option of having your app as a well not in the App Store but still within uh looking like an app in your phone might be the way to go and opening up of the App Store anyways by legal pressure is the thing but it's still taking the cut if you want to have it so the it's it's it's a halfway measure so maybe the progressive web apps is the solution obviously it doesn't help with the distribution and Discovery for those apps but it's better than nothing do you know how many nost clients there are well this list uh as a as of uh this chit date there's 28 uh raow items but I would say there's
47:44 probably 15 active ones uh it gives the features it also list them by the nips check it out if you're interested still and haven't tested all of them the OG iOS nost client damos seems to be getting removal from the App Store uh pretty soon because uh they've been trying to change the code and trying to um be comp compliant with the Apple Store rules guidelines but it seems that uh if you just allow to have a tip option in the profile even though they already removed that per uh per tweets uh it it still is not um good enough for Apple because everything should go within the inapp uh route which is obviously not the way to do it if you're doing with the Bitcoin and is Apple even capable of accepting Bitcoin and are they expecting to get 30% cut from all those things so it doesn't really make any sense uh because Twitter has the same option and tipping somebody on their profile does not mean that it will unlock some content there's no direct link between tipping and content so it seems that uh apple has a bad day or there's just somebody who doesn't understand or there's a bigger scene of things behind it which is not revealed because those guidelines can always be read in a way that it fits the ad hoc policy thanks I appreciate it so the plan for the future is pretty
49:49 much the same plan that we've had for the past 6 months with some minor improvements the idea is that you can turn your noer profile with all your noer notes or your GitHub repos or your website into a Merkel tree now a psionic Merkel tree and you can store that on these Hornet relays then you put the Merkel rout of the psionic Merkel Tree on the Bitcoin blockchain so now the Hornet relays know when there is an update to your Twitter profile or your GitHub repo and can start requesting missing leaves uh right when they see an update on the Bitcoin blockchain so now that we have these new Merkel trees it's just a much better system all around because the branches are so small for users and relays can sink missing leaves with small branches as well so it really improves our end goal uh we're just laying a very strong Foundation to achieve that decentralized GitHub and synchronized noer this is pretty exciting so when threats becomes part of the fediverse uh you can also um take the benefits of uh rest of the fediverse so must done instances and people there but you don't need to be dependent on any single instance which might be well overnight delete all your data so um this ditto uh enables you to utilize the decentralized uh data servers uh in nost so this way your data is not in any instance's hand and uh all the benefits of nost are yours so you can follow and like and engage with people across the threads and uh the rest of the fers and also obviously
51:52 nost so they got a funding for at least one year from the Jack dosis donation so there's a a lot of good stuff happening at the moment here's the list of uh all the grant uh uh recipients uh who got it in the batch of July 2023 you can see the list of um pretty much all the M clients and uh well the most significant development uh projects in the field obviously not an exhaustive place but uh Good Start Discord Snapchat tender even air chat could all be decentralized on noer free of all of those annoying ads and just nonsense I guess air chat doesn't really have much of that but I really feel like all of these could become noer apps and and uh feels like they need to be cuz it's funny on Tinder and Snapchat so many features are paid but the features are just withheld like it's would be totally possible to have those features open source for free and then you could just spend the money on paying the nodes to do the job instead of paying for these useless features that are bricked away by close sourced Developers can't tell you how many times I've gone onto Snapchat and been sucked into the whole page full of nonsense it's like thirst traps and it's like the modernday tabloids like when you're at a grocery store and you see those magazines with all that [ __ ] on them that's what they brought that to to Snapchat that's how the Millennials deal with that now it's like they're I forcefully seen it whenever they want to
53:54 talk to their friends on SN Snapchat it's it's so annoying and then tender not being encrypted end to end encrypted I mean those are your most intimate conversations are with a loved one you know or with a potential loved one that should be encrypted and then Discord it's like we have these giant group communities might as well have them be encrypted and I think it's it's totally reasonable you know especially all of the sensitive crypto projects using Discord just horrible security so I think all of these apps deserve to be decentralized if you ever be using Kindle and you do highlights or you make some quotes from books or texts this is what you see here this is the level in nost noway already the clients are this is just a regular note code from a book and you can click the other and it it goes to the profile page and uh the text is obviously also copyable and that's just the beauty of this thing this is in the middle of your feed so you can make book codes you can it's not just retweeting some text like what you can do in uh other regular social media this is you can quote media and hey is this the new peer reviewed platform as well so this is what happens when the Innovation is free and everybody can contribute and you can put your widest uh dreams uh in reality and people uh like them and they catch up so this was done with the no to one of the clients uh in in the Apple ecosystem so iOS Macos um iPad OS uh available already now D Kiki wrote this in um earlier this year fourth of April and he was uh exactly wondering how to make these composable uh highlights something useful and how that could uh happen and you can read it in the article or even
55:59 listen to that article by clicking on the top of the note well it's it's a regular blog post uh but uh here you see that you drow an idea and few months later it has already happened nost daily active user account has been pretty flat between around 8,000 to some 10,000 users with the few Peaks going to 14,000 but U pretty much between the eight and 10,000 users and it hasn't grown currently there are some 100,000 trusted users on no based on the noan definition which is clearly behind muston and even Blue Sky the link give some comparison to Blu sky and some other alternative social media how they've been fairing this year if you want to get a little bit wild and see what's happening in nost ecosystem there's this new client called No strudel and it has a lot of features in it it may look a little bit more exotic but uh it is really fast and there's a lot of things to discover if you are in the Apple ecosystem nosu is my favorite client at the moment it's backed with features I would say it's on with the Twitter and probably going already over it in some sense and it's really reliable and it's my everyday client which I'm using on Apple ecosystem I think they already now have a Mac um app as well to give idea of the speed uh in development when you can just uh do what you wish and you can also ask for things I posted this few days ago and within the next uh 18 hours or so there was already a first version of it executed by the founder and
58:04 creator of uh nosto actually here is the WordPress plugin where you can host your own pictures on Noster so you don't need a external server or relay or anything to have your uploaded media files you can control them yourself lens founder stunning which is another um blockchainbased um alternative social media has come to the conclusion that what ELO musk is uh trying to do it uh you have to pay a little model uh to fight the spam and pots doesn't really work you have to use something else and not the clients have been some of them have been implementing web of trust which is a really good way of um blocking things you don't want to see so basically how do you do Define is that uh you define the depth from the following whom you following and who they follow and who they follow and all along that course as many levels as you like and the rest you don't see so this way the regular spam people you don't follow who may not have any followers and it's just complete spam doesn't uh come to your feet because it only SS uh the things you define it to see and that's how do you control it by the following obviously if there are bad apples in your following then spam Creeps in but uh nothing is perfect if you want to develop something and you have some good ideas uh till the end of this month few days left uh you can apply for nost Project funding from open SS and this way maybe you can get your project uh up and running Noster as the the strong leader in two different ways one it is a much much more interesting environment
1:00:07 to build applications like we can build much more interesting applications it's like blue sky is super tech like super interesting and some of its Tech is better but you can really only build a Twitter like app on Blue Sky and you know Matrix super interesting protocol you can really only build like a direct messaging and group chat application on top of Matrix um and so Noster lets us build many many kinds of applications and so you know that's why I do stuff on Noster and not not activity Pub and the fediverse because I don't get any leverage effect of it you know I could build not social on the ferse but I don't like then someone couldn't build up on top of what I have and that's the way open source works the other way in which Noster is is different and Powerful is that Noster use of connection to integration with lightning means that easy fast micro payments are possible which means we have business models that aren't advertising or high value subscription content you know only fans or substack can do subscription content because you pay lots of dollars per month per thing and so those are the two places that Noster really succeeds but we don't necessarily have more users uh we aren't in as many communities we don't necessarily have the ux as better uh but uh we both can do more interesting applications and you know the financial model wasn't baked in to Twitter and Instagram and and Facebook and mypace and all those others when they were starting they didn't have any other model but advertising and that that is fundamentally different and I don't see the veerse or blue sky or everyone else being willing to
1:02:12 adopt lighning payments or other equivalent micro payments and so um that's huge hey I've never used Nostra before but I'm a big fan of far Costa and the concept as a whole uh would love to hear some thoughts from people that have used both uh why one might choose Nostra over um foraster I am definitely more on the ethereum side than Bitcoin side so maybe that has an impact as well now talk about why Noster is going to win um I think this why only a few months in we already have a pretty rich ecosystem of apps that are that are being built on this open protocol and every one of these projects is going to choose their own set of trade-offs nobody can stop them uh everything is allowed so everything will be tried and we get to see all of this play out uh in front of our eyes so to application developers I would say don't be afraid to experiment with tradeoffs uh this is actually not's superpower the fact that we're that this is all going to happen whether we like it or not and uh I think it will be glorious thank you the founding document uh in the GitHub I can put it in the comment link is a really good place to start which gives a lot of reasons why nost is need it and it's the latest development but uh I give you a few reasons uh first of all because it doesn't have a blockchain uh the second one it it is completely open protocol and the third one it is so simple so it's easy to do whatever you please in there and innovate and that means that uh nobody can stop you and it's also free which is the reason going to the point number one he doesn't have a blockchain conference has been great so far I got to know Marty really well I met Jack asked Snowden some questions and it was actually cool Snowden replied and said we needed file storage for media hosting on relays and I didn't even ask him that question I just said what do you think noer needs uh it was just lucky coincidence so it's been really cool so far but uh there only a handful of talks that were really really
1:04:14 cool but uh the just the vibe of a small conference was was refreshing it's been a while I would argue that there was a center of gravity people were saying that we were going to become China or that uh China was going to become America basically uh that we were going to adopt the other models and I actually think it's different I I think there is an authoritarian center of gravity that is pulling all manner of governments toward it right um the China government is very authoritarian many governments around the world are very authoritarian uh but what's interesting is that we're seeing more liberal governments becoming more authoritarian uh Co was really a bright red warning flag uh that it doesn't take much uh sense of panic sense of emergency we're seeing the same thing with Israel and Hamas right now uh where we go up but you know somebody's crossed the line there's a 911 moment uh and the old rules no longer apply classic rights will no longer be protected the world has changed so we as institutions will change there's not time logistically for a vote there's not time for a conversation this is an emergency don't you understand and so we need to use the maximum extent of our capability of our technology um to confront threat and step by step bit by bit uh you what you see is you see China and the United States becoming more like you see Europe and China becoming more like they still differ there is distance between them but the distance is now and and that really is what should alarm us particularly when you start looking at capability when you look at surveillance when you look at QR codes when you look at control of money flows when you look at control of communications when you look at real name policies and identities when you look at the fact that there's a you know in everything app uh in China like we chat that does you know payments it does chat it does identity it does social media it does travel it does tickets um but the government in China requires you to go into an office and ship ID in order to activate your account and then you hear Elon Musk saying oh X is going to be in everything app he's starting to pay people but then you have to tie it to your identity in order to get paid uh these are things that should really alarm us and
1:06:30 I like the rabels presentation yesterday really high quality a lot of inspirational stuff in there then uh Primal one was good today then the HLA Founders presentation was also really nice uh those were at least some of them uh I recall now being with of high quality obviously I saw some of yours but it was only 480 um resolution I don't know why um so I was just waiting for a better one number one single pointer failure was was myself um in that I was leading and making decisions around this for hundreds of millions of people and policy um the the next was what you mentioned incentives around Revenue Twitter um was beautiful in the early days and Rabel has talked about this and that it was a pretty wide openen API to the degree where uh we had so many developers on it experimenting actually a lot of them in Japan Japan was our biggest Market um because we had so many developers use the IP API to make things like tamagachi that you could feed and you could see pass away and live and smile is it was amazing but it actually brought the sight down all the time and uh and we got this this fail whale and um but that's when it most felt like a protocol and that's when it most it felt most like it felt the most special as soon as we grew we we started with that feeling but then we took money from VC's and we made people that we employed a promise that these shares that we would give them would be worth some meaningful amount more than they were today and that just set up a
1:08:35 whole series of events that took us public and before that created a a business model such as advertising which became another single point of failure is the advertising pressure and the and the revenue model um I've said in the past that like if if Bitcoin existed before Twitter started we would have had a much better option and a much better path and removed at least one of the single points of failure and that's what makes me so excited about Nostra is it does have Micro payments like it'ss real it's it's a scaled experiment that we can actually learn from and that to me is so rare and and so amazing that it actually exists uh right now and people can play with and most importantly feel it and then the last single point of failure that was meaningful was what you mentioned in terms of the government in terms of regulators obviously a lot of this was exposed in the Twitter files and it's um it's very challenging as an individual or anyone in the company when the government or any government comes knocking at your door it's very hard to um take the stand that that you took um especially as you have concerns about revenue and the company just going away because we're the smallest of the Giants against Facebook and Google and everything else and um all that to say what I think is changing and these are all pendulum pendulum swings and I think the pendulum is swinging back to a world where we can actually persist more open protocols because we have things like Bitcoin where everyone who contributes to bitcoin from a development perspective or from a marketing perspective or a policy perspective makes it better for everyone else who does the same thing
1:10:40 and you have this very interesting virtuous Loop and I think the same is true for for Noster um in that to me the most powerful idea is not that it's recreating twitter- like things or or handling the social media use case but it's this open permissionless ecosystem of apps that anyone who creates one of those and it's great actually benefits the entire ecosystem so it's this like cooperation that continues to build upon itself in in a very unique way and I just don't I don't know if we've had the tools to do that before but maybe we did on the internet and and you know the the um the the downfall was the centralization of the discovery mechanism that's where Google came in that's where Facebook came in that's where Twitter came in yeah away from the use Nets away from the irc's away from um gopher and all these technologies that were truly decentralized but really hard to find something and then the last single point of failure that was meaningful was what you mentioned in terms of the government in terms of regulators obviously a lot of this was was exposed in the Twitter files and it's um it's very challenging as an individual or anyone in the company when the government or any government comes knocking at your door it's very hard to um take the stand that that you took um especially as you have concerns about revenue and the company just going away because we're the smallest of the Giants against Facebook and Google and everything else and um all that to say what I think is changing and these are all pendulum pendulum swings and I think the pendulum is swinging back to a world where we can actually persist more open protocols because we have things like Bitcoin
1:12:45 where everyone who contributes to bitcoin from a development perspective or from a marketing perspective or a policy perspective makes it better for everyone else who does the same thing and you have this very interesting virtuous Loop and I think the same is true for for Noster um and that to me the most powerful idea is not that it's recreating Twitter like things or or handling the social media use case but it's this open permissionless ecosystem of apps that anyone who creates one of those and it's great actually benefits the entire entire ecosystem so it's this like cooperation that continues to build upon itself in in a very unique way and I just don't I don't know if we've had the tools to do that before but maybe we did on the internet and and you know the the um the the downfall was the centralization of the discovery mechanism that's where Google came in that's where Facebook came in that's where Twitter came in yeah away from the use Nets away from irc's away from um gopher and all these technologies that were truly decentralized but really hard to find something the direction is is going to capture all of us so we have an option and it's in this room fortunately and I want to thank you all for helping to build it so we'll take another question hi I was wondering uh besides the inaccessibility through tour are there any other scaling problems that you've encountered while using noer or are there any other things you'd like to see noer enable I think that one's for you Edward if you're still there yeah sorry guys we're uh we're keeping it weird right um yeah I mean uh
1:14:54 I actually think uh Nostra is really capable right now uh the main thing is to to get people using it um I I've seen some criticism of the the the lightning Network integration with it um because uh you know people have criticisms of lightning lightning has worked um pretty well for me I mean I've been excited I see you know the zapathon and everything like that uh and what I like about is that it's accessible for normal people the thing that I I don't like about it is that uh you are replacing one set of centralized gateways with another in that nobody's running their own uh sort of lightning node everybody is using like uh you know an Albi or or some other uh centralized uh provider because they don't have their node running uh and when they're offline like lightning lightning doesn't work um this problem I I don't know how to fix uh but the the core thing is when we talk about things like video publishing which is really really popular for a lot of people's use cases uh how are we going to host that uh image hosting is expensive you know video hosting and serving is way more expensive uh and the reason so much of the the internet has worked uh in the way that we grew to understand it was because like Jack said there was there was VC money that was quietly burning in Warehouse uh in the background um what Google is doing right now with YouTube is the best example of that uh and kind of what makes me worry for the uh plausibility of of competing with them on that uh is you look and they are trying to monetize every
1:17:02 last inch of it all at the same time like they've become very aggressive with ad blocking they're running more ads uh if you don't run an ad blocker they'll run more and more and more and more and more ads until you subscribe to their service uh and it's all happening at the same time whereas for the longest time YouTube was something that was free and most of the content that's on YouTube is not the kind of thing that you would pay for uh and and now suddenly they' changed the game and you know YouTube has every video on the internet on it even ones that don't belong to them we're just ripped and re-uploaded from from somewhere else uh but if you're talking something like NSTAR like you know how do we get videos up how do we host them like on mass I I I know people can embed things they're doing now it's actually beautiful it works wonderfully i' I've had a good experience again when I can connect um but if you think about like a lot of people joining like uh the Noster version of the fail whale uh are like we've got all these relays and all of these relays have notes that are being Ritt to them that basically links to these other sites how are we going to deal with bit Rod right when when we've got one repository like that and the repository goes down or but like the first mover becomes you know the sacred cow that we can't get rid of uh because if they drop uh we are uh we are losing a central part of the network and losing the history that comes with it uh these are these are tough question mosil as a NCO Foundation uh yet uh talking almost in a corporate language how they going to enter the competition and capture some audiences and eyeballs from the uh current large players because there's an opening in the market maybe that's the um Au uh interpretation in the article but anyways what they doing they setting
1:19:06 up their own instance and that's in activity pup but uh it's the best thing you can do to have your little isolated island um and if you truly fought a open environment and free freedom and and open communication you probably would have picked up something else Noster or maybe blue sky but in activity pu it's so convenient you can have your own server and you can do your moderation and you can block the world if you like and you can kick out people so that's the best alternative if you don't want to spin up your own uh twiter type of uh complete system contrast that to this presentation this this is in the time stamp 2 hours 22 minutes and 50 seconds and while I was listening to this one I was just thinking this could have been Elon Musk talking about freedom of speech and really liberating the platform for public domain and for the purposes where it can do a huge impact and has already been doing the huge impact for the last 10 years in news and being the uh open discussion forum for the whole world with open apis and and everything in the golden days of uh Twitter as Jack dos was mentioning in food chit pack was honored to be mentioned in Marty's talk here right at the end about the future of noer and possibilities with peerto peer but beyond that this story was really cool to see and you know I knew Marty was involved in the early days but this really clarifies all of the little things and like for example the first thing ever sold for Bitcoin and where dollars were actually exchanged was uh SpongeBob stickers lazos pizza was the first but
1:21:11 that didn't inv involve you know a dollar exchange rate so who would have thought you know SpongeBob stickers uh definitely worth a check if you guys are curious about the evolution of Bitcoin and how it's all LED here to noer that's a really interesting tread um I have to agree I've worked um on developing stuff on ethereum I found it you know quite slow difficult complicated um my mind was blown once I discovered uh Noster its Simplicity um you know and basically yeah the experience of a zap uh which would have took a lot of clicks on metamask uh somewhere else was uh particularly mind-blowing I like the description of the slow bottom up emergence uh of Noster right now it's a lot smaller than farcaster but I can certainly see how it grows and wins one thing that's on the bitstream paper that no one is talking about yet is that it actually provides a way to discover new servers on noer right now the only way you find new relays is by going to your friends profiles and seeing what relays they're connected to but with bitstream the relays freeze coins on chain as I described before and when they freeze coins on chain that means you can go on chain and find all of the relays you can get a list of every relay that exists that's using bitstream so this is like a truly decentralized way of discovering new relays without just relying on your friends and it also goes back to what we talked about with nval at the beginning of the year which is that you use the blockchain for a small amount of metadata you don't put everything on it you don't put all the tweets on it you just have the list of relays on there
1:23:15 and I'm working on an idea to actually extend that to where you can actually use that list of relays and see which one of them is storing data for a given public key or a given person I that will be a whole another paper but I'm still working on it but either way least with bitstream we're going to have that index of relays on chain and move us in that direction in the right step forward e that's a new feature on irs2 and SN social nost browsers where you can check how does your social craft look like I'd like to talk about the state of Noster in 2024 it's been a year since this decentralized protocol uh gained much attention and uh got a lot of people working on it so uh it would be nice to have a recap of what was achieved and where we are now