CD106: Nostr is Freedom with Miljan of Primal

Happy Bitcoin Wednesday,

freaks. It's your host, Odell, here

for another Citadel dispatch.

The interactive live show focused on actionable Freedom Tech and Bitcoin

discussion.

I am broadcasting

live with a very special guest direct from Bitcoin Park on a very busy Wednesday

here during our lightning summit week.

This is gonna be a great show. I'm very excited about it.

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We have a wonderful guest here,

who

traveled internationally to make it. We have Miljan of Primal App,

one of the most exciting,

Noster focused companies here to join us. How is it going,

Going amazing. Good to see you, Matt.

We gave you,

the whirlwind,

Bitcoin Park experience. Welcome.

It's amazing to be here, and what a great place you have.

I'm I'm blown away. For anyone out there who is on the fence about coming over,

do it. It's totally worth it. Like, the the place is really nice, and the vibes are good, and the people are really nice too.

Yeah. I mean, we have a shit ton of people here right now.

Right? It's a bit of an outlier, like, this this week. Or Well, right now, we have our monthly meetup is going on, which we run every month,

and the topic is lightning. But then the next 2 days, we have our lightning summit,

where we have some of the best builders in the space are coming in to talk lightning

and collaborate

and and

and hang out.

It looks like,

okay,

we have a lot of people in the live chat. You cannot see the live chat,

but I will tell you about the live chat. Love it. So

this is fucking awesome. I'm glad to have you here. It's good to kick it.

Should we start with

Derek Ross is telling us to apologize that he has a check on YouTube.

We are going to be talking about today, and we're gonna be talking about Primal.

The last time some of you freaks might have heard about

was when I had Fiat Jeff

and JB 55

on

way back when in the early days of Noster.

It's been a long, long time,

but also a very short period of time, in Noster development and Noster adoption.

And since then, Primal has been launched. So I guess,

probably a lot of our live audience already knows what Nostr is,

but a lot of people listening on the podcast

feed might not know,

what is noster.

So

in in in your mind, you know, let let's distill Nostril just real quick, and then we can get into a deep conversation about Nostril.

Well, Nostril is,

I guess, global

open,

network

for communications

and publishing

with which has an open social graph

associated with it,

as well as a monetary network kind of attached to it, which is Bitcoin lightning payment. So

if you combine all of those things,

magical things happen.

It's really game changing to to have all this together.

And what's unfolding in front of our eyes, I think, is a sight to behold.

With that, this there's this technology that was,

created a couple years ago.

There was only a handful of guys working on it, only a few users.

It's,

it it was pretty kind of slow moving

for maybe a year and a half.

And then,

things started taking off at the end of last year, maybe November, December last year when

when Jack Dorsey started endorsing it in in a bigger

and, when Elon, for some reason, reacted

to

I don't know what whatever the current thing was at at the moment. He was, I guess, threatened about linking out from Twitter,

and

he had made a rule,

at at the time to,

forbid linking out

to a certain number of sites. I forgot exactly the list, but it was the big sites. It was maybe,

Instagram and Mastodon. The big one was Substack. Right? Substack. Exactly. It was around Substack. And then he All the blue checks lost their shit on the Substack. Right. Exactly. Exactly. And then he in that list, he listed Nasr at the bottom. Right. And the 25 people on Noster were like, what?

So that

that made me notice it actually.

That was when you noticed it. Well, I I noticed it before. I I think I actually listened to your pod with Fia Jaf. Let's fucking go.

I was,

looking at these types of kind of decentralized publishing technologies for a few years now.

I was just on my own time researching that, trying to figure out how that problem gets solved,

and wasn't quite happy with anything that I saw. I even tried designing my own protocol,

back a couple years ago.

Wasn't happy with that one either.

Actually, I think I I reached out to you at one point, and and we've talked about it. Yes. I remember that.

So,

props to you, Matt, for just taking a call from a random guy

who has Many such cases. I know. I I witnessed it myself. The best part about this movement is the people behind it. Yeah.

And,

let it be known that Matt just picked up the phone and talked to a random dude who wanted to talk about, like, decentralized,

publishing, decentralized social media.

So, anyway,

I was

not

too happy with my own solution either. I put that aside.

And then,

Nostra came on my radar a couple of times, but I kind of brushed it off.

And it wasn't until November, December last year that,

I decided to take a closer look, and

I was reading through the protocol, actually, the the through the spec,

and it just hit me like a ton of bricks.

This is gonna work.

That was the first thought, and the second thought was

we have a shit ton of work to do.

Okay. So we have,

maybe we you went deep there. First of all, I just wanted to that that dispatch, that original dispatch

with jb 55 and Fiat Jeff,

was episode 63

of dispatch, if you haven't heard it. And mister Kooks, joined us

as well. Incredibly impressive,

BTC pay server,

contributor and Nostra contributor.

So noster the way I look about noster,

right,

it's an interoperable,

permissionless,

censorship resistant

communication protocol

Yes.

That anyone could build on top of,

that

most

most of the applications, we might not necessarily even comprehend.

But we're humans,

and for better or for worse, humans are,

spend a lot of time on social media.

And one of the first main use cases of Nostr

is essentially,

social media using it as a social media alternative,

where

you cannot easily be censored. You can move between different apps. All those apps can communicate with each other.

And from a Bitcoin perspective, that you can also natively send Bitcoin payments to each other while using the protocol.

When we see these centralized platforms that we've become to rely on, Instagram,

TikTok,

Twitter,

Reddit,

they all have the same fundamental problem, which is there is a centralized

entity,

company that has full control over what happens on that platform.

And we see censorship happen.

We see policies get enacted that affect power users and all users.

And there's this weird,

never ending, circular,

people just jumping from platform to platform, but never really solving any of the fundamental core issues. Right? And and Noster

represents

the ability for us to move away from that

concept

and move to something where the end user actually has

control over their own communication.

Right?

Exactly.

And I think the way you described it is is great. What I would emphasize though is that from the get go, the the, the it's it's the centralized publishing protocol and and the communication pro protocol

that has a social graph that's open to everyone

Right.

To develop on,

and obviously not controlled by any person or any company.

The combination of those things is really,

like I said, groundbreaking. And when I

when I discovered it when I truly discovered it, it I couldn't sleep for weeks.

I'm still having a tough time, actually,

coming to terms with it because

so many things can be built on it.

The obvious things are kind of microblogging

applications, you know, Twitter Is that what we call Twitter microblogging?

Yeah.

Okay. Is there a better name? I don't know. Shitposting. I don't know.

Twitter clones, microblogging, that that's an obvious thing to do. And I have a feeling the protocol was kind of designed with the intent that, like, you should be able to,

replicate those types of things on the protocol.

I like the

point of view of

textual

speech, like online speech, but in textual form. So excluding media,

like sound files and video files.

So It's text first. Exactly. It's a text first type of protocol.

And in addition to microblogging, we have long form content, which is also equally obvious to build on on Nasr. Sub stack medium.

Exactly. Exactly. But open.

Exactly.

So, imagine all of those platforms like you like you mentioned where people,

in companies, corporations are in full control of everything. They own Right. They own everything behind it.

Imagine being able to build,

the same functionality

without it being owned by any central authority.

And the implications of that are huge because the censorship

issues that you you,

brought up

This interview the other day, it kinda hit me that The Jack and Jack interview? The Jack and Jack interview. Yes.

When he told the story of how, you know,

how they developed Twitter and

how Twitter turned into what it is today.

It hit me that, you know, usually when we talk about censorship,

we think about

the people who are being censored as the victims there.

And that's,

you

know, that's probably true in most cases,

but it's really those who doing the censoring

that are

victims as well.

Like, if you have the power to do that,

that that's a huge burden to to carry.

Right.

And,

if you have that power, you will be made to use it. You'll be pressured. You'll be pressured by powerful actors to use it. Right. So the only solution is to not have that power.

If the question is, you know, who

who can decide,

who can speak.

Right. Who should have that power? The answer is, like, no one should have that power. It's fucking crazy Yeah. That someone could have that power. Yes. And they do. There's, like, a handful of companies that that

basically have that power to Right.

To, decide that.

So

it's

it's really

super exciting to see Nasr

kind of spread out. Like, the it's one thing to, develop the technology. There there have been some technologies before. I really like Noster because of its simplicity and how effectively it does these things.

So

but, again, Noster as a technology is one thing, but the network sprouting on top of it

organically,

is

is really a sight to behold. Right.

And we're witnessing that,

and it kinda makes sense for it to be,

starting from the Bitcoin community because

we as Bitcoiners, we understand these types of problems. We

have a culture of running nodes. So therefore,

in Nostrad, there are things like relays.

You know, there's just thousands of relays out there. Right. We run our own relay at Bitcoin Park. Amazing. Yeah. And one of the big,

first kind of,

I guess, critiques of Nostra was, oh, well, you know, the what are the incentives for running a relay? No one's gonna run a relay. Right. Well, there are thousands of relays, and people are running them. Well, I mean, I I wanna run a relay because I wanna communicate too. Right?

Yes. Yes.

You you want to make sure that your speech can be,

taken down by Exactly. Other people who run Realize, so

you run your own.

Okay.

I mean, there's a lot of overlap there.

For Bitcoiners, I mean, when you talk about the censorship

on Twitter or

Facebook or, I guess, Instagram now has their own Twitter competitor

threads,

There's there's a lot of overlap there with with Bitcoin in terms of PayPal censoring you or Venmo censoring you or Cash App censoring you,

or Bank of America censoring you. Right? And and why

I I think a lot of people just don't realize

that we've just never been in this situation before.

We've never had

so much of our lives digital,

and as a result,

this digitization

of our of our lives has been in a very centralized way, so we'd never had we've never been so vulnerable to so few people that can control how we interact in our daily lives.

And that is incredibly true for speech. I I think people do not really

understand the ramifications of it yet. I think people will understand it,

further. I think it's the same with with financial freedom. I don't think people realize

I don't think people realize the relationship they're in with these centralized parties, and they unfortunately, a lot of people do not realize until they they get

burned.

Or

or until someone prominent gets burned that Right. Someone they pay attention to gets burned.

I mean, every I a lot of people knew when Kanye lost his bank account. Yeah. But, like, millions of people lose their bank accounts every year,

and get cut out of Bank of America and Citibank and all this other shit, and no one really pays attention,

because they're nobodies. And but when con when it happens to Kanye. You know? Yeah. And Kanye has his own opportunities where he can

buy his own social network or buy his own bank, you know,

make shit happen.

But the average person just gets fucked, just constantly gets fucked.

And all these technologies at the greater freedom tech movement is all about empowering the individual. So the individual has this defensive technology.

You also touched on this idea that Noster has a bunch of different ways it could be used, and I mentioned it briefly earlier.

But I am looking right now on this live chat

at zap.stream.

That's the website, zap.stream.

Because now

don't like, everything in our lives, it's all corrupted by fiat Maxis and Chick Corners. There are a million suffix says that you can have for domains, including dot stream.

So zap.stream

is a domain.

It is this cool web service where

we stream to zap.stream,

and people are in the live chat, and they're they're sending us,

well, they're sending me. They're sending me Bitcoin

on here. I'll I'll I'll give you a portion of the bit I actually owe you a 100,000 sets anyway, but we can get into that later. But but So, hopefully, if they keep if they keep zapping, I can take their money that they're contributing to sale dispatch

and pass on to you. But that's that this is crazy. It's like,

do we who developed zap.stream?

I don't even know.

What

There's a git GitHub repo that lists all of Nostra projects.

Live chat. Tell me who developed zap dot stream.

And there are literally hundreds of them. There are hundreds of projects.

It's hard to like, I'm full time in Noster now. It's really hard to keep up. But this feels like it was a weekend project.

They had this permissionless protocol, a weekend project.

They combined it with,

Kieran.

Kieran,

developed zap.stream.

So I believe it was, like, a relatively

quick project for him,

and

they want me to get Noster comments in the stream instead. I I haven't figured out how to do that yet.

I might try and figure it out

live. But, anyway,

and because he had 2

permissionless protocols, he was able to just build this thing. He didn't have to ask anyone

if he could or not. And he was able to do it really easily. And that's the kind of empowerment that you see with these open protocols.

Okay. All this said,

we have you on.

You launched Primal.

What is Primal?

So Primal is a company that focuses on noster development.

Our immediate focus is to build an alternative

to the centralized

social media platforms like Twitter,

and,

we're also,

attacking,

as I mentioned previously,

textual speech. So I would include the media medium and substack in there.

We,

we

we

started looking at Nasr back in or I started looking at Nasr back in, December, and I liked it, but,

there was

I saw an opportunity to make, this faster, basically. So to

and I thought saw some gaps in terms of

scaling and such.

So

I came up with this

way of

gathering all the data and and doing, the the

caching from from all of the

all of the thousands of relays out there and gathering that in a in a a caching service

and,

which enabled us to implement,

UIs and clients which are

extremely fast.

So

I just wanted to say that

I I got zapped out stream comments on the livestream. They're very excited. Go for it. No. They're they're on right now. They're very excited right now.

What? About the announcements? Or Oh, I mean, we haven't got to the announcements yet. They're just very excited because the I got the

I got the chat on the What did they say? They're seeing it on the video. They're very excited. Alright. Let's Continue. Sorry. I apologize.

So zapping lots of sats. Lots of sats are being zapped. I can I can pay you off on the better? Be able to pay me back. Excellent.

So, Primal,

the the whole idea behind Primal is to build on Nostr and to bring Nostr to

the masses, to bring Noster to,

millions or potentially even billions of people out there. And currently, there are some technological and kinda UX,

gaps,

to be able to do that.

And we're focusing all of our efforts into kinda bridging those gaps. And one of these gaps is the,

kind of performance issue and and how quickly the UIs can load, how quickly we can load the data.

So we look at the whole stack and we build,

client applications

for all of the platforms, but we also more interestingly perhaps

build the middleware,

the caching technology that makes it possible to,

to to

bring the types of user experiences that people are used to with centralized platforms like like Twitter and so forth, which load instantaneously.

But without

compromising

the,

the,

censorship resistance,

aspects and and kind of self sovereignty aspects of Noster.

So,

at the high level, this is kind of what primal is doing currently.

So,

Noster, the protocol, is incredibly powerful.

It has

an immense amount of potential

as a tool for freedom in the world.

The major friction point

is how people interact with the protocol,

and

primal's goal

one of Primal's main goals

is to make that experience

as polished as possible. So someone can just

go on to their app store,

install an app,

go through the onboarding flow, very simple,

easy onboarding flow, and have an app that is even more performant

than their favorite centralized social media addiction.

Yeah. That's basically it. That that's that's the goal, and we're kind of We're, like, workshopping the messaging. Yes. I'll I prefer your work.

And and so we have,

so first of all, I will say

that

I

am a

massive

Twitter addict.

I I

disavowed all social media

about a decade ago.

Got rid of LinkedIn. Got rid fuck LinkedIn, man. The the worst of the worst. Got rid of LinkedIn.

You wanna know when you have fuck you money? You have fuck you money

when you get rid of LinkedIn. It doesn't matter how much money you have. If you feel comfortable getting rid of LinkedIn, you have fuck you money, just f FYI to everyone.

Got rid of LinkedIn, got rid of,

Facebook,

got rid of Instagram, got rid of Snapchat, never joined any of the other ones.

But Twitter was the only one left remaining, and it was a it was a platform where there was

there was open discussion was being had.

All my discussion was was pretty much focused on Bitcoin.

Never deleted a tweet in my life. You can go through

if you're allowed to search on Twitter, I don't know if you're getting rate limited or not.

You can go through there's,

you know,

10 years of Bitcoin discussion

in in my archives that are all open. Most of them, if you go through the threads, like, other people have deleted tweets, but I haven't.

Love Twitter.

The past regime,

not great.

There's a lot of censorship. I got shadowbanned in that regime as well,

but I continued because there was no really good alternative.

This current ownership,

Elon,

this is not speculation. He wants everyone to verify their identity.

That is

a nonstarter for me. I,

am obviously a public figure. A lot of people know me. There are almost 250 people here at Bickman Park. I've shake shaken all of their hands.

But at the end of the day, what made Twitter great to me was this idea that anyone could just be a nim, anyone can join the conversation.

There wasn't these multiple classes of users,

and people weren't pushed into identity verification. I think identity verification is gonna go,

across

across the board.

So, I mean,

this is a real threat. And, unfortunately, I'm in a position

where I never really wanted to be a so called influencer.

I think influencer

culture is incredibly toxic,

but

I respect this idea that at will, at any point,

people can,

a single individual, can essentially take away your income stream if you are that. Right? If you rely on that. If you rely on Twitter like people every day,

watch what they say because

because they might lose their platform. They might lose their audience.

We see, my good friend, Marty,

who does rabbit hole recap with me,

just posted a recent podcast,

and COVID was the topic,

and he didn't post it to YouTube. Right? And that's the implicit understanding

that if you post it to YouTube,

he might get a strike from the YouTube people, and he might use his YouTube platform. It's self censorship. It's self censorship. Exactly. So it's not only like

so this particular show, he probably knew he couldn't post the whole show, but, like, for a bunch of other shows where these types of topics come up here and there,

you kind of maybe pull back a little bit even subconsciously,

knowing that, hey, you might get another strike on YouTube or or something.

But I wanted to ask you something. So you said you,

got rid of all social media years ago, but you stayed on Twitter. Yeah.

I presume it's because

that's the online speech platform

that is the town square or used to be the town square.

The point is is, like yeah. Like, when people say,

like, Matt, why are you complain why are you still on Twitter complaining?

Uh-huh. Is because Twitter was a big deal for me. Like, I met a lot of friends through Twitter.

I had a lot of good discussion through Twitter. Like, it was empowering. And when people say I have people say to me,

Matt, you know, you have almost 200 k followers on Twitter.

Like, you don't understand.

That's why I hate this move is because

a young Odell

would to have any voice in the conversation would have been forced to verify my identity, and I might have been weaker at that point. Yeah. Right? I might have been weaker and and and actually complied and did that

for this increased engagement, for the ability to send longer tweets, for the ability to edit my tweets, for to send longer videos. And if you watch anyone with a large platform on Twitter, they've mostly just all complied.

Yeah. They've all just completely complied with the identity verification.

And to me, Noster I guess, I it was a very long winded,

context,

explanation, or whatever. I mean, if you listen to rabbit hole recap,

I've been going with Marty about my issues with the blue check for a while.

But if you listen to Seal of Dispatch, I haven't really talked about it, so I just kinda wanted to give you guys some context if this is the only show you listen to.

But to me, Nostar is what I was sold Twitter was.

I was going to ask if Right. Nostar didn't exist,

would you still be full on on Twitter?

Well, I would still be anti check Right. But I just wouldn't have an alternative. Right.

To me, Nostr is is what I was sold Twitter was.

Just a a truly free speech platform. It's it's not a platform. It's a protocol, but this is a nuance.

So let's dissect that a little bit. I think that's I I agree,

about that.

So

Noster

has the potential to

grow into the town square that Twitter

is only for real, only,

without the,

centralizing

capabilities.

But that's only one small aspect of what Noster can do.

There's a ton of other things that can and, will be and are being built on Aster.

So

and and the network effects that you get from each of those,

applications is insane.

So let's say if Twitter and Medium and Substack

were on the

same protocol, on the same And Spotify and Instagram And Spotify and then Instagram. And even more than that. Places

and, like, all And eBay.

You know? And You know, people like Pablo

And LocalBitcoins,

like, all of these. Everything. And, you know,

ton of different applications. Let's say people like Pablo are building

things like highlighter.

Right. You can see that highlighter.com.

He is Great domain. Yeah. It's a great domain. Pablo's a rider die for you. Pablo's such a rider die freak. He's both in the YouTube comments

and the zap.stream comments. He's in both comments. Shut up.

So

all of these things are being built on the same social graph

without

requiring permission from anyone.

And any piece of content that you generate

in any one of these

individual applications

can be referenced in any of the other applications

without permission.

We're

insane. That's insane. Like,

even

those of us who are in Austin full time

are still

having a tough time coming to terms,

around what this is actually going to mean.

And we're kinda lucky that we're seeing this sprout from from the kind of from the get go and it's going from just a handful of users to

tens of thousands of users to hundreds of thousands of users. It's happening in front of our eyes.

It's it's just insane.

Yeah. I mean,

I agree. That's why I kinda just I, like, preface it with just, like, I we can't even really comprehend the implications.

And it's it's funny because it it's it's it's similar to Bitcoin in a way that it's it's hard to describe

because there's so much nuance.

It's hard to describe what the potential implications are, but even just the

let's as I just wanna drill back down to just this basic

Twitter functionality Twitter like functionality, like, what I was sold as a young kid, what I was sold Twitter was. Right?

That alone, that tiny little piece

of

the greater what will be the greater Nostra ecosystem,

is revolutionary

revolutionary in itself. This idea that no one no one can easily censor you,

that no one can easily stop you from broadcasting your speech,

that you take the control from an individual company to,

to an actual individual user, right, is a is a fundamental

paradigm shift

to how we have,

treated speech on the Internet up until this point.

That in itself would would have been huge Yeah. If it was just that. Just that. Which is that's what makes it so hard to talk about because I wanna Yeah. Like, all of it is crazy, but that one part is fucking crazy.

Yep.

That's that's probably the core of an Oster.

I don't know if it's the core philosophically, but in terms of how it's being used,

probably if we look at the, you know, the the events that are being posted and users and

probably that microblogging

application is is by far the the number one

use case for Nasdaq currently.

But all of these other things are sprouting as well. You know, we have long form content with

Hubla news and,

the block stack.

Yeah. There's a few,

that basically work off the same Dude, the zap dot stream right now, by the way, Kieran,

Kieran also has Snort.

He's mostly he's mainly known for snort dot social,

which is a web noster client. That's a great client. They've zapped me they've sent me

over 400,000

sets of Freedom Money. Says that they're going to the show? Says that yeah. They're going they're just they zap in the comments. It's the coolest fucking thing. Anyone who's watching on YouTube can see it, or Twitch,

or Bitcoin TV.

Obviously, the people that are on Zap dot stream can see it, but everyone can fucking see it right now. That's fucking crazy. It's crazy. You can afford to lose multiple additional bets. Yeah. I I lose a lot of bets. This is my thing. I love it. You lose them for being overly bullish. Over always overly bullish. And we'll talk about the bet I lost, but,

Yeah. I

I mean, before we talk about

the announcements,

The integration with Bitcoin is fundamentally

changing things too. Like, you mentioned Abla News, which is

really demeaning to Abla dot news to say this, but a Substack competitor

that's built on the Nostra protocol. That's demeaning? I wouldn't

I think it's a lot bigger than that as as a concept.

Yeah. SubStack is is is a fine company, a big company providing great service, low lots of Horrible service, and that's why we need alternatives. But,

it has direct Bitcoin payments built into it Yes. At at at at a fundamental level.

It's not like,

a writer needs to ask for donations

at the end of their post.

It's not like a I you could post a meme,

on the quote, unquote microblogging

side of Noster.

You don't have to ask for money. Anyone can just send you Freedom money. They can send you Bitcoin.

And I do wonder because a massive,

a

massive part of my

a a bun a bunch of my brainpower is constantly thinking about this idea of just, like,

broken incentives. A bit Bitcoin Bitcoin showed me that if if you if you look at what is

is most wrong with our world, you can usually dial it back down to some kind of broken incentives. Right?

And we've seen this massive,

influencer domination

of communication of of media. People don't watch CNN. People don't watch Fox News. They have their favorite influencer or whatnot.

And everything is all about engagement, and everything is all about ads.

Your podcasts are are filled with ads,

YouTube filled with ads.

Your favorite Instagram influencer is trying to sell you sunscreen.

Right?

And all of a sudden, you take out these middlemen that are involved in this in this monetization

of content

and speech,

and you direct the audience.

You're directly connected to the audience who can fund you. Right? And you have this direct incentive to serve them. You're not serving your ad partners.

You're not serving

the quote, unquote, algorithm that is a complete black box on whatever individual platform, and you're able to receive these funds directly.

That Bitcoin element

is incredibly powerful.

And I actually think

that, like, the early days of Noster is like Bitcoiners bootstrapping Noster.

And I'm curious on your opinion. I think at some point, Noster overtakes Bitcoin in terms of adoption.

And then

Noster

essentially

increases Bitcoin adoption. Like, most people there'll probably be billions of people in the world that their first interaction with Bitcoin is

Nostr, not the opposite way around. Right? I think you're right. I think that's right. We're already starting to see people who got into Bitcoin through Nostr,

which was wild to see. Like, the the,

conference we had in Costa Rica back in March,

there were a bunch of

people there who I don't know how how they ended up there. Maybe

they were traveling or whatnot, but they ended up at the conference.

And they got onboarded onto Noster and got really into Noster. They understood

what it is and why we're building what we're building the way we're building it and so forth.

And then they start getting to Bitcoin. They they kind of

tangential

tangentially got into Bitcoin.

So it I think this core

of

kind of

user base of Bitcoiners

is required to to

spout off the network,

and it seems like we've done that actually.

That might be the the most, difficult step.

These first few,

you know,

let's say,

50, 100,000 users that are actually there, like, day in, day out.

The intolerant

minority.

Almost you can think of them, you know, in the sense that,

you know, they're for Bitcoiners,

there's a bunch of people who own Bitcoin, but there's, like, the core

that runs nodes.

It's probably it's like

maybe the same order of magnitude,

Bitcoin nodes?

I think it's in the tens of 1,000. Yeah. And there are millions of people who own Bitcoin. How many people do you think self custody Bitcoin?

Probably

I think we have the numbers on the nodes, so that's easy.

We have the numbers on the total

kind of owners of Bitcoin people who have Coinbase accounts and stuff like that on the other extreme. They they have IOUs. Right.

But how many people self custody? Probably, like,

1,000,000?

Maybe low digit millions? Well, we know What do you think? When led the ledger leak happened

Uh-huh. They had a 1,000,000 customers leaked. That sounds right to me. So that's, like, a bottom line,

a ledger self custody. I maybe, like, 2,000,000, 3,000,000?

Yeah. That sounds right to me. Over, like, 8,000,000,000 people.

But I think that works.

This type of distribution

works Right. For Bitcoin. It like, the network is already resilient enough,

for this to work. If you have tens of thousands of, like,

really intolerant,

hardcore Bitcoiners who are now going to change their nodes

on a whim,

change the software on their node. Right?

Protecting the network from that standpoint. Like, if you wanna change Bitcoin, you need to convince those guys

to run your version.

So that's going to be tough. And then you have a few million people who self custody, and then you have tens or maybe 100 of millions of people who think they own Bitcoin or who own Bitcoin through IOUs. Yeah. It's probably, like, 10,000,000 self custody, a 100,000,000

Yeah. Custodial. Those are the orders of magnitude. Too. And I don't know, like, curious to get your take on it, but I think that works.

That that type of distribution. It'd be amazing if we had more node runners, but,

I mean,

10, 20,

50,000

actual economic actors that run nodes.

That's pretty good. It's pretty fucking high. I mean, there's, like, one federal reserve node. Exactly. Yes. Yeah.

So in the context of Nostra Yeah.

It's a little bit different,

but you need you do need a core group of people who

who

are there to

for for the kind of censorship resistance reasons and and for the kind of network

strength reasons,

and who are willing to run the relay. The rider dies. Exactly. Exactly.

And then I think that group

continues to expand. I think we'll continue to expand,

because we I don't think we've onboarded

all of the Bitcoiners.

Let's say here's a thought experiment.

What would it look like

what would it take to

onboard

all of the self custody

Bitcoiners?

The,

you know, 1 to 5,000,000

Bitcoiners onto Nasr. I don't think we're anywhere near them kind of being on on those networks. So we're so early still. And and No. It's incredibly Nonsir is incredibly early. Yes.

And it's a bit of a blessing, to be honest, for us builders right now that it's not going gangbusters, that we're not hockey sticking in terms of growth because,

it's hard enough to build this stuff when when when there's no not

no chaos. Right? Like, so just imagine if we were onboarding,

you know,

hun hundreds of thousands of users now,

you know, per week or whatnot. Right. That's not happening currently. We're kind of at a many how many active users do you think are in Nosta right now?

So there's a few different,

ways to look at it and a couple different

kind of, groups who are doing the work to estimate all of this.

I like the work that Arthur from Noster Band is doing, noster dot band. He has his stats there.

So he is,

just like primal, he has a a service that connects to all of the

publicly available relays Right. And connects and collects all of the events

that are being published in real time.

And those events, like, you know, likes and posts and notes and so forth,

they obviously are signed by the the the

key of the user, so you can kind of

get user stats from there.

So

the numbers that he

is,

reporting are on the order of

30 to 40,000

weekly active users.

I think that's the kind of 25 to 30.

That that's the ballpark.

Now

these are when

when he calculates active users, he has, like, 2 I think he's being a little bit maybe too strict in terms of, like, what he

considers to be an active user in 2 different ways.

1st, he

trims down the overall number of users to what something that to a group he calls trusted users to Yeah. To,

through analytics, he's figuring out

because it is an open network graph. He's putting on this So just to back up, the the problem we're facing here is that anyone can easily create a key pair. Right? Right. So you can create bots so easily. You can there's millions and millions of Like Bitcoin, you can just generate a key pair offline. And then you can start doing stuff with it. Like, so it's very You don't have to sign up, provide your identity, whatever. So the actual public keys on the network isn't this isn't the

signal. That's a No. Exactly. A massive upper bound. Exactly. So it's easy to spin up bots on Aster, and people are doing it. You know? Right.

So you need to do some analytics work to figure out through the through through the social graph, through through all of the,

relationships,

follows, and so forth

of and maybe other means as well,

who the trusted users are.

So he kind of limits the number of,

pop keys in that way,

and then he only is reporting those

users who are actually performing actions.

So,

if if you're just reading

Noster, you are using it. You are an active user.

But if you didn't even perform a single like, you will not be counted in. Right. And this is something you see with centralized social media where most people

just read. They don't actually communicate.

Yes. So that would be interesting to that's a piece of information we collectively as Nostra community, I think we don't have.

So so, Arthur has done a great work to kind of give us the numbers on

people who are doing stuff on the network. So that's the lower bound of the active users is is what he's reporting.

I think

on the monthly basis, it's something like over I think it's be between 50 a 100000 users and then on the weekly basis maybe like 25, 30.

So that's the lower bound, I think. We don't know how many more. Maybe it's multiple folds from that. It kinda feels right to me that it would be. Right. So the upper bound the upper bound, if I go to primal and go to explore

Right. The upper bound is the number of public keys, which is

31,900,000

public keys Correct. Which is way off. Yeah. That's that would we don't have that many users. There's a lot of millions, though. Yes.

And then the lower bound, you think,

is, like, 20,000,

10,000. Well, if we're talking about, let's say, monthly active users, it's, like, order of magnitude, like, 50, 70000

users. Right. So so that will be lower bound. That's users who are actually logging in and doing stuff, like liking and posting and so forth.

That makes sense.

So, I mean, we have some Bitcoiners in the chat,

that

disagree with our self custody estimation on Bitcoin. Okay.

That is fair.

It is mostly a guess.

They think it's more or less? I think he thinks it's more.

Mostly, I guess, hard to tell,

for sure.

There's a bunch of different ways you can calculate. I feel pretty confident in that 10,000,000 range, but who knows?

The more, the better.

I will say just to defend my statement about why I think

Nostra

will

onboard

at some point, there's like,

I'm not gonna say the word. At some point, Noster starts onboarding people to Bitcoin versus Bitcoiners onboarding to Noster

is because for better or for worse in our society,

social media is a major aspect.

If you ask most of

our average,

our our our non Bitcoiner friends

what they care about,

most of the time,

it's not money. They just take money for grant. At least in the developed world, they take money for granted. They just assume the institutions will be trusting.

But what they spend 9 hours, 10 hours of their day is is hunched over their phone,

scrolling Instagram or scrolling Twitter or scrolling TikTok,

and

and that is a real connection to them. So

to me, this this idea of,

a freedom oriented

social protocol

or communication protocol

is a direct connection to a a a, in the near term, a much larger group of people.

And as a result,

they might not even switch to Noster for the the freedom oriented

money side, but then they get

they touch that aspect. And and this idea of buying Bitcoin

or,

and then learning how to self custody and all this like, that that takes a a step. But if you're just posting a meme on the Internet,

or let's be honest. Let's be honest. If you're if if if if

you're posting a, you know, a glamorous shot of you out to dinner,

and you get just paid

money on the Internet that that you didn't buy,

that's a much easier touch point. That's that's a touch point that you didn't do anything additional. You'll still get your likes. You'll still get your retweets, so we call them reposts on Noster. You'll still get all that, but you also just

like, some stranger just sent you money.

I think for a lot of people that will be their first touch point. I think that makes logical sense to me. And this is coming from someone who's one of the most bullish

people on Bitcoin. Like, I'm incredibly bullish on Bitcoin. I remain incredibly bullish on Bitcoin.

But a lot of people are gonna get onboarded to Bitcoin, I believe,

through switching to Nasr. And I think Primal is a very interesting

primal's a very interesting

part of that message

because,

yeah, we have someone in the comments saying OnlyFans thoughts are gonna love it. I haven't even mentioned OnlyFans.

OnlyFans got completely cut off by the financial traditional financial system, and they started cracking down on people and saying you can't have certain content and still get paid for it because they were using traditional financial rails.

So, yeah, I mean, OnlyFans

is going to be the OnlyFans use case is gonna be fucking massive on Noster, and and they're gonna use Bitcoin as the payment method. Like, that is that's what's gonna happen. And these people, like, you can,

you know, tell them to read the Bitcoin standard or go on whatever kind of orange pill

narrative you wanna go on. Yeah. People don't care about them. They don't care. Don't care. But until they when when they post and they're able to post and they don't get censored and they're able to receive payments from their audience,

they they will care. But Primal plays an interesting role here because

your team is focused on just making this

a better experience altogether. It's not just about

the freedom oriented aspects. The thing will load quicker. Yeah. It already does load quicker than Twitter, and you're very early beta. It does.

And and that that's really our focus.

We wanna do what it takes

to

get that Nostra experience to be as good, if not better than the,

kind of legacy centralized

media that people are used to consume. It needs to be at least as good.

And you're right. Currently, we we do

we do,

in a lot of cases, load faster than Twitter. There's this anecdote where, we were

we were doing a launch and somebody on the team,

sent me a link

of of something that we posted. And I it was at the end of a long day, and I clicked on it. And I and it was, like, 11,021,000. I was, like, what the fuck? Why is it not loading?

Oh, it's Twitter.

Okay.

So so yes.

I see primal as as

a company or a service or a product that will bridge the gap

in terms of performance in UX

and to

harsh terms.

This is what we're, focusing on,

and we'll leave no stone unturned

when it comes to,

doing

things necessary to make it happen.

To make that happen, you need to do you need to solve a,

2 or 3 big problems

and thousands of little problems.

And we're just going in 1 by 1 and, like, you know, getting this done.

So yeah.

Yeah. I mean, I've seen this I mean,

I've spent years on Bitcoin education.

And at the end of the day,

people will just choose the most convenient option. Most peep most people, not everyone, most people listening to this don't.

Cheers to you all for taking personal responsibility over your life. But most people just choose the most convenient option. So if we can make the most convenient option,

freedom first and privacy first,

not require identity verification, not have centralized rulers,

that is a massive step. That is a massive step as at improving this world.

You know, we can have a whole conversation about people dealing with social media addiction after,

but at least the thing they're addicted to is not centrally controlled and easily censored. Right?

Also, the the incentives that you mentioned before where, you know, if you

as a as a publisher

or a content creator, you if you're

monetizing your work by

engaging your audience and getting them to pay you, Similar kinds of incentives

apply for,

product creators like Primal.

If

if we're being paid by our customers, by the users,

in other words, if the user is the customer, then we'll be incentivized

to

work all day long

for our users, for our customers to make the to make everything better and and to make the feature set better and not to optimize the feeds in a way

that increases engagement and decreases the right advertising revenue, but in style to,

optimize the feeds

for the highest level of signal that people,

need to get. I think that's going that's a particular,

subject area in Noster that's, very interesting and it's it's like a problem to solve. Right? Because you have all these end pubs, all these user accounts. You you can create,

bots. You can create automated content. There's a lot of content that can be created. It's already being created.

So sifting through that and,

surfacing,

high signal

stuff is

extremely valuable, and this is something we're focusing on.

Yeah. I mean, I it brings us back to the blue check because a lot of people think my issue with the blue check is the payment part, and it's not. It's the identity verification. I actually think the idea of paying for a service,

in a

in a way that you can preserve your privacy

makes a lot of sense.

And I I think there's a,

there was a deliberate

decision,

by Elon,

to include the identity verification

with,

a payment

to essentially,

make people feel like they are no longer the product because they are buying it,

when in fact, they're an even greater product Yeah. Because they're doing identity verification.

And the perfect example of that is that they still get served ads. Yeah.

So, yeah, I mean, I think that could be really interesting.

So, you know, we are an hour in.

You have, multiple big announcements,

here.

Should we get into the announcements?

Sure. Let's do it. Let's go into the announce I mean, there's a lot of people waiting on these announcements.

Sounds good to me. So and let's talk about the announcements, and then

Okay. Then we'll take it from there. So What are we announcing today? We have no less than 3 announcements today. Okay.

The first announcement is

Android.

As you know, we launched our iOS,

app yesterday in test flight, and people seem to like it.

And,

I know, Matt, you're an Android user. It's true.

Still good. So we decided to hold back the Android release just so we can ask it in your show.

So effective immediately,

as as of, like, a few minutes ago,

you can go to primal.net/downloads

and download

the,

primal

Android client.

So one thing I should say about the Android client is that this this is an early alpha build.

It is,

so currently,

the feature set is limited to reading.

So you can

log in. You can,

you know, get your feeds. You can do all the browsing and searching and consuming.

But,

at the current time, there's you can't post. There's there are no actions that you can do and so forth.

But, yeah, you you will get a good feel for,

where we're going for with It's already smooth even as an alpha.

Yeah. You had a chance to use it, so maybe, like, I'll I'll

I'll get your It's smooth as fuck. I mean, I I, my experience is different than other people because I there's a bunch of people, by the way, in the comments,

that are clearly watching our GitHub and have downloaded and are running,

the primal APK. Well, we took we took an hour to get the announcement, so I love it. They found it out. Milan said we should frontload the announcement, but I wanted to talk about Noster, so we didn't.

It's smooth. You know, for all of you guys who went and downloaded the source code and built your own version or or even, like, downloaded APK write on, guys.

Well,

like, how do you like it?

We, you know, we actually have we have carnage. We have Kieran in

in the comments that he built. By the way, one of the cool things about the Nostra community

is,

they are essentially, like,

feedback

providing feedback and beta testing for zap.stream

to Kieran in the live comments during the live like, this is the cool part about permissionless innovation. Right? I love it. Like, we're getting so much useful feedback on all of our stuff from from the users. But, anyway, what I was gonna say is, you know, I've never really used Nostra on mobile. I only use it on on my computer. So to me, to have a read only app is, like, oh, that's that's

pretty convenient for me. It's it's I haven't lost any features of not being able to post.

But I do look forward to

no. Kieran isn't in the comments, but Pablo's also saying Kieran is everywhere and everyone.

Oh, Carnage is in the comments, and Carnage helped build it.

Cheers to Carnage. Thank you, Carnage, for this app, by the way.

Thank you for correcting me, freaks. Keep me honest.

But I'm very excited for the full Android build. I mean, you guys have been crushing it. You guys just continue to ship. It's really fucking impressive.

Thank you. And it's smooth. It's smooth. It works,

works really well.

And I'm I'm kinda curious. So,

like, how like, the way so on on primal.net,

which is what I've been using, which is the web app,

you have to use it with the Albie extension

or the no s 2 nos 2 x extension,

that holds your

nostril private we haven't even gone to the nuances of nostril private keys, public keys, whatever.

There'll be many nostril shows in the future, freaks,

that we can go deeper.

With with the mobile app,

obviously, you can't zap yet on Android. Nope.

Can you zap on iPhone? Yes. We can. The iOS beta came out yester 2 days ago yesterday. Yesterday.

By the way, the bet I lost was,

I thought there was gonna be a 1,000 downloads

of the iOS iOS beta in

first, I said an hour.

Then I found out the lowest guess was 3 hours. So I changed it to hours because I just I know how priced it right works. So I might as well, like, use my guess. But I was off.

You freaks haven't really.

You haven't hit have we haven't hit the a thousand number yet. Right? It took about 24 hours. 24 hours. Well, are is it is it limited to a 1000 now? So we decided to to kind of open it up.

The reason why we limited it originally was

we didn't know what we're gonna get in terms of feedback,

and, like, issues and stuff Right. Being reported. And we didn't wanna get overwhelmed with, like, 10,000 users,

reporting

all everything at the same time.

This was just the right amount of feedback. What we got was just what we could handle as a team,

and,

it it turned out that

there aren't too many,

issues that we were not already aware of. So we're past a 1,000 We're past a 1,000. Guys a limit. You can still keep it. Is there I think the test flight has a limit of automatic 10,000. Is that it? That's right. No. You can't have more than 10,000,

users in test flight, but we're well below that. Okay. Anyone who,

is interested can can download. When you listen to this, if you're running an Apple device, consider buying an Android device. But if you don't do that,

consider signing up for the test flight before it fills up and you,

don't get a piece of it until it's a full full release. Okay. So we you released yesterday. You released the iOS

release,

the iOS test flight.

We just announced Android. Android today. And I'll I'll say about those two things,

about those two apps,

we are

building them pretty rapidly. There will be,

like, a rapid

change

in additions to to both of these products. To give you an idea, we

started building.

We started coding the iOS client 3 months ago.

That's insane. We started coding the Android client

2 months ago.

So things will happen quickly. And we already did the most, the the most difficult,

pieces. This now it's about filling out the features and

and fixing stuff up. So stay tuned. There will be,

you know, probably weekly or biweekly updates,

for each of the calls. Yeah.

It won't be long before Android users can,

you know, post and zap and do everything.

So that's the first announcement.

The second announcement is probably the

most important, the biggest announcement today, I think, which is,

we are open sourcing the entire

primal stack.

So effective immediately,

when you

go to primal.net/downloads,

there will

be links there for to to,

all of our repositories,

which now include,

the caching service, which we open sourced a few weeks ago, the web app, which we open sourced a few days ago, but also now the iOS app, the Android

app, and the full primal

primal server. So this is the entirety of everything that we do. We open sourced

all of our codes so that people can stand up,

a service that's

similar to primal using the code that we've,

that we've opened up.

They can build off of your code and release whatever they want. So And this is a full MIT

FOSS

licensed. Do whatever the fuck you want with the code. It's open to the public, open to the community.

Everything's open on the D MIT license.

That's fucking massive, dude.

I think so. I think there's,

I don't know how many millions of people appreciate that, but there's not that many people that truly appreciate what what what that does for the ecosystem.

I agree.

Yeah. We we thought about it and realized this is the only way to build on Aster, or this is the best way to build on Aster.

And it's coming back down to those freedom rooted ideals. Exactly.

Exactly.

So, again, I'll emphasize,

it's common that client apps are getting open sourced.

Hey, hon. How's it going, guys? We're live right now. I'm on a house. You wanna say hi? Go on in.

How's it going? We have we have, Alex Leishman in the house. You guys are on camera right now, just FYI. Hey. How's it going?

Appreciate you, Alex. We have Rod, the cofounder of Bitcoin Park.

Sorry. I missed you, guys. Well We're talking about Nostra. We'll talk about Nostra with you guys later, but Absolutely. Thanks for No problem. Stopping in. Primal.net.

Yeah. Thank you. Cheers. We'll catch you. We're at Bitcoin Park. We have

we have 250 people here, and 2 of them just walked in.

That was Alexander Leishman,

founder of river.com.

Open sourcing.

And rock. Yeah. Open this and this is fucking massive. Thank you. Thank you for, like, thank you for your service, sir.

I agree.

And thank you,

for everything, Matt. We'll get, I guess, to the next announcement before long.

But,

yeah, when you think it through,

you realize

we what we're building here is an alternative to the closed platforms. Right. This is why we are here.

And,

the correct way to do that is to be radically open.

So not just the protocol itself, which is open and there's,

you know, there's

that's an that's not changeable.

But also the software stacks that you work that you build on top of, especially the

the

pieces of software that,

are consumer facing. Right.

Like,

you know, you should be able to know precisely how primal creates their feed,

how you get the trending,

users and so forth.

But there's another aspect. Like like, the idea of Nasr isn't, like, the end of, quote, unquote, the algorithm, but it's it's you have choice of algorithms. There will be algorithms. Right. And and, hopefully, some of them will be open, including what Primo's doing. Ours ours will be open and ours are open.

Yeah. There will be lots of algorithms. It it gets really interesting there. We'll build some crazy algorithms, I'm sure, and and we need them,

we need them arguably more than the closed platforms because everything is open, so everything is allowed

by everyone. Everything will be tried.

So to,

get signal from all of that,

will require some algorithms.

You just,

you know, ideally, should have full access to them.

But there's another aspect of it to which which influenced our decision to open source

everything. So not just the clients, but also the back end. The back end,

even within the Nostra ecosystem, it's not so well, there aren't too many back ends to begin with.

And the ones that exist, as far as I know, are not open.

So

here's another

aspect

that that needs to be considered here.

Let's say if Primal is really successful

and if we're running these, like, caching services and discovery services and all of these things that are extremely

useful. And let's say that that we do a really good job and provide a great service and a lot of users flock to Primal.

That's a

problematic kind of centralizing factor there.

If we if we're the only ones running these services or or our services are best and the users flock there,

when we encounter

a major censorship

event

or a major situation where censorship is required by the powerful actors out there, is we are an easy target. We are a company. You know, we're like

Same situation as a Twitter would face. Right? Exactly. It's not that much Or at least similar. Yeah. So,

to deal with that,

we decided to build clients that can connect to multiple different services out there. So,

and,

also, we're opening everything up so other people can stand up those services.

So that's a way,

you know, there's this whole kind of trade off balance between,

you know,

centralizing things and making everything fast because you have all the data and so forth and,

like, decentralizing and making it slow

and not appealing to most people.

This is how this is our solve

for

it, where,

we think it's important to have these caching services and to have have things load quickly and

and help, honestly, help the network scale as well.

But

it needs to be possible that these services are being

run by others.

So specifically with the caching services,

we are building

primal clients that are that have this competency

to work with a caching service for reading to to be able to get all the stuff so quickly.

But that's not a replacement

for being able to work with the relays directly.

In fact, currently, the way we do it with is we do the reading through the caching service, and we post directly through the to the relay. So anything you post currently on Primal clients goes to all your relays. Right. We we don't interfere there.

But the next step we're working on is

we are,

making

adding the capability for the in the clients to work with multiple caching services kind of in at the same time. So instead of 1 caching service, you have a list of caching services.

And the client is smart enough to

kind of,

pick the right one, the most,

well performing one and fail over, like, if the the assumption is that any of these services can go down at any given time for any reason. So all the clients should just gracefully fail over,

and the user should be able to configure which just like they can configure which,

relays they they use, they can also configure

which what's the set of caching services they want.

And finally,

the the ability to,

use

the Nasdaq Gossip protocol to,

read to to read from the relays as well and to connect to, to to do relay discovery and and and,

work with an astronaut that way.

We're also implementing that. So

in a perfect scenario the client should be a perfect client in my mind

is one that has a competency to work with the caching services,

has this ability to do failover,

and

it has the ability to,

switch off the caching services and work just with the relays.

That's the type of Noster client that I would want to use, and that's the type of clients that we're building.

So I think,

you know, we're willing to experiment,

when it comes to

this kind of scale of decentralization

and centralization,

that there's, like, trade offs. We as Bitcoiners know we're always dealing with a set of trade offs. It's never going to be

perfect across the board. Everything has trade offs. Exactly.

And we think there are some interesting

there's an interesting trade off balance

along the lines of what I just described, where you get top performance,

but if primal

services go down, assuming that there are other services that are stood up,

your client just continues working.

And then

if all of those things are down, all of the caching services

are down, then you work directly with the relays.

That's

But the the caching service here is is key to making it smooth and performant

And while still

it's it's this like, let let's go into the the caching service a little bit. It's a little bit hard to crack, but this is what this is what makes scrolling

on primal silky smooth, right, is the caching service. So when I said there are

2 or 3 big things that need to be solved and a 1,000 little things Yeah. To be solved to make that feed scroll smoothly. Yeah. The caching service is one of the big things that needs to be probably the biggest thing there. Because otherwise, you're pulling it directly from relays. Right? Otherwise, you're fetching from relays and hitting a number of different relays

to get the feed and to

to,

there there's a problem also an indexing problem as well because you you don't

know specific relay has all the data, so you can't

see how many likes. You can't quickly see how many likes a certain post. Because you're pulling it from all the different relays. Exactly. Like, the normal way a noster client works is I'm manually pulling from

10 relays or however many relays you have set. I'm pulling all this information from. Right? Exactly. And the caching service

has already pulled this information from the relays, and then the client is also verifying against the relays to make sure the caching service isn't lying to them. Is that what's going on? Like, what That's right. So so, like, there there's the whole kind of, well, let's take it one step at a time. So a typical master client would connect, like you said, to 10 or 20 relays, however many you configure.

And then, you will get your feed by

hitting up all those relays

and,

kind of querying them for the, people you follow and getting all the data back, and there's a lot of redundancy there. You get a lot of same data from a bunch of different relays.

But,

the fact is that

the that small subset of relays,

compared to the whole network doesn't have

the full picture of the network. So you might be missing some data and some numbers might be wrong. For example, the probably the most the most famous aspect of this is follower numbers. Right? It's hard to get follower numbers,

like this. And you're you're really hammering,

all the relays

pretty

badly

to get a number that's, like, spectacularly

wrong

for followers specific. It's probably the most

extreme example.

So instead of that,

we are,

we we put this caching service that,

connects to all of the public clear accessible relays that we can find

and

collects all of the

events, everything that's being published in real time, and stores it in a way that's highly available

in a way that kind of guarantees that most queries will be served from the RAM.

And,

and then clients can get

the the response times that

are, you know,

on par or even better than the centralized

platforms. Right? And you can get accurate data because then we know how many followers people have. We know how many likes a post got.

But the key is

there's there's a trade off there where you have to make sure that the caching service isn't lying to you. Right?

And then there's that. So so, basically, the only way for caching service to lie because all of these,

events are signed.

Cryptographically signed. Right. By by the

your private key. The only way for the caching service to lie to you is by omission. Right. It can be, like

can just exclude some stuff. You have 3 followers instead of 10 or something. Or Matt didn't make this post. Right. Or may Matt just made these 12 posts instead of these 25 that he actually made. Stuff like that. Right?

So,

the competency of a client,

to

work with the caching service, but also query the relays

in some sort of smaller kind of subset of the data

is

interesting there because you can flag

stuff that was not sent to you by the caching service. So you verify a subset. The client in the background is, like, verifying a subset. And if the caching service is lying to you, I I assume you're not there yet, but the idea is that Exactly. There's, like, a failover. It's like, okay. I'm gonna switch to a different caching service and check it. Yes. So you're right. We're not there yet. This doesn't, work currently in in in private clients, but this is where we wanna go, where we're kind of reducing the trust to the caching service where it can surface some,

posts maybe that are

if they're being hidden by the caching service.

And and Yeah. If you get too many of those as a user, you can

decide to switch to a different caching service or switch it off. And I'm, like, running really quickly here while we're

live on air.

But, like, that is part of the reason why it's it's super important

that

you release the caching service as a Yes. A completely false

implementation

so that you can have multiple competing caching services. And then

so not only is maybe the failover verifying against the relays, but you can actually verify

across caching services. And if one is omitting something,

then you stop using that caching service. And that could all be hidden from the user. Like, all this stuff we're talking about, the average Nostra user is just

installing the Primal app, and they're using it like social media. They're not even thinking about any of this shit. It's all happening kinda in the background.

Yes. You got it. And this is why we open sourced the caching service first. I think it was like I forgot exactly. Pablo's in the comments bragging about using it for 2 months.

Yeah. Well, we

published it. We we open sourced it, and then Pablo had it up and running within

a few hours even though he was traveling. He was flying.

Dude, it's a fucking beast. Yeah.

But,

yeah. So so it was pretty obvious from the beginning that the caching service needed to be open sourced.

Where we kinda took it to the next level is, today

is we open sourced the entire back end.

So

everything else on primal.net

that's being done on the back end is now also open sourced. And it makes sense to break out these two things because some people might might only need the caching service.

Probably most people will only need that, but the back end is there for those who want to look at the algorithms and look at our kind of discovery features and,

you

know, forecast stuff and run with it, hopefully.

And, again,

this is not

only

kind of altruism and being, you know, doing the right thing,

but also it's creating mode for us.

If if there are multiple

successful players who are doing this, then we become less of a target,

in in this situation. Because Prime is not successful if Noster is not successful.

So to capture to capture Noster as a protocol,

would be a complete failure for Primal. The incentives are aligned in that regard. Absolutely.

To make a credible argument out there that Noster is different,

even even from purely selfish reasons, let's say, for primal. If we're out there, you know, we we we wanna compete with

not with other Nasdaq clients necessarily, but we wanna at this stage, we wanna compete with Twitters of the world. To make a credible argument, we we need

multiple or many successful,

like,

clients. We can say, look,

Primal

why is primal different? Well, because we can't lock you in even if we wanted to. You can take your key and go to

Snort or Danlos or Amethyst or

many other clients. Potential Primal Forks. Potential Primal Forks as well. Right. In our analysis, it made more sense to have primal forks than not.

I mean, as someone had someone who fully believes in in the freedom potential of Nostra, the protocol,

I think I think we're incredibly

lucky, and I feel very grateful to have builders like yourself in the space. But, also, I mean, so many builders in the Noster ecosystem at this early stage is just crazy how many

are so focused on this just greater freedom mission. And, like,

you just can't manufacture that kind of

early adoption

by die hards who are are building in an open and transparent way, and and that's gonna make or break, you know, whether Nastr is a success versus

just another flash in the pan.

Yeah. I agree. It really does feel,

pretty special. And it was eye opening back in March, and a lot of stuff has happened since March,

You know, when we were all or a lot of us were at Costa Rica, that conference and North Rica. North Rica. Exactly.

It really did feel special and still does.

Something is happening here.

Yeah. I mean, I I I wasn't around when Bitcoin first got created.

Mhmm.

But I'm fortunate enough to be around with nostrils

in its infancy.

It's a really beautiful thing to

witness unfold.

Same.

Same.

So we have one more announcement.

Yes. The third announcement is that Primal has

closed the round of financing.

We secured $1,000,000

from 1031,

Hivemind

Ventures, and a couple of angels,

to help us

build

premium UX on all platforms and form factors and bring this to as many people as possible.

Very excited about this.

In hindsight, I was thinking before we

in hindsight, I mean, about, like, 10 minutes ago, I was like, damn. Like, we probably should've

as a managing partner of 1031, we probably should've led with the fact that we were supporting you just as a overly disclosure thing before this conversation.

But that was not,

the intention, freaks. The intention wasn't

to deceive you or shill you on primal.

I had the the the fortune of meeting,

Milan. Well, first

through his earlier project,

but then the second connection was through a mutual friend,

and just very excited to support her. Like, I like, this is why 1031 exists. Like, 1031 exists

to support these kind of projects, and I think it's very rare it's very rare for and and huge shout out to Max at Hivemind

for joining us in this journey and and and the angels that are involved, the other investors that are involved.

Because I think it's it's the traditional

the traditional

fiat

venture mindset

can't understand

a project,

a startup

that would

release their intellectual property to the world for free. Yes. Like, that's a ridiculous

Yes.

It's a ridiculous concept,

and I think it's even more ridiculous that I'm incredibly excited that you have done that,

and that our whole team at 10:31 is incredibly excited that you've done that. And I I

I'm just excited to go on this journey with you. I'm very excited to go on this journey with you. I I can speak for everyone at 10:31 that we're we're very excited to

to be a part of of the primal mission, a part of the Nostra mission. We're gonna have a lot more focus on the Nostra ecosystem in general.

But across all my work across all my work,

Bitcoin will always,

be a major focus,

but Noster is gonna be an increasingly increasingly larger focus. We have in open sats, we have,

we have our Noster fund. We've already funded 16 projects. No strings attached, open source grants.

10/31.

We're extremely excited

to join you and the rest of the primal team on this journey.

Bitcoin Park,

we're gonna have a more focus on Noster education. We have Nosterville in November.

We already have NIP five handles for our members at bitcoinpark.com.

We now have our own bitcoinpark.com

relay.

The podcast, as you can tell, is still dispatched. We're an hour and a half into a Nostra podcast. There is gonna be more Nostra conversation on this show.

Rabbit hole recap, We've already been talking about Noster for months now.

We are not gonna stop.

But I appreciate you. I just appreciate you. I've been very excited for this moment to tell the world.

And,

I've been very excited about Primal for a couple months now, and Milan's like, no. You gotta wait. Can't talk about it yet. Gotta

we got we gotta wait. The moment's gonna happen, and and and that moment is here now. So I appreciate you. Love it. Thank you. Thank you so much. And though, I'll say this,

the way you and your team have reacted when we decided to open source everything

And also the way Max from Hivemind reacted and the other investors, it was just like

unanimous complete support across the board.

Made me

understand

fully that we've surrounded ourselves with the right people. It's it means a lot in this type of

environment to be,

partnering with such mission aligned,

investors.

It's really a huge deal for us. And thank you for

the vote of confidence. We don't take that lightly.

And we're gonna kick some ass here. We were just getting started. We're only a few months into this. Dude, it's so fucking early.

Let's build this fucking future. Oh, yeah. This is gonna happen. This is all happening. It's inevitable, definitely.

Fuck yeah.

Like, I think this is the first of many conversations.

The local time here is 8:50 PM.

You had a lot of delays on your flight to get here. It was important that we did this in person, I think, as well. I agree. So I appreciate you, making the journey out to Nashville so so we could do it in person.

And the line you saw was gonna be fucking awesome too. So Can't wait.

This idea like, Bitcoin and Nasr is just so intertwined. I think people will.

We're gonna I don't need to convince you.

Time time will tell. Time will tell, but I think I think,

the destiny of both protocols is forever intertwined, and I think most people are just gonna come to it gradually then suddenly.

But, I mean, with all that said, like, should we go get dinner? I think we should. Yeah. I mean, I was gonna rip. I don't think they could hear your your stomach grumbling on the

on on the feed, but,

how how can people find you on Noster? What is your what is your NIP 5?

So you can,

my NIP 5 is miljanat

miljan@primal.net.

And you can

find me on primal.net.

Yeah. There's a search box there for users. It's very easy. Just look for milj a n.

Awesome. Fine. We're gonna do more civil dispatches in the Let's do it. Let's do it. Awesome. Well, I appreciate you. Shout out to all the freaks who joined us.

It appears that they decided live during our chat that they need to have some way in the Zap dot stream to show how many sats have been

streamed during this. I I don't think anyone really knows how many sats were streamed during this. I realized that the number I quoted was just the top 3 zappers.

Woah. So we don't I don't really know how much

freedom money you guys sent me, but thank you,

for sending it.

And I look forward to going through this journey with all you guys. Thanks to the freaks who joined us in the live chat. I know we were delayed by, like, 5 hours,

so even more impressive,

to join us on a Wednesday night.

A huge shout out to Milan and the rest of the primal team. Thank you, guys. And huge shout out to everyone building on Noster.

If you haven't checked out Noster yet, consider checking it out. If you have iOS,

you can download the primal test flight right now.

How does iOS test flight work? Do you just search primal? Or Well, you can go to our download page. So primal.net/downloads?

Correct. That's the page. And if you're gonna use the web app, you need to have the Albie or the no s two x,

extension.

Do you have, like, a

is there, like, a good

getting started landing page for nostril people?

The Do we direct people to, like, nostra.com

if you wanna use another client or something? Amethyst is a great client on Android. Domus is another great client on iOS.

Yes. North. North.social

is a web client. It's web. They don't have a mobile app. Right? I think it's web only. Iris.2

is a great web only one. No. No. I think iris.2

has,

they have mobile clients as well. They have mobile clients? I think so.

So many of them. Korkle. Let's not forget Korkle. Well, anyway, freaks,

if you haven't used Nostra yet, consider trying it out.

If you're

burdened by the friction, just know that we are

only probably only a few months away from less friction. Yeah. Like, it's just gonna be you're just gonna download people are just gonna download an app. You're just gonna tell people to download their favorite app. They might not even know they can take their private key to a different app until they get censored on that app, and then they fucking do it.

And that's fine. That's that it's it's gonna become much easier.

But, yeah, definitely check it out and,

resist the blue check. Do not verify your identity on the Internet to use Twitter.

That is a dark, dystopian, ridiculous world that is parallel to CBDCs.

And if you have any kind of platform,

whether intentionally or accidentally,

just know that people are watching what you do. And if, if you comply if you comply with identity verification, others will too, and you're part of the problem. And,

that doesn't mean I don't like you. It just means I'm disappointed.

Do better.

Thanks, Milan. Thank you, sir. Thank you, Freaks. Thank you, Freaks. Stay humble, StackSats,

and, learn how to ZapSats on Noster. Appreciate you all. Cheers. Peace.