{ "episodeId": "SLP352", "speakers": { "stephan": { "name": "Stephan Livera", "role": "host", "tag": "STEPHAN" }, "matt_hill": { "name": "Matt Hill", "role": "guest", "tag": "MATT" } }, "segments": [ { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "00:09", "start": 8.51, "text": "Hi and welcome to Stephan Livera podcast, a show about Bitcoin and Austrian economics. Today for episode three hundred and fifty two, we're talking about EmbassyOS and this whole notion of making self-sovereignty tech cheaper than the alternatives, which I find actually a surprising argument, because normally we think of it like being private or more secure might involve more of a cost cost. But in this episode, Matt of Start9 Labs talks to us about why that might not be the case, and we also discuss the broader world of freedom and that broader fight. Is it a question of tools, or are we about actually trying to win hearts and minds here? This show is brought to you by Swan Bitcoin, and as many of you know, I'm working at Swan Bitcoin as part of the Swan Private team. We launched Swan Private because we have talked to so many people that had issues with the major exchanges, some had accounts locked, and customer service couldn't help them. them, others couldn't onboard their accounts, and many simply wanted to talk to an actual human being who could answer their Bitcoin questions, and they wouldn't get a reply or this just wasn't an option. Swan Private is our one-on-one Bitcoin advisory service for high net worth buyers. Our team is here to actually support you in your Bitcoin journey, so to sign up, go to swanprivate dot com. Brains are a Bitcoin mining company through and through, and they're working on some of the most unique and cutting-edge projects in the mining industry. Firstly, they have Brains OS Plus. Now, this is firmware you can install on your ASIC mining machine. Brains OS Plus has the main feature of auto-tuning, so this optimizes your miner performance so you get more hash rate for your electricity bill. And also, if you are using Brains OS Plus on your mining rig and you point your hash rate towards Slush Pool, you get zero percent pool fees. So Slush Pool is the first Bitcoin mining pool, and they've got a range of features there. Also, interesting for people out there, is the Insights dashboard on the Brains website. You can see things like profitability calculators and all kinds of other interesting data. So that website is brains dot com, it's Brains with two eyes. And if you wanna get started easily with Bitcoin mining, Compass Mining can help you. Compass Mining is the First and largest online marketplace for Bitcoin mining hardware, hosting, and ASIC reselling. Bitcoin mining is only getting bigger, and so is Compass Mining. Compass is adding over two hundred and eighty megawatts worth of hosting capacity this year, with more to come. So with Compass Mining, you can select a machine and have that shipped to your home in the US and plug that in and use the at-home mining guide, or you can use some of the facilities that Compass have vetted, and you can select the mining pool, and you pay the hosting fee, and you're receiving Bitcoin. So go and start mining Bitcoin, visit compassmining dot io today. And now onto the show. Matt, welcome back to the show. Thanks for having me back. So, Matt, there's lots going on in the world, whether it's this whole Russia Ukraine thing or the Canadian trucker thing or what's going on in Bitcoin land with hacks and, you know, privacy and sovereignty all being at stake. So, do you wanna just give us a little bit of your view on, what's happening, potentially even if you wanted to touch on your views on, around, on the whole Canadian trucker protests." }, { "speaker": "matt_hill", "time": "03:15", "start": 195.26, "text": "Yeah, so broadly speaking, you kind of hit on it, there's a lot happening right now. There's been a lot happening over the past couple of decades, I would argue, or more, but, recently there's been an acceleration of, of movements. You know, I don't think it's a novel thing to say that, you know, we are at war, it's a do-new kind of war, there's an information war taking place on Earth right now. Luckily, it hasn't spilled over to be an open, you know, In a no holds barred, total war scenario, and maybe it never will, hopefully it never will. The weapons available to mankind today are far beyond anything that we had in prior wars, so let's hope that it doesn't come to violence. But it is an information war, and the future is at stake. And of late, there have been some increasingly, drastic, you might even call them desperate movements, on behalf of who I would consider to be the enemy, the statists and central planners of the world world, have stepped up efforts towards their agenda, and as such, the opposition has also stepped up. we in the Bitcoin and individual sovereignty space have, accelerated our efforts at constructing a parallel system that enables people to jump ship, so to speak, opt out, and that's going well. we've made a lot of progress, Bitcoin has made a lot of progress, but we've also witnessed some setbacks recently, you know, because I think there's some surprise throughout the greater freedom community. These at the extent to which the authoritarians are willing to go. Now, it shouldn't come as a surprise if you look at history, yet it's all fun and games and talk until actual people get hurt, and that's beginning to happen. So, you know, you bring up a few examples, Russia-Ukraine incident, I would argue that that's nothing new, in terms of, you know, one nation state and another nation state having tension. That's, that's kind of an age-old story, but we have seen some innovative tactics with regard to creative- forms of protest. You know, there were protests in twenty nineteen and twenty twenty that took on a certain flavor. There are protests, now with the Canadian truckers, for example, that are taking on a totally different flavor. and ultimately, there's a lot of chaos, a lot of confusion about what is appropriate, what isn't appropriate, what is effective, what is useful, what is a distraction, and so it's really hard to kind of pin down. Now, personally, I don't follow a ton of detailed news around different, You know, battles, we'll call them, taking place all over the world. I am very focused on our angle, what we are trying to do, and we are thoroughly convinced that what we are doing will be a highly effective tool in the fight for freedom into the future. And so, you know, I can weigh in on some of these things, but I also don't presume to understand exactly what's happening on all fronts at all times. So yeah, I mean, it's, if you wanna talk about the trucker specifically, I look at it like this. You do what you can Okay, if you feel disempowered, attacked, if you feel threatened, and you have the ability to strike back, then you are welcome to. there are actually no rules here. People might disagree with what you're doing, they might agree with what you're doing, they might support what you're doing, they might even try to fund it or assist in any way that they can. But ultimately, whether it's right or wrong is kind of a, a luxury of the philosophers, right? Like ultimately, power is power, might is might, and, you know, the truckers these, these Canadian truckers that chose to blockade city streets as a form of, protest against, you know, vaccination mandates, mask mandates, lockdowns, did so, in my opinion, with the full authority of, moral authority of doing what they can do to fight for what they think is right. Now, the fact that the Canadian government then pushed back and used their might, backed by their understanding of, what is right. is also just like, I don't view this as a, I, I don't wanna argue about the morality of it. It's, who's got more power? Who's gonna, when push comes to shove, who has the power? And that's where I tend to focus on this. We need to create tools that empower individuals and groups of individuals who are fighting for freedom so that when a government comes along and tries to exert itself in this arbitrary manner according to some arbitrary code, that we can just say no, and there's nothing they can do about it. That's The day I look forward to." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "07:45", "start": 464.78, "text": "And on that theme, I think the important question also is, what have people been taking for granted? They've often been taking for granted that their bank accounts would be available to them when they wanted it, and as we've obviously seen with the GoFundMe and other instances, that's not actually true. And of course, a listener or somebody could be thinking, \"Oh, fine, well, I didn't like what the Canadian truckers were doing,\" but of course, that's this time. What happens another time when it's a government who is opposed to what you Something to people on the other side. And so I think that's an important point for people to think about, what are some of the things that people should be doing to take that power back or to assert their own power?" }, { "speaker": "matt_hill", "time": "08:24", "start": 503.76, "text": "Well, first and foremost, we have to come to terms with the fact that evil exists. You know, we are quite naive. Since the end of World War II Everything has been kind of smoke and mirrors, right? That there has been conflict, people have suffered, but there hasn't been a real re-emergence of pure evil. There hasn't been this like, you know, and we've gotten kind of complacent as a society, as a culture. We tend to think that, well, they wouldn't do that, right? Slavery is over, mass murder is over, that was in humanity's past. We just kind of like look at history and think it's sort of in the history books and that we've moved on and learned from it. As a species, and we haven't, the, you know, the tactics have changed, the landscape has changed, the technology has changed, but to think that people will not resort to barbarism, In order to obtain control or get what they want is naive. And so first and foremost, it's recognizing the, the real possibilities of disaster, and only then can you properly take any reasonable measures to prepare. You know, there are some people who believe disaster is imminent and inevitable at all moments of all times, even in the most peaceful times, and they take extreme measures to prepare for these things, and we call them preppers, right? And then when things do turn Turn poor, they turn out like, \"Ah, see, I told you, I told you.\" But here's the thing, by and large, they've wasted their resources, they've wasted their time, because most places in the world at most times are pretty safe, secure, and free. Now, we have, again, seen an acceleration, so you need to prepare in accordance with the threat model, right? If you're making threats up in order to be contrarian and preparing for it and spending your resources on it, you're, you're losing, you're missing out on life, right? To use. But when the threat is real, ignoring it is equally, equally a bad decision. Okay? So what's happening now is there is a real threat. I don't know how imminent or how extreme it is, it's actually really hard to assess that on a day-to-day basis to see who's doing what, what the movements are, what the intentions are. But I think it is undeniable at this point to look out at the world and say that there is a real existential caliber threat brewing against freedom on Earth. And so it's time to take, you know- You know, equal and opposite measures towards protecting that freedom and fighting back. And so, you know, as individuals, had these truckers maybe been a little less naive, right? Like, did they do what they thought was right and use the power that they had effectively? Yeah, but ultimately they kind of got beat because they underestimated the tools that were available to their opponents. They thought that they could, you know, park a huge truck in the middle of the road and say, \"I'm not moving,\" until someone showed up and said, \"Your bank account's frozen.\" Your family can't eat. Well, maybe I'll move now, right? So they, they sort of didn't do it comprehensively. Like if you're gonna make a move against the state, you better watch your flank, and they didn't. And it's a lesson learned, right? It's not like a failure, it's that, that's the point of these battles. You learn the tactics of your enemy and you adapt so that the next battle, the next encounter, you are more prepared. So what would that mean to be more prepared here? It would mean that if you're gonna go A bunch of trucks in the middle of the street and, you know, essentially obstruct the, the right of passage for citizens and the government, you are expecting them to move against you. Well, you better secure some food and supply chains and, and protect your money beforehand, as in get it out of the bank, put it into cash, put it into Bitcoin, put it into gold, I don't care, just get it out of the hands of a third party custodian before you make a move. Now," }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "12:13", "start": 733.06, "text": "now they could potentially say, \"Look, I didn't think it was going to get that I think part of that also comes to maybe beliefs, right? What, and, and maybe not just their beliefs, but the beliefs of other people in the country. So, I'm, I'm curious your view, Matt, how much of it is around trying to build tools and use specific tools, and how much of it is actually trying to, as the saying goes, winning hearts and minds." }, { "speaker": "matt_hill", "time": "12:36", "start": 755.96, "text": "Yeah. I think the hearts and minds. So, look, there's a lot of fronts, okay? You're talking about propaganda, you know, when it comes to, to war, propaganda is" }, { "speaker": "matt_hill", "time": "12:48", "start": 767.61, "text": "is good and bad, your side and their side. You have to win the hearts and minds of the people that, who are ex- who you are expecting to back you, and we're pretty bad at it, you know? They're pretty good at it. they've been practicing for decades and they have all the outlets, all the, the channels. I shouldn't say all, we have some channels, and they are effective. But, you know, maybe I'll, maybe I'll backtrack here. I think we're doing pretty good, right? We, as in the, the" }, { "speaker": "matt_hill", "time": "13:18", "start": 797.57, "text": "Libertarian, even anarchist camps are actually doing pretty good. We're pretty good at memeing, you know, the, the meme wars are real, it is how you win hearts and minds to a degree. I think that where we're really losing is that we don't really understand yet the, the sort of any PR is good PR mantra. We don't really understand this yet. We don't understand that by giving something attention, you give it life, you fuel it, right? We are too quick to take the- These ridiculous statements and claims that are made by these horrible people and amplify them on social media. Now we are criticizing them, right? We are saying, \"Look at this crazy person, what they just said, like this is horrible.\" You know, I can't believe they're trying to do this. But in doing that, we are amplifying their message, right? We are rallying their side against us. We're, we're giving them energy, awareness, right? What matters on social media is visibility. Right? Trump really proved this in his first campaign, that you can just do horrible things, say horrible things, for the sole purpose of getting the amplification, right, against you, which then rallies the people who are for you, right? Like triggering your opponent effectively using viral marketing is a highly effective way to rally your own base. And so I think we feed them far more than we should. I would like to see a more effective tactic in my mind is more of the clown world meme approach to dealing with, the things that they say, which is to dismiss and not take seriously, and quite frankly, to laugh at them, for the ridiculous people and stances that they are and take. it is deserving of laughter, and that's pretty much what we should do every time they say something Something crazy and we take it seriously, it becomes possible. Just laugh at it and go back to building things that make what they're saying objectively ridiculous, like impractical." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "15:30", "start": 930.02, "text": "Yeah, it just comes down to, I think you're right, it's mockery and this kind of derision are legitimate tools in that sense, that basically not taking them too seriously or at least trying to help show them as being false. Now, it's not the perfect strategy, but, it's, it's- Probably the best thing you can do when you're already in that, let's say, underdog position as, the broadly considered the freedom camp is. And so I, I think that's the challenge that we all face, is that we're operating on these online platforms, but there's a risk that we can get shut down and canceled at any time, where, people have, are still operating with fiat bank accounts and they can get shut down at any time. there, there's just this difficulty of, operating in that environment. And so I think that's just the And so probably a good spot now to, yeah, switch and chat a little bit about what's happening with Startnine. I wanna, get some updates for listeners, in terms of, you know, what's happened since, last time we spoke." }, { "speaker": "matt_hill", "time": "16:29", "start": 988.74, "text": "Quite a bit. I think Aiden and I were on together last time, and we had-- I think we had just released 0. 2. 0, version two of our platform. So we are now entering the third major iteration of our product, which is EmbassyOS. It's not Embassy. Embassy is Hardware off the shelf, it's nothing special, it's nothing innovative. Our primary value add to the world is an operating system, a previously, you know, non-existent type of operating system, which is to enable a totally non-technical person to operate a personal server, right? All the way from discovering, downloading, installing, configuring, and managing in perpetuity, open-source self-hosted software services. And that's a bunch of word gibberish Push to a lot of people maybe, but ultimately what it means is the elimination of trusted third parties from your digital life, which is an insane thing to say given the fact that pretty much everything you do on your computer or phone involves a trusted third party. it is almost impossible to use a computer in the modern world without raising your hand and asking for permission every time you open the app without entrusting the data and lines of communication to- Third parties, and without sacrificing your own privacy in the process, and possibly money too, right? Like a lot of these things are paid for, you're actually paying for the right to be in, to have your privacy invaded and to ask for permission to use your computer. So EmbassyOS, we think was the missing link between two things that had already existed for many, many years. One was, reasonably performant commodity hardware, right? Things like a Raspberry Pi or a Rock Pro 64 or even an In- Until Nook, and open source software services, which have been numerous and, and quality for many decades, and are getting better by the year. You've had great software, and you've had commodity performant hardware. What has been missing is the middle of those two things, the liaison between software and hardware, which is operating system. There hasn't been a user friendly, graphical, comprehensive, useful operating system for a personal server ever. Things like, you could say Linux, Ubuntu, well, those are operating systems for personal servers. They aren't mass market, they aren't easy to use, they involve command line, they involve technical expertise. What has been missing is the personal server equivalent of Windows, and that's what we have done. We have invented the Windows equivalent of operating a personal server. Anyone can do it, and there's no compromise involved. We aren't involved, nothing. It is a pure software property. You buy the software or you build the software yourself from source, and it is is yours through and through, and then, you know, you just use it to run a personal server. so what has changed to get back to your original question since the last time we talked is we have grown up, okay? Our initial V1 version was very prototype. It was something we threw together and was capable of, you know, quickly installing a Bitcoin node, or a self-hosted password manager, Vaultwarden, or even a file, file storage, cloud file storage system, very quickly. And it, you know, it was naive. It was like, \" You know, we put it out the door and it was cool. V2 was a massive improvement on that system. It involved a comprehensive generalized dependency management system that allowed us to add services that depended on other services in a modular way, such as, LND and C-Lightning were launched alongside our V2 operating system because now we had the ability to compose services that depend on one another in a very sophisticated way that also didn't detract from user experience. We built an advanced configuration system, such that instead of editing dot com files and all the dragons that go along with that, you could just go into a settings menu and change some settings and not have to worry about screwing anything up. we revamped the user interface, we pivoted entirely to a web model in order to exclude Apple and Google from the as, as dependencies from the system. So V2 is a huge improvement over V1. It took a big step in the direction of sovereignty and usability for a personal server. V3 is a rewrite. We took V2, which has been in the wild for a year and four months give or take, and, we, we threw it in the trash. It was a great product and people have enjoyed it and it has worked really well, and we threw it in the trash because, we're not here to deliver a usable operating system for a personal server that allows a few Bitcoin and freedom hobbyists to get on board. We are here to reinvent personal computing for the sovereign era. And to do that, we needed something that could scale, something that could scale not just in terms of like the way people normally think about scaling, which is a-accommodating sort of more users on a network like Bitcoin scaling, or if you talk about like SaaS scaling, like Twitter scaling means bigger servers, more efficient databases. That's not the kind of scaling I'm talking about, because we don't have a network that needs to scale, and we don't have a database or central server server that needs to scale. What we need to scale is understanding, usability, user experience, and support, okay? When you invent a new computing paradigm, your biggest challenge, aside from the tech itself, which is enormously challenging by the way, is the support network. It's, can grandma understand what you are trying to do here? Can she get it? Right? Just because it's usable doesn't mean people will use it. They have to be aware of it It, they have to feel like their hand is being held. The user experience needs to be flawless. You can never say the word command line, you can never say the word SSH. Like, we're, we're going for mass market here. We're trying to get everyone on board. We're trying to put a server in every home on this planet and in every business on this planet, at least one, okay? Like, we're gonna replace routers. We want to replace routers wholesale. There will not be routers in the future. There will be servers that have- The functionality of a router. So we're going after a massive, massive market, and in order to do that, you have to speak the masses' language, which is quite frankly, push, click, and swipe, nothing else. And so that's what V3 does, is it takes a massive step in the direction of usability for non-technical people by eliminating all of the technical pitfalls and, you know, like system nuances and command line stuff, it like It really just becomes like using a website. We've made it really, really simple." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "23:22", "start": 1402.39, "text": "That's great to hear, and of course, I'm, I'm all for it. I'm excited for what you guys are building. I think at the time, the last time we spoke, v2, it was like, you know, I was just playing around with it, and, you know, it had-- I think at that time, you were just bringing Lightning in, right? As you said, you had c-lightning and LND. And so I think the question probably from most people And freedom enthusiast, hobbyist crowd, what's gonna take it to, what's gonna draw them in?" }, { "speaker": "matt_hill", "time": "23:53", "start": 1432.51, "text": "Sure. So the world is doing our marketing for us to an extent. So the more hacks there are, the more privacy invasions there are, the more, extraordinary behavior there is, and we should dig into that 'cause we actually think that's gonna be the primary driving force for mass adoption, is cost. centralized models, right? These companies that have been, you know, two decades now really of building these SaaS Models where they are giving away products for free in order to establish themselves between you and the things that you need from your computer, right? To firmly position themselves as a middleman, and they've largely succeeded, right? Like I said, it is hard to use your computer or phone in any meaningful way without there being a middleman between you and the thing that you're trying to do, and we are just about to start seeing the rampant increase in cost, okay? Once at that- That's what middlemen do. You establish yourself as an indispensable liaison between two parties that need each other, in this case, the computer and the human, and then you just squeeze. You just squeeze and squeeze until there's, you know, all the money is, is gone from the user. And that's what we're about to start seeing. They were able to get away with it without squeezing for a long time because they were monetizing the data, right? You were the product. They were actually mining your data and selling it. However, More and more people are saying no to that, and ironically, the companies themselves are advocating for, like Apple, for instance, are advocating for the ability to retain your privacy if you'd like, as in they are forcing these SaaS providers, software as a service, apps on your phone to ask you, \"Are, is it okay if we collect your data?\" Now you point to the person who says yes. I don't know a single person who clicks yes when presented with the prompt of, \"Can we spy on you?\" Right? They're all Pressing no, which means these SaaS companies aren't going to be able to mine and monetize your data in the same way that they always have. So how are they gonna pay their bills? There really is only one other option, which is subscriptions. Subscriptions, subscriptions, subscriptions. Everything on your phone, every app on your phone is going to cost X amount of dollars per month to use, and you are going to get nickel and dimed out of your ability to pay your rent. And so as this phenomenon kicks up Which it's going to take years for this to, you know, fully become like a mass, mass problem, but it is happening already. The free tiers are getting smaller and the paid tiers are getting more expensive. And, as that happens, more and more people will reach for alternatives in the free and open source software ecosystem. They'll say, \"Wow, you're telling me I don't have to pay a thousand dollars a month for my small business to use Slack. I can go get an Embassy, install Matrix, hook it up to...\" To a my domain name, and now my and my company are messaging for free for life, and it just works just as well. Who wouldn't do that? Okay, so part of Start Nines' go-to-market strategy, if you wanna think of it that way, the way that we are going to actually expand and make money in the early days, especially, is small businesses. It's not just individuals, right? We started with an individ-- a product for the individual because that was quite frankly one of the hardest things to do. It's much easier to adapt a product that you built for an individual individual and apply it to a business, than it is to build a product for a business and then apply it to an individual, right? And long term, it was an investment as well, because we need this to work for individuals. We need individuals running servers out of their own home to accomplish our longer term goals of mesh networking and automated IoT in a sovereign way. However, business is gonna pay the bills. I can go into a small business and say, \"How much are you spending per month on all of your SaaS subscriptions? Slack is costing you a thousand bucks. Google Drive is costing you three hundred dollars. Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. It all adds up. I can go in there and say, \"Buy this device one time for two thousand dollars and never pay a subscription fee again. It will literally pay itself off in five months, and then it's free for life for your business, and this is how much you'll save on a monthly basis.\" That is our value proposition, is that this isn't just about privacy and censorship resistance, sovereignty, it is about those things, but it's also about just a more efficient way to do- To build a computing network on Earth, it's just cheaper." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "28:22", "start": 1702.15, "text": "Back to the show in a moment. Unchained Capital have Collaborative Custody. This is an easy way for you to upgrade your security to multi-signature, so you can bring two hardware wallets to the website and create your vault. Now, if you need guidance, they have a concierge onboarding program, so you pay upfront, you will receive some hardware wallets, you will have a call to teach you how to use the vault and set up your vault with your hardware wallets, and also talk about- Backups, recovery, there's some ongoing education there also, and this can be done in a way where you might have never used Bitcoin private keys before. So this is a great way to give yourself that peace of mind and improve your security. So go to Unchained dot com, use the code Livera to get a discount on your concierge onboarding program, and don't forget Unchained also have a range of educational material on their blog, such as Parker Lewis's Gradually Then Suddenly. So go and check that out at Unchained dot com. If we're dealing in the world of Bitcoin hardware security, you have to check out the Coldcard. This is my favorite Bitcoin hardware wallet, and it's by the team at CoinKite dot com. Now, I did a recent episode with NVK talking about some of the new features coming in the upcoming Coldcard Mark four. Now, the Coldcard is a really great tool. You can use it with pSBT, partially signed Bitcoin transactions, meaning you can use an SD card to pass that information back and forth, and this is the standard that helps you keep your Your Bitcoin wallet airgapped. Now, the bit-the coldcard can be used in single signature or in multi-signature. You can have all sorts of features like a Duress pin, a BreakMe pin, and on the website coinkite dot com, you can order all kinds of things like the seed plate, which is a metal backup for your Bitcoin private key. So don't forget to do your metal backups also. So that website is coinkite dot com. And finally, for those of you interested in stablecoins and loans, Lend at Hoddle Hoddle is a peer-to-peer Bitcoin-backed lending platform where you can lend or borrow stablecoins globally and anonymously. So if you've got Bitcoin and you need some fiat liquidity, you can sign up in just thirty seconds and borrow stablecoins without any verification. You deal directly with other people, and the users control collateral together through the whole deal. All the interest is paid at the end. Now, on the other hand, if you have stablecoins and you want to lend them out Out at high returns, you can issue overcollateralized loans with the full interest guaranteed. So lend at hodl-hodl, you lend and borrow stablecoins on your terms at your desired interest rates. There are no hidden fees, the terms and conditions are transparent. So go and check it out, the website is lend dot h o d l h o d l dot com. And now back to the show with Matt. That's really fascinating, and I think it's cutting against the grain a little bit, because historically people maybe have made the argument that if you wanted to be private, for example, you might be making a trade-off there of paying more in some way. Maybe you're paying with your time, or you're paying with your money in some way. And so I think people might be thinking, right, and I, and I'm with you, right? But people might be thinking, how is it that you're able to do this? How can you do this by actually making it cheaper for them to be self" }, { "speaker": "matt_hill", "time": "31:31", "start": 1890.94, "text": "We always do this, right? We didn't invent personal servers and open source software services or the ability to use those software services on a personal server over a, you know, private network. We didn't invent any of that. We're making it accessible to everyone else, right? The, the only companies who had done that in the past were the big ones, right? Well-financed big companies with lots of tech talent, as in, in order to opt out of Slack and Google Drive and LastPass and Dropbox, whatever, you name it, all these software as a service things that businesses need, in order to opt out of that, you had to hire a DevOps engineer at At minimum, one hundred and fifty thousand dollars a year. So you just do the cost, you go, okay, this is how much it's gonna cost me to self-host it, and it's a ton. Plus, I have to like make sure that, I'm keeping backups, I need to make sure that my, my network is, is functioning, I need to make sure that I have ninety-nine percent uptime on my internet, blah, blah, blah. So AWS actually stepped in and filled that gap. It was like, oh, for you businesses that don't just wanna do SaaS" }, { "speaker": "matt_hill", "time": "32:44", "start": 1963.88, "text": "Infrastructure for you to actually host your own stuff, and it's way cheaper, right? Instead of having your bare metal where you are like installing everything, the full stack and monitoring it and making sure that your internet is connected, and then going basically the full free route minus the labor that it costs to do that, AWS took a middle ground and they were like, \"Let us take care of all of the hardware, the networking, you know, the spinning up of these virtual private servers, et cetera, and then you can have your DevOps engineer, your AWS certified employee run Run all your personal servers on our metal, and that was like a huge deal, and look how much money they make. AWS pays the bills for Amazon. We are now coming in and saying, going all the way back in time and saying, \"You don't need any of it. You don't need to pay for SaaS subscriptions, you don't need to pay for AWS infrastructure to run your own self-hosted software. You can go all the way back to metal, and you don't need a DevOps engineer anymore. Your college intern can manage your server infrastructure.\" Now, with EmbassyOS, that is the value that we have created, is we are eliminating the need for DevOps engineers in small businesses self-hosting scenarios and individual self-hosting scenarios, by the way. So like as an individual, I wanna self-host all sorts of things. Well, in the past, I either needed to have a ton of money to hire somebody to do this for me, a ton of experience to be able to do it myself, and in either case, I needed to be very patient, like it takes takes time. Even if I know how to do it, I'm still gonna be burning days and weeks making sure that these things are set up and configured and networked and blah, blah, blah. EmbassyOS just does this. So it's, it's actually difficult to underestimate here or to overestimate how valuable this is. I mean, we are going after first and foremost the SaaS companies of the world, and they have been driving the venture capital investments for two decades, right? Most VC firms, Silicon Valley especially, they're investing In SaaS, they're like, \"Oh, what's your software product? What's your free tier? What's your subscription model? How do you get the recurring revenue? Like, it's all SaaS. \" And what we're saying is that we can wipe them all out, all of them, that every single service that is centralized, custodial, paid for, middleman SaaS company that exists can be replaced by an open source, self-hosted software service that's running on your own metal in your own home. And the only thing that has prevented that from Being a reality until now is an operating system that enabled a non-technical individual to just do it, and that's what we have invented here. So first, we're going after the SaaS companies, then it's AWS, right? And we do that by enabling small businesses to run self-hosted services on their own physical servers as opposed to virtual private servers, which is what AWS offers. And then there's sort of a third phase, which is- Which is way out there, where we're actually competing with the likes of, like, Apple and the ISPs by doing mesh networking and, you know, circumventing the ISPs. Now, again, this isn't just Startnine. When I say we, I'm not talking about Startnine and Startnine alone. I'm talking about the entire self-hosting sovereign computing movement, of which Bitcoin is at the center, ultimately involves the elimination of, hopefully all, but at least most, trusted third parties From the digital realm. If you take that sentence seriously and you take it to its logical conclusion, it means that every company that we think of as like an Earth superpower becomes anachronistic. They're, they're no longer necessary. So we're talking about potentially one of the largest, most disruptive moments in technological history here, if we, not StarNine, us plus others, can win the day. it's gonna-- it's, it's, it's a big battle, but it's gonna take many, many years. But that's what we're talking about." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "36:43", "start": 2202.7, "text": "That sounds great. I'd love to see, more of that. And so some listeners might be thinking about things like feature parity as an example. They might say, \"Well, X, Y, and Z service offers this feature, but let's Might not offer that. So I mean, quick example, if they're using some cloud storage, I don't know, Google Drive or Dropbox versus, let's say, Nextcloud, or if they're talking about, you know, some of the document-type features versus what some of the open-source alternatives are. Do you have any comment to offer around feature parity or disparity?" }, { "speaker": "matt_hill", "time": "37:17", "start": 2236.53, "text": "Yes, and you nailed it. That is the, that is the other angle, the other challenge, right? So the first is the ability to do it, the ability to run self-hosted OS Open source services in a convenient manner. That is sort of challenge one, and that's a huge challenge. Challenge two is having that experience be on par with the experience that people have become accustomed to. and to be fair, it isn't on par. The open source self hosted equivalents of these centralized SaaS products tend to be inferior in functionality, reliability, security maybe, right? Well, maybe not security, because open source projects tend to be quite secure Secure, at least if they have a lot of attention, if they're popular ones. But we have a long way to go on the user experience side of these services. Here's why I'm optimistic though. Never before have these open source services had a audience, a mass market audience, right? Most people who build open source, free and open source software to say compete with Google Drive, like building a self-hosted Google Drive equivalent, they are doing it out of pure passion And for reputational purposes, they're like, \"This is cool, this is fun, this is gonna make me, you know, really popular and cool amongst my, my group. Like, I'm building this thing so that I can build my own brand reputation, that I can hone and practice my skills, and hey, some people will use it, and I think it's good for Earth.\" As in, they're building it out of ideology, passion, and reputation. Now there's a new reason, and it's because-- well, I shouldn't say new. All of those reasons are Goes from a few hobbyists who like to read GitHub READMEs and self-host on the weekends, goes to mass market. Now all of a sudden you're not just earning some reputation points in your little circle, you are a celebrity of sorts, right? Like if you build some self-hosted, look at the Bitcoin devs, for instance, right, to get a flavor of the kind of clout and celebrity that is going to come along with being the core contributors of these powerful, meaningful, widely used open source services. It's going to- be people's life endeavors and the ones that really matter will actually be fairly well funded, right? Not just through donations, but also we have stumbled upon in the last few years a new way of monetizing decentralized systems, which is huge, okay? You can make money now, and not just by doing it in the old fashioned like, \"I'm gonna build free and open source software and then, you know, have an enterprise tier where I- I sell, where I host it for people as opposed to them self-hosting it, which is a little bit of betrayal of the software, you know, in the first place, but it's how most of these things monetize. And two, through support. Like, I'm gonna do white glove support, and that's how we're gonna make money. There is this new way now, and it involves Lightning, right? It involves this idea of building money into the system, and we've seen some really horrible takes at this over the last five years with like the tokens, right? The, the utility" }, { "speaker": "matt_hill", "time": "40:27", "start": 2426.91, "text": "Experimenting, and the future may hold some very interesting solutions around the way that open source developers can build these self-hosted things and at the same time integrate into those software systems a way to make money. Now, I don't have this solution yet, but I sense that there is something there, that there is a way to do this, that is, that doesn't betray The, soundness and the principles of good business, we'll call it, right? Like most of the attempts at this right now have been basically scams, but it doesn't mean it can't be done in a, in a clever way. And so I'm interested to see, like, Lightning, these, these like layer three Lightning apps, where, you know, I've built some system that I'm not necessary in, but I'm a participant in it, and because I'm an early participant and a trusted participant, I sort of have this like special place and can make routing fees type of Into the software itself, where you don't have to rely on the goodwill of people to donate, but like, if you use my software, by default, you are gonna be paying me. Now, you can opt out, right? But I, I, I need to get paid for my work. It, it'll be interesting to see how that evolves. So I think the quality of the open source self-hosted software services is going to skyrocket because for the first time in history, people will use them, provide the necessary feedback, contribute to them, and they will be better funded, especially now that- Bitcoiners, you know, are, are emerging as a, as a class to be reckoned with from a, from a financial power standpoint. I think you're going to see quality projects get funded, even by" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "42:07", "start": 2526.71, "text": "donations. Interesting. So I'd might summarize that then as you're saying it's, it's almost like what people in the Bitcoin world might know today as podcasting two point oh, where they are streaming some sats to the creators that they like, and also a fraction goes to the, the platform that is helping or other people. So in a similar way, maybe, yeah, Creators of some open source software might receive a, an ongoing stream of, sats in that way that the user could opt out of that as an example. And like you're saying, there might be these wealthy Bitcoin patricians who decide that, you know what, this particular piece of technology or this particular security or privacy technique needs to be more available, I'm just gonna fund it. So we might see that too. So That's really interesting to see. I think the other question probably people are thinking about is, m-most people aren't used to running their own infrastructure. So as you said rightly, the having to have a DevOps person or having some kind of person or way of dealing with backups, with redundancy, or availability of the system. How confident are you that these kinds of concerns that were typically done by a professional, how confident are you that this can be automated and done within? EmbassyOS and other freedom technology." }, { "speaker": "matt_hill", "time": "43:21", "start": 2601.03, "text": "Extremely. If I wasn't confident that we could pull this off at scale, we wouldn't be doing it. That doesn't mean we have the solution to every possible technical challenge we're going to face yet, but we are confident that those solutions exist and that we have the talent, both at Start9 and in the broader community, to discover those solutions. Now, some of them we actually do have working models for of how we will solve, for take- Redundancy, for instance, which is perhaps amongst the most important, right? There's a danger to running your own personal server in your own home on your own metal, which is that what happens if a hammer gets taken to it? What happens if there's a fire or a flood? Does your entire digital life evaporate? The answer is yes, unless you have redundant geographically dispersed backups. And so the way that we solve this problem is the way that you solve any massive problem that you don't fully understand the end game to, which is iteratively You solve it in the cleanest, simplest possible way, and then you find people who are willing to put up with the inconvenience of that sort of naive, simple solution, and then you use their feedback and input to iterate it and make it more and more available and easier for larger numbers of people. And so that's also why it's important as an early company solving hard problems to not go mass market overnight. You have to iterate towards the masses. It's why we don't put a lot of Effort into marketing, right? We are very early here. We are still trying to solve a lot of these. So redundancy, here's how we did it. As of today, you can make a backup of your Embassy and all of its services by either plugging a drive into the device itself and clicking backup, and you get a full backup of absolutely everything on the device, or with the release of O3O, which is coming now, it's done. So I'm happy now to leak that here. EmbassyOS will be released publicly out of beta. It's in beta right now, it's been in beta for a while. It will be released publicly out of beta within the next two weeks. we have not, or at least we're not sharing the exact release date, but it is done. That is a done deal, it's being released, and it's awesome. Okay, so with O3O, not only can you make a physical backup, on the device, but you can also make backups to any other device on your local area network. this is using the" }, { "speaker": "matt_hill", "time": "45:48", "start": 2748.31, "text": "That say your MacBook would use when sharing a file to another MacBook nearby. So you can very easily now go into your Embassy, click backup, and that backup will be created, encrypted over the local area network to your desktop or your laptop or to a drive that's plugged into your desktop or laptop. Like you could take a two terabyte drive, plug it into your MacBook, hit backup on the Embassy, which is located in another part of the house, and the backup would land on the two terabyte drive that's plugged in. Plugged into your MacBook, fully encrypted over the air, also encrypted over HTTPS on the LAN in case anyone happens to be snooping, which nobody is, but they-- if they were, it's still safe. So that was an iterative step towards the next phase of backups, which is gonna be, right? So you see here, the-- we started with a physical backup that you yourself had to plug in and make. Now we've moved towards a backup where you can back it up to something else on the local area network. After that, the next logical step will be that you can click backup and it Back it up to a remote device, potentially another embassy of yours in another geographic location, and these two things can create encrypted backups of each other so that if one goes down, the other can re-replace it pretty seamlessly. Then we move towards an automation of this feature, where now you aren't even clicking backup, your device is just constantly creating encrypted backups of itself on one or more devices, which by the way, don't even need to be your So you could create a buddy system with other people who have embassies, and you share a couple pieces of credentials, like I give you some credentials, you give me some credentials, and now we are storing encrypted backups on each other's device without any effort whatsoever. And if my device ever goes down, I just call you up and I'm like, \"Hey, I need that backup.\" You click a button and I have my embassy now can be fully restored. And say I don't fully trust just you, I could actually cut this deal with five different people. The next logical step after that is to Process. So instead of you and me actually getting together personally and being like, \"I'll store yours if you store mine, \"and we're doing this for free, \"I can actually just hit, create a backup of my embassy, and it will back itself up to people, people's devices who I don't even know all over the world, creating ten redundant backups all over planet Earth, and pay for it with Sats over the Lightning Network. I can then ping these people all day, every day, saying, \"Prove to me that you still have my backup. \" Prove to me that you still have my backup, and every time they prove it to me, I pay 'em another ten sats, and they prove it to me again, I pay 'em another ten sats, and if they ever stop proving to me that they have my backup, I stop paying them and I start storing it on somebody else's device. So now you can monetize excess storage space. So I can actually go out and buy a bunch of terabytes of hard drives and be like, \"I'm a huge player in this network, I store everybody's encrypted backups, I don't" }, { "speaker": "matt_hill", "time": "48:48", "start": 2928.07, "text": "described, a lot of people have talked about and thought about. We know how to build it. We also can't build it ourselves, I don't have the resources internally to build out that entire system, but we will absolutely be patrons of it, we will absolutely contribute to it, and it'll just plop right into EmbassyOS because that's what we built it for. So the redundancy problem not only will be solved, but we already know how to solve it and it will be solved in a relatively short period of time, right? The, the vision I just painted you isn't a twenty twenty two But it's also not a twenty thirty vision, okay? It's a twenty twenty four vision probably, where that comes to full fruition." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "49:26", "start": 2965.6, "text": "And what about security? So, and in fairness, this is an issue that applies all over the world to everything, that there are, let's say, zero day exploits or vulnerabilities found. And so what's the approach going to be with Embassy in terms of keeping things up to date, such that users are patched against these vulnerabilities?" }, { "speaker": "matt_hill", "time": "49:47", "start": 2986.99, "text": "Yeah, so you're talking about sort of dependency vulnerabilities. I mean, we-- most software operates up here, right? It's just layers and layers and layers of software, and if the Linux kernel gets a bug in it, a security vulnerability all the way down at the base, then basically everything on Earth is now potentially compromised. So there is no simple solution to this other than open source diligence, having, you know, audits and being on top of it so that if there is an exploit, your ability to- patch it very quickly exists, and we have designed EmbassyOS for very, very easy updates. So for example, if there's ever a security issue with any part of the dependent stack or if there's a security issue with any given service, our ability to deploy a fix very quickly and securely is there. That was a big thought process of ours that, quite frankly, isn't shared by a lot of the other options for self-hosting in the world because they're so bundled and fragile. So take, for instance, I don't wanna mention names, but take for instance another plug-and-play kind of node solution. If there's a vulnerability with Bitcoin, okay, there's some sort of security vulnerability discovered in Bitcoin Core, in order to patch that security vulnerability, you the user would have to update your entire system. There is no way to just patch Bitcoin. You have to update the entire operating system, including every single service on that operating system that hasn't updated available. So there's no way to just patch Bitcoin, which means you could end up in a scenario where you have purposefully not updated to the latest version of LND because it's like experimental and you think there's a bug with it or whatever, but you have to patch Bitcoin. Well, now you're stuck between a rock and a hard place because if you don't upgrade your system, you're stuck with a Bitcoin that's vulnerable, and if you do upgrade your system, you're stuck with a version of LND that's potentially vulnerable. So it's, it's very fragile, it's very Nothing approach. EmbassyOS isn't like that. EmbassyOS is extremely modular, nothing is bundled, right? It's, it's totally all up cart. So if you want to, if there's a bug discovered in Bitcoin, we can deploy a fix for Bitcoin in a matter of minutes, and then you just click update Bitcoin and it updates and you're, you're patched. So that's part of it, okay? Security broadly speaking, so that security question was very much around like vulns discovered in dependent software and in services themselves, and again, those are hard But doable, just requires diligence and speed. When it comes to security, broadly speaking, as a principle, EmbassyOS and self-hosting on a personal server is night and day, right? Because here's the problem with Earth's digital infrastructure right now, it's just, just a ton of honeypots, okay? When you have central service providers who are providing communication, data services for a billion people, you're talking about a goldmine of data, okay? And, and you know what's protecting That gold mine of data is a few people with the right keys. Alright, everyone thinks about hacking as like fighting with the computer, right? When someone hears the word hacking, what they picture is somebody with a cloak on, in the middle of the night, like typing really fast and like sort of like jousting with the computer on the other side. That is not a valid image at all. Cryptography works. You wanna brute force SHA two fifty six? Go fuck off. You can't, you can't type fast enough, right? It's, it's impossible. The way that hacking works is social engineering. People get hacked, not computers. Yes, every once in a while a computer has some exploit that can be taken advantage of, but the vast majority of hacks are people getting hacked. And so it doesn't matter how good your security systems are, the bottom line is, is that Facebook must, on a moment to moment basis, be able to access highly sensitive information because they have to deliver that highly sensitive information to their users. When I wanna see my private- Profile. I'm not on Facebook, but, well, maybe I am, but I haven't logged in in ten years. But if I want to see my private profile, there is some mechanism in the Facebook software stack that is enabling me access to that, which means the access exists and it's highly available. That fact alone dictates that it will eventually get hacked. There's no way around it because all it takes is the right or wrong, depending on how you want to think about it, person with the right access, because people can be bought, bribed, blackmailed Threatened, coerced, you name it, people can be had for one, in one way or another. And so long as that's true, and it will always be true, everything that can be hacked will be hacked. Here's why Embassy bypasses this entire paradigm. Because when somebody is hacking Facebook, they're not hacking Stephan Livera, they're not hacking Matt Hill, they don't even know we exist. They're hacking Facebook because they want the honey pot of all of our data. We're just a number in the database. If someone wants to hack you, when you- You are running a personal server, they have to hack you. There is no third party to go after, they have to hack you specifically, right? It's the same reason why most people feel safe in a neighborhood, in a home, it's because your house is one of five hundred in that neighborhood, right? You're just playing probabilities, like what is the probability that I'm gonna be targeted for robbery, assuming that you're a nobody, which most people are, right? Now, if you're a high profile individual and you have a ton of net worth and you're out there in the public eye Probably take additional precautions to protect your security, and you should have a, a security team, and you should invest in technology that is above and beyond what anyone else needs. Big walls instead of four foot fences, right? But most people don't have to worry about getting hacked. They're nobody, nobody even knows who they are, let alone that they have an embassy. How would your neighbors even know that you have an embassy that has lightning, you know, funds on it? They wouldn't even know. So our security model is protection through obscurity. It is the basic- fact that when everyone is custodying their own data and their own money, nobody gets robbed, nobody gets hacked, because the value proposition isn't there for the robber slash hacker. It's just not there. Like if I wanna get ten thousand people's data, I have to go personally hack ten thousand people. The chances of me pulling that off are zero. I'm gonna get caught, I'm not gonna get make any money, I'm wasting my time. So we think that simply by moving towards a self-custodied sovereign computer Computing model, security will actually become somewhat of an afterthought. It's not even like a, you don't even have to worry." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "56:25", "start": 3384.66, "text": "There's a lot of points I agree with you, but I'm just curious because as an example, like, let's say you're running a lightning node and it's not on, it's not Tor only, I mean, can people just figure out like if they were to be able to tie things, you know, from your real world behavior, purchases to, let's say, the lightning node that received from this or paid from this, and," }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "56:45", "start": 3404.69, "text": "you know, The payoff is a lot less because you'd have to go after individuals as opposed to trying to go for the, the lowest hanging fruit, these big honey pots that have a billion, billion plus users. Also, I wanted to, get your thoughts on the, I, I guess, where you're at with kind of what software, what, sorry, not software, rather, what, what kind of hardware should people be using to run Embassy OS? Like, should they be using Raspberry Pi, Rock Pro, or, should they be purchasing the device? What are Should be thinking about." }, { "speaker": "matt_hill", "time": "57:19", "start": 3439.35, "text": "Today, the only option that is tested, tried and true for running EmbassyOS is a Raspberry Pi four. It's the only option right now. That was a good starting point for us, right? The Raspberry Pi is, or at least was, a highly available piece of commodity hardware. There have recently been some shortages, which have accelerated our own plans to make new platforms available, but we don't expect those supply chain issues to persist forever. The Raspberry Pi will be widely available, and- Supported for many years to come, and so it is an option, and it's a good option, and it's cheap, and it works. So today, that is your option. In order to make Embassy OS available on other hardware platforms is totally doable and will be near term actually, viable on multiple different platforms, but it's also not trivial because what we're talking about here is low level computing operations. We're not talking about like an app that can just sort of run on a variety of OSes, we're talking about OSes that can run on a variety of hardware. And it's tricky, right? There's, you start dealing with like computer science, right? You're not dealing with just like whittling a couch together, you're dealing with the nature of wood. Like, you start to get into like the nittier, grittier aspects of, of what it means to run a computer. And so we want it to work really well, okay? We could definitely take shortcuts to, like, \"Oh, yeah, you can, you can fire this up on a Rock Pro, no big deal right now.\" But that doesn't mean that everything is just going To build the kind of, you know, confidence in usability that we need. So we are being very careful about not expanding or recommending alternative hardware platforms until they're properly engineered, tested, you know, vetted. And, it is a priority of ours for a variety of reasons. One, because the more hardware platforms there are, the less you are dependent on any given supply chain. The more hardware platforms there are, the easier it is for people around the world to acquire that hardware without having To buy it from us, right? it's just optionality. And three is because the Raspberry Pi just isn't gonna cut it. It just doesn't have the juice to support the kind of use that we're going to need long term. So we have to work towards more powerful alternative hardware platforms, and it's a pretty front and center endeavor for us. So expect near term results, on that front. I don't wanna say anything yet because it's not important. It's Raspberry Pi today, it'll be something else tomorrow. but the Raspberry Pi won't It won't always work, right? You need a low powered commodity solution that can be got at the hardware store, Raspberry Pi's for you. You want the big beefy thing that's gonna be able to do everything and then some, you might need to, to look into more, more powerful solutions." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "01:00:00", "start": 3599.82, "text": "And for people who are wondering, how much of the focus will be generally freedom aspects and how much of it will be keeping up with, let's say, the latest and greatest in the Bitcoin world from an EmbassyOS point of view?" }, { "speaker": "matt_hill", "time": "01:00:12", "start": 3612.11, "text": "Yeah, that's a, that's a good question. We, Trying to get out of that game. We don't wanna be making those decisions, right? We are building operating system technology, just like Apple wouldn't tell you what apps they're funding or supporting or whatever. It's the idea is that whatever the market deems to be in demand, there will be people who step up and provide the supply, right? We're going to let supply and demand work. Now, what was on our plate was to make it as easy as possible. So with Oh Three Oh, we have a whole new service packaging SDK that will make it easier than ever for even moderately technical people. Like, you don't need to be, you know, off the charts here, you don't need to be a DevOps engineer. It does require some technical expertise though, but it will-- it's fairly approachable that many moderately technical people will be able to package up services for EmbassyOS. we also will provide support in that front, as in, you know- Have questions, there's a, a channel for you to come ask those questions. We will continually improve the SDK, such that eventually it will really be like filling out forms, and then, boom, you know, some new lightning service that you're dying to try is now available as a one-click install on Embassy with all the bells and whistles, right? GUI configuration, health check monitoring, dependency management, and everything else is just sort of like done for you. That's the, the vision here, and we're like this close to it. I mean, it's there to- Today, we just need to make it better and better and better, and we have multiple people now in the community who aren't Startnine, employees or contractors, who are packaging services, and we are using those experiences and their feedback to make the, to make the process even easier. So when you ask me, you know, what is the priority for functionality of Embassy, like what services are the priority? Hey, I have some ideas, and we will continue to do some things, but by and large, it's going to be community driven. And I predict that people will be almost overwhelmed with the amount of things that can be done on this, in short order. Like, in other words, we are gonna have to strive to minimize what we, we do, as in curate our marketplace experience so that it doesn't overwhelm people. 'Cause if you log into our, into your embassy and visit the marketplace, and there's like fifteen different options for running a self-hosted P2P messenger, you're not really gonna know What to do? You're already overwhelmed by the idea of a personal server and self-hosting, and now there's fifteen options for doing messaging, you're gonna kind of feel paralysis. And so we also can't tell people no, right? So if fifteen different people package up fifteen different messaging services, they all will be available, but Start9 can take measures to highlight, promote, recommend certain things over other things, which puts us in a potential- We'll call it dangerous position, right, where we can start to emerge as like an authority of what people should be running on their servers. And so we are going to actively, actively fight against that while also trying to provide a good user experience. It's going to be a very delicate balancing act, and the way that we avoid the pitfalls of centralization, of authoritarianism, like so the way that we avoid becoming like a, \"Do this, do this, do this with your computer, and people just listen,\" is by creating an open marketplace. So So for example, Start9 by default will be the marketplace that you are connected to. So when you turn on your Embassy and you go to the marketplace to shop for services, you are browsing a repository that is hosted on our servers, where you hit download and you are downloading Bitcoin from Start9, okay? And we can curate that marketplace in any way that we want. We can say, \"Here's the different categories of services, here's the ones that we recommend, \"and you know what? We can even tell people no. If somebody tries to put a service on our marke- marketplace that we think is spam or malware, and we can just be like, \"We don't think anyone should be running your service, so you're not gonna get onto our marketplace.\" The way that we combat that potentially dangerous situation is that the user, as of O3O, as of the release that's coming in a few days, you can switch to someone else's marketplace, and anyone can run a marketplace. So instead of shopping at the Start9 service marketplace, you can shop at the Stephan Livera service marketplace, and you could host not only Bitcoin Bitcoin, right? As a redundant place to obtain Bitcoin in case we ever go down, people can still go to your marketplace and get it. But you could also host, host services that we don't want to put on our marketplace, and any user can just be like, \"Oh, I'll go shop there instead of shopping at Startnine and download things there.\" So we predict that in the near term, the service availability and marketplace ecosystem is going to get pretty cool, and there'll be tons of options." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "01:05:13", "start": 3913.79, "text": "So it reminds me of, how in, let's say for, if you're using We've got different repo, repositories that you can connect to and download from there. Yeah. So it's kind of like putting that, but in a nice, obviously, user interface, for the user who doesn't wanna go doing command line things. So that's really cool. I think it's really interesting. I mean, we've, we've spoken about a bunch of things. So we spoke about the broader world, what's going on in terms of the battle for hearts and minds, and also the tools to enable ourselves getting some more freedom, and as you mentioned, the big new release, So just some of the real world difficulties as well, but I think the important, I guess probably for me, the probably the highlight of the interesting point is the, the point around cost, right? Because for most people, they would think of it like, okay, being private or being secure, you're generally paying more of a cost, whether it's money or some kind of effort, and you're actually coming at it from a different point of view, you're saying actually we're going to win by being lower costs than some of the alternatives. So that's, that's been interesting for me Thoughts for listeners out there, and of course, where can people find you online?" }, { "speaker": "matt_hill", "time": "01:06:21", "start": 3981.85, "text": "Yeah, you know, so lower cost and better security. Yeah. So, just according to the, the threat model of an average person, you are gonna be better off having your data and finances on a device in your home than you are on a third party cloud, and it's free. So, you know, final thoughts? no, not really. We are workin' our asses off here. we are building as fast as we possibly can. we are doing it in an We're doing it in broad daylight, we're not hiding what we're doing, you know, everything that we're doing is, is transparent and visible, and, we expect to be held accountable by everyone and, and everyone doesn't mean that everyone's opinion will be, you know, adhered to because lots of people disagree with what we're trying to do, but we are, a very open project. Now, we are a company, we are selling things, which is great, it's what you should do in this world, or at least can do, but, you Present. you join our chat channel and you're not getting some automated message that, you know, says, \"Come back later\" or \"We value our customers, please hold for six hours.\" we are here, we are present. It is a, front and center principle of ours to remain available, because we know that what we're doing is scary for people, right? To take this step, to take action, right? It's one thing to sit back in an armchair and complain about privacy rights and, you know, data monitoring Surveillance and costs of subscriptions, and it's another thing to actually like wake up one weekend and say, \"I'm gonna, like, I'm gonna take back control of my digital life.\" And so it's not just about the availability of the technology, it's about the community, it's about, do you have people who have your back, who are gonna answer your questions, who you can lean on for support? And it's not just us at Start9, we have an incredible community of people who have just found us, fallen in love, gotten involved, and are there twenty- 24/7 in our chat channel, welcoming people, helping people, and so I invite people to do that because this isn't some niche project. We are trying to overturn some of the largest, most powerful institutions on this planet for the better, for the individual, and, yeah, come, come hang out." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "01:08:34", "start": 4114.82, "text": "Fantastic. Well, I'm, excited to see what you guys are building. I think it's, a really cool thing that you're doing. So, thanks for joining me, Matt. Thanks for having me. Appreciate it. Thanks for listening, and I'll see you in the citadels." } ] }