{ "episodeId": "SLP572", "speakers": { "stephan": { "name": "Stephan Livera", "role": "host", "tag": "STEPHAN" }, "miljan_from_primal": { "name": "Miljan from Primal", "role": "guest", "tag": "MILJAN" } }, "segments": [ { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "00:13", "start": 12.75, "text": "Hi everyone, welcome back to Stephan Livera podcast, a show brought to you by Swann dot com. Today we're gonna be talking about Nostr and Primal, and so joining me today is the founder of Primal, Miljan. Miljan, welcome to the show. Here's Stefan, good to be with you. So lots to talk about today, a lot of noise about Nostr, and so, you know, we're gonna get into that and, I don't think I've done like an episode really about Nostr, so this'll be a good, good one for listeners just to kind of learn a bit more about it. It's something I've been playing around, I've been using it also on, on Primal, so thank you for that. and, yeah, let's start with a bit" }, { "speaker": "miljan_from_primal", "time": "00:56", "start": 55.5, "text": "But I think there's also a lot of signal, hopefully. Oh," }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "00:58", "start": 58.04, "text": "yeah, I didn't mean to imply, yeah, yeah." }, { "speaker": "miljan_from_primal", "time": "01:01", "start": 60.88, "text": "And, hopefully we can contribute to the quality of that signal today. yeah, so about me, how I got into Nostr, I'll give you kind of like a quick, background on me. So I'm a software entrepreneur, I've been doing that for many years, did many startups. Some of them successful. I guess I had most success in, enterprise software and developer tools. I tried to retire in, 2016, didn't work out for me. I fell down the Bitcoin rabbit hole and I fell down pretty hard and decided, okay, I have to, have to do something here, so started another company. we were focusing on onboarding, people onto Bitcoin. the idea was to onboard people onto a self-custodial, Bitcoin wallet using physical gift cards. So, the company name was Rise Wallet. I don't know if you might have heard of it. W-we didn't- Oh, briefly, I might have heard of it. But I didn't know a lot" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "02:03", "start": 122.51, "text": "about it. But go on. Yeah." }, { "speaker": "miljan_from_primal", "time": "02:04", "start": 124.22, "text": "Yeah, the idea was to kind of leverage the very vast, Physical retail distribution network of gift cards, you know, they're everywhere, literally hundreds of thousands of locations. so we built this UX where, a pre-coiner could pick up a card off a rack, like a Bitcoin card with twenty-five dollars worth of Bitcoin on it or fifty or, a hundred, whatever, install our, wallet. It was a self-custodial, on-chain wallet back in the day, scan the code And they would get, their Bitcoin. So we kind of spent, a couple of years trying to onboard noobs onto, self-custodial Bitcoin. So this, you know how you, you win some or you can, you learn some, where well, we learned quite a bit on this one. so I s- I couldn't quite get that startup off the ground, so I ended up selling off the assets of that company and then spent the next couple of y- years researching, decentralized publishing protocols. I was tinkering with different things, I even, tried des- designing my own protocol. I wasn't quite happy with anything that I saw or I wasn't that happy with, with, the protocol that I designed. And then Nostr came along, in, I discovered it in '22. In, in mid '22, was my first encounter with Nostr, and I kind of discarded it. I kind of, took a cursory look, and my first impression was, \"No, this is, this isn't gonna go, this is no chance.\" and then a few more months went by, and then, no Other people started making noise about it, most notably Jeff Dorsey po- posted about it on Twitter, and then a lot of the c- like the current cohort of developers maybe got onboarded at that time, it was like November or December of, twenty twenty-two and, then I took the time to read through the spec, and it hit me like a ton of bricks. It, it looked like this was going to work, and I immediately decided to jump in and do another project, and" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "04:26", "start": 265.95, "text": "that's Primal. Fantastic. And so, yeah, let's, I guess, let's talk a bit about Nostr. I know it's picked up a lot. I think, I can't remember exactly when, but I, I wanna say maybe twenty nineteen or twenty twenty was when Fiat Jeff kind of invented the idea. Nostr, it stands for Notes and Other Stuff Transmitted by Relays, but then it kind of had a sec- a really big second wind, as you mentioned, in twenty twenty-two, twenty twenty-three, and now it seems that, you know, there's a lot more momentum, a lot more people are really, really using it now. and I'll, I'll say this, I think there were a few times where Bitcoiners tried to go off Twitter, and they tried to use some of these other, you know, mastodon and, you know, some of these different things." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "05:10", "start": 310.02, "text": "He's full, he's fully on board with Nostr, of course. so actually, let's hear it from you. Why are you bullish on Nostr? Like, why, why should people care about this thing?" }, { "speaker": "miljan_from_primal", "time": "05:19", "start": 318.91, "text": "Oh, what's the problem this thing is trying to solve? okay, that, that's a good, good thing to cover. I think we need to kind of stop and assess how insane the systems are that we're using today. I think you-- we don't do that often enough, we don't appreciate how insane the current situation is. so, we have one company, a privately held company, that, owns the public town square so that's pretty crazy. and then not only do-- does that mean that, these guys are able to, you know, censor your, your account, censor your content, you know, stuff like that? That's the more obvious stuff. The, the, the less obvious, kind of point is that they can also post from your accounts without any, you know, without anyone noticing that it wasn't you who posted it. And we have heads of state, making announcements on, on Twitter or X. I don't know if you remember back a few months ago when, ETFs, Bitcoin ETFs were about to get approved, there was that, the" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "06:27", "start": 386.82, "text": "SEC incident." }, { "speaker": "miljan_from_primal", "time": "06:28", "start": 388.34, "text": "That's right, yes. So somebody posted from the SEC account, it created some sort of market turmoil, and I think Odel had the best take on it, back in the day, and he, his take was only available on Nostr, of course. This is Nostr only. But basically he said, \"Oh, Elon doesn't like Gary Gensler, so maybe Elon posted that from, from the SEC account.\" Well, probably not, but he could. And that's pretty crazy, right? So, so, I think, you know, once you take, you know, the, the stop and to, to kind of assess this situation, you kind of realize this can't go on. Plus, there's a number of other per-pervers incentives, that these companies that control these types of silos like X, Facebook, and so forth, have, due to their revenue models and so forth, they're incentivized to, you know, spy on people. So the, the- We can, use them as a better product to sell to their real customers who are the advertisers, right? So all of this combined, along with the, the rampant censorship we've seen, in recent years I think has lit up a bit of a fire under, you know, those of us who are freedom minded and, it's, it's really in response to that experience of like, severe censorship over the past few years that we have an auster," }, { "speaker": "miljan_from_primal", "time": "08:00", "start": 480.21, "text": "that, some sort of a response to that, not only as a technology, but as a, an actual network that has sprouted on top of it and as, and an ecosystem of Of, apps and services that now exist on Nostr, so we can get into that. so I think that kind of hopefully, kind of frames the, the problem we're trying to solve. And like you said, there have been multiple attempts at solving this problem before. You mentioned Mastodon and the whole kind of federated approach, I, I think, it's good to assess kind of strengths and weaknesses of that approach too and how that relates to Nostr. so with the federated approach, instead of one dictator, one big dic-dictator, you have a number of smaller dictators. So, anyone running a federated, like a mastodon instance, has full control over everything that happens on that instance, including all of the accounts that were created on that instance. So, nVK was running, I think it was bitcoinhackers.org. and we all were hanging out there, here and there. It never really took off. It had like a couple of waves where we attempted to do something, but it never really took off in a major way. But in any way, he, he had full control over all the accounts that were created on that instance and, and all the content posted there. So, if he decided to, you know, get rid of you, you're gone from the entire kind of Mastodon network. And the federated approach means that, different Mastodon instances can communicate, kind of, and bridge, kind of content between each other to the extent That, administrators of those instances allow it. And I think most mast- most Mastodon instances actually blocked the bitcoinhackers dot org instance because I guess- Right. I remember this. Which is" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "10:05", "start": 604.54, "text": "really funny because like a lot of them were kind of more lefty-minded, so they saw it as like, \"Oh, the, the, all these like really, whatever, right-wing people on bitcoinhackers or whatever.\" So that was kind of the perception, right? And so then again, all these people can't talk to each other, they can't see each other, it's kind of In some ways, maybe it was a little bit better than Twitter, but it wasn't like a ten x better experience, right? And that's the typical thing people talk about in product and VC and early stage, they say it needs to be ten x better, otherwise why are people gonna switch, right? And I think that's where maybe you can make the case that Nostr actually is ten x better because they can't ban you." }, { "speaker": "miljan_from_primal", "time": "10:40", "start": 639.83, "text": "Right. that, that's exactly right. And, just to back up a little bit, in some ways it was a little bit better than Twitter, but in some ways it was, it was markedly worse. Because I, I'm going to argue that there was more censorship on Mastodon because of all the things we just mentioned, where, where you have one big platform with one kind of, one person essentially currently in charge, there's a lot of scrutiny, there's a lot of eyes, you know, and, and, people notice when, when people get, censored, especially like big accounts. On Mastodon, with a bunch of instances, you know, anything goes, and, I think as a result of that, there, there isn't enough scrutiny and more people get censored. So the next, evolution of this whole, kind of problem is, Nostr itself. So maybe, maybe I could spend a couple minutes just going over Nostr at a high level. By the way, I didn't realize you didn't-- this is your first, Nostr episode. I thought you must have had, maybe will by now. Oh, and I, I'd, I'd" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "11:46", "start": 706.13, "text": "spoken about it in passing, but I hadn't like had like a Nostr person on to explain Nostr. So, you know, like it would be good to kind of talk through some of the basics, right? Like, I mean, let me just take a second and explain" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "12:03", "start": 723.08, "text": "Can get a Nostr app like Primal, and there's various others, right? But let's talk, let's talk about Primal as an example, and you have like an nsec that's kind of like your Bitcoin private key, right? You keep that nsec secure, don't tell anybody that, and then you have your npub, and that's your Nostr pub key. And Of course, there's other ways to kind of find people, but nPub is one way to find people, but you can also have your NIP oh five identifier, and that's kind of like, in my case, Stephan at Primal, and you have Miljan at Primal, obviously, and so then you have this nSec, and you can use apps like Alby or others to kind of- Keep that sort of a little, sort of segregated from, you know, just like pa-copy pasting your private key effectively into the browser. And you can, you know, people are thinking of it kind of like a decentralized Twitter, but actually it's more than that, but it's kind of like decentralized social media is maybe the, is arguably the first sort of Use case, but other people are building out other ideas on top of that. So in terms of what does it look like, like if you're a Bitcoiner who's never used Nostr, like just get an app like Primal or one of the others, and, you know, just use it like Twitter for now, and then you sort of learn over time, okay, there's other apps that you can use. That's how I would explain it. how would you kind of elaborate on that?" }, { "speaker": "miljan_from_primal", "time": "13:21", "start": 800.71, "text": "Yeah. so, so the first thing to, I'm good to explain how the Of detail. And the, the good news is that, the protocol is extremely simple. It, there, there are only three concepts in Nostr really. The, the first concept is that every user gets a key pair, like you said, public key, private key. Bitcoiners will be very familiar with that. The second concept is that you use client apps, everyone's familiar with that, to create, messages, to, to create any type of content, then the app signs The content with your key and publishes it to a set of relays, which is the third and final concept in Nostr. so the, the protocol is so simple that it can be described in three words: signed messages relayed. That's Nostr. the rest of it, you know, the, the rest of the details have to do with the message formats and so forth, and, the protocol is, defined in a series of NIPs, Nostr Improvement Possibilities. So there are hundreds of them, but only NIP one is mandatory, all the other NIPs are optional. So that's an interesting, take at, you know, defining a protocol. And you, you can read NIP one literally in Couple of minutes and you'll understand exactly how this works. so at the high level, this is, this is, the, the idea behind the protocol. I'll just say one more thing. I mentioned that you, publish your notes to a set of relays. This is important because, you-- it's through this redundancy that we achieve, a, a, a degree of censorship resistance. So you're not, and by the way, relays are very simple servers. You can think of them that way. all they do is they're able to accept and save, these signed messages from users, and they're able to respond to requests. So, like, if I, go and request from a relay, I can say, \"Stephan has this xPub, this, here's his public key. Do you know anything? Has he posted recently?\" And the relay will re-re-respond, with, your recent events. So that's it. and now since you are no- Not choosing one relay to, publish to. I mean, you can, but typically Nostr users, publish to a collection of relays, let's say a dozen relays. you get this level of redundancy that if you get banned by some relays, your content, stays alive on other relays. and as Nostr clients become more sophisticated, where, you know, many Nostr clients are implementing client-side caching where there's like a local database on, on the, on your device that contains, your notes and perhaps other notes you've downloaded. for example, Primal's Android app already works like that, and I know Will from Damos is implementing that, a similar, kind of functionality on, on Damos iOS and Android. so This kind of adds another layer of, censorship resistance where if you, were to get banned by all the relays you were, posting to, you still have all your content local, you can s- choose another set of relays, rebroadcast, your, content, all your signed messages, and update your kind of your, profile metadata basically stating, to the network, \"Here, here's the set of relays that I'm publishing.\" Publishing too, now this is where you can find me, and everything just works." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "17:13", "start": 1032.98, "text": "Yeah, that's really cool. And so let's get, you were mentioning the, the relays aspect. So, yeah, I was kind of glossing over that in my explanation 'cause I was kind of like, I know in the background actually your apps are dealing with all that, but it's, it's an important point that we should talk about that as well, because the obvious questions that people will have, well, they'll be like, \"Well, hang on, what about spam? Who's gonna People thinking Bitcoin, they might thinking, in their mind, they may be thinking like a full node is kind of like running a relay, and, and who's gonna run the relays if people can just spam it out and I can just go and post like ten gigabyte videos and all this kind of thing, right? If you could just ex-explain a little bit around how the relays are gonna work, how-- and how the relays will either monetize or be supported." }, { "speaker": "miljan_from_primal", "time": "17:59", "start": 1078.61, "text": "Okay, that's a great question, and that's one of the common first questions. That was, that was actually when First objection to Nostr, which is, what are the incentives for running a relay? Why would anyone run a relay? And the kind of, I, it's easy to jump to a conclusion that, no, there won't be enough relays out there for this network to survive and thrive. In reality, what happens is people run relays. So we have currently, according to our, records, about eleven hundred relays that are up and running and responsive and participating in the network. and it's interesting to observe that because in theory this shouldn't be happening, but it's happening in practice. There are all these relays out there that are being run, a lot of them by, by enthusiasts. But, also we should acknowledge that there are, certain types of actors within the Nostr network, within the ecosystem, who, who have it in their interest to run relays. For example, many app developers, decide to also run a relay as, a part of their kind of service. So Primal does that, Damus does that, I think Snort does that, many other, client developers kind of stand up their own relays. Tend to be popular relays. So there's, you know, Primal has an incentive to run a relay because we want to make sure that our users can, post their content somewhere, right? Like that's a part of the system that's under our control. There are also, paid relays, and there are some very interesting kind of, things you can do there because you can, whitelist, certain mpubs who have made a payment and, greatly reduce the amount of spam, for example, on your relay there are, you know, excuse me, many other," }, { "speaker": "miljan_from_primal", "time": "20:03", "start": 1202.79, "text": "scenarios where relay, running a relay, makes sense, and, this is kind of being figured out in, in an open kind of very, excuse me, very, How would I say, organic matter. So the, the network is sprouting, the ecosystem around is, is sprouting organically and without any central planning or control. You just see these relays popping up, the various services on top of Nostr popping up, like file hosting services, indexing services, wallet services and so forth. and, something quite special, I think, is unfolding in front of our eyes. So what we're seeing with Nostr, the network, is we're actually s- bootstrapping a global web of trust Of cryptographic identities. this has been a, a cryptographer's dream for decades that something like this will work, and there have been multiple attempts to get this done over the decades, as you, you know, Stefan. And, as far as I can tell, this is by far the most, successful attempt so far, and we're only at the very beginning of it. I would say that, we're, like, let's say in Bitcoin evolution terms, we're Probably in twenty eleven, right now in Oster. where you know, like, and it's an interesting" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "21:31", "start": 1291.38, "text": "point you make about wallet, web of trust, right? Because the, the kind of OG, OG hacker developer people will know this, but most people don't wanna use PGP or GPG. and so the o- the old school way people do is they generate their keys and they might send them to like some of these university pub-pub-public key service, right? And people would try to, okay, I wanna download Miljan's PGP JPK to verify his messages or some software that he's put out, and that's kind of like the OG, you know, hardcore, you know, people would do that. But realistically, the average user, like grandma, is never in a million years gonna do that. The best you could do is get her on Signal or something like that, and that's kind of in an app form. And so in the same way, it's kind of like Nostr is kind of creating this kind of web of trust idea, and you can create this idea of, you know, I follow Miljan on No or whoever and you're kind of building up a web of trust in a kind of, you know, in this kind of decentralized social media way. So it really is a, a very big shift In terms of what historically used to be and what there is now." }, { "speaker": "miljan_from_primal", "time": "22:41", "start": 1361.09, "text": "What we have with Nostr is a network of sovereign individuals, sovereign in, in terms of their online identity, their social connections, and the content they publish. acting in their, in their own self-interest, connecting with other sovereign individuals and sprouting this, web of trust that's glob- that's open and globally accessible but invisible by anyone. And to give people an idea about some orders of magnitude of the size of this network, we're talking about, probably a couple hundred thousand human accounts, many, many millions of bots, but in terms of human accounts, that's, that's probably a good estimate. And in terms of people who are active, probably, on a daily basis, probably twenty or thirty thousand people are active. so this, these aren't big numbers in absolute terms. W-when you compare this to, you know, X or, you know, Facebook or any of the, you know, Reddit or any of the big networks, even the up-and-the, the, the newcomers like, Blue Sky, for example, are much bigger than, what, Nostr is. However, it's comparing app-apples to oranges. if you're looking for, a net- Work where you truly, hold and own your own identity and social connections and content, there's only Nostr. There is no second best only Nostr is, is, providing, this capability. And, I would, make a suggestion to those, Bitcoiners especially who haven't, tried it yet, or who might, might have tried it a year or so ago when, everything was much more, raw and, borderline unusable, I would say, in terms of UX, to take another look and, to try to participate in this. This is, this is a chance to participate Participated in something very special, I think, at a very early stage." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "24:49", "start": 1488.7, "text": "Back to the show in a moment. CoinKite dot com are my favorite providers of Bitcoin hardware security products. Now, when it comes to securing our Bitcoin, as we say, it's not your keys, not your coins, and you need to learn to use some of these different tools to help create your private keys offline and then keep your private keys offline. And that's where some of these devices, like the Coldcard Mark IV or the new Coldcard Q device, can come in and help you because they can help you Create your private keys offline. You write down your twelve or twenty-four word seed, and that helps you interact with the Bitcoin network in a self-sovereign way. And so you can use these devices easily with software such as Sparrow Wallet or Electrum or Spectre or Nunchuk as a few examples. Now, the really cool part is that you're keeping the private keys offline because you're signing in an offline way. So if you're a beginner, yes, you can just directly plug it to the computer, but you can use these devices device is also in an airgapped mode. So for example, the micro SD card, which is available on the Mark IV, or you can also use micro SD cards on the Coldcard Q, and the Coldcard Q also has an extra way, which is this QR code, so you can scan, and read it back that way, and do your transactions also in that fashion. So there's a range of different features and ways that you can improve your security, but you can just start basic with a single signature hardware wallet, and then later think about, okay, do I" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "26:14", "start": 1574.24, "text": "Do I wanna use seed X or do I want to use multi-signature? So these are all some of the things that are available to you. The Coldcard and CoinKite team are always innovating and putting out new products. They have a range of different products, so for example, the TapSigner is a cheaper device for those people who want a specific, different kind of UX that's also there. They also have the SeedPlate, which is a, a way for you to backup your seed words in a metal product. So there's all kinds of products there. Go to CoinK And use the code LIVERA for a discount over at coinkite dot com. This show also brought to you by Nomad Capitalist. Nomad Capitalist is a service that can help you in terms of going overseas, lowering your taxes, getting a plan B residence or citizenship, or perhaps even a plan A citizenship or residence. Now, as many of you know, I left Australia for a few reasons, taxes, the COVID tyranny, and other aspects of, you know, the wokeism, but with Nomad Capitalist, you can find a way to choose An alternative. You can go where you're treated best, as Andrew says. 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Now, this is a service of, that is, suited for people with a liquid net worth above one million USD" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "28:14", "start": 1694.04, "text": "andcapitalist dot com slash apply, you can find out more about how to, use this service to improve your self-sovereignty and to potentially lower your taxes and gain access to some of the benefits of going overseas and living overseas. And now, back to the show. Yeah, and I'll just comment on that as well, because- I was playing around, you know, I wasn't like super OG or whatever, I'm not saying that, but in my early experimentation with Nostr, it was super slow, right? Or you can't-- And I was like wrangling around with different relays to try to get a faster experience, and it just kind of-- It just wasn't kind of slick. But then when I picked up Primal, when you put me onto Primal, it was like, \"Alright, now it's-- It feels more like a, you know, Twitter-like, X-like experience with a similar level of" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "29:04", "start": 1743.88, "text": "Or you're kind of wrangling manually with the public key, private with your nsec, it just kinda, it was a very clunky experience. but I would say nowadays with Primal, it's very kind of Feature parity and in some ways better, right? Like with Nostr, we haven't really spoken about much on this, but there's a, a native Bitcoin and Lightning integration, right? Like there's just people have their Lightning address in their profile and people just tip each other, and that's the other big cultural difference, right? So maybe we should talk a bit about that, right? In Nostr, there's this cultural difference where if you like a post, you can, you can, you know, you can heart it or like it just like you do on existing platforms, but you" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "29:45", "start": 1784.55, "text": "Buy some sats because you liked his post, that kind of thing. So, do you wanna just explain a bit about, you know, that different experience that you get in Nostr?" }, { "speaker": "miljan_from_primal", "time": "29:54", "start": 1793.5, "text": "Yes, I would love to. That's like a, an, a fascinating part of Nostr. But before I do, I'd like to, kind of take a step back and, just, kind of respond to your previous comment. yes, Pr- Primal maybe, when you tried it, at, at that time, was, more responsive All Nostr clients have improved tremendously in recent months. So if you, let's say, if you tried Damo's a, a year ago and you, if you try it today, it's night and day different. same as, Amethyst and, and, Coracle and so forth. There are probably a couple of dozen, social media clients out there, and they've all improved quite a bit. So I'd just like to make that point, that, you know, people should be open-minded and- And, try using multiple clients. I'm, I'm not really here to shield Primal, I, I'm, I'm here more to, awake those Bitcoiners who are maybe sleeping on Nostr, and, I'd love to kind of point out all kinds of different clients in all kinds of different categories outside of social media, you know, because there might be people out there who are just not too interested in social media, and that's understandable. but, Nostr is so much more than that. We have Long form text like, Substack competitors like, Highlighter, for example, or Ha-Habla News. We have wallets, you know, Primal, supplies one of those wallets, but also Mutiny does a great job. we have, live streaming services like Twitch competitors like Zapstream, there are music services, there's like, audio chats, chats like, Clubhouse competitors, that NostrNest, for example. There's curated- There's like a GitHub competitor, so GitHub, like Nostr Git is implementing, like a decentralized version of, GitHub. We have AI tools, you know, the, the, NVK's Unleashed Chat is a formidable, Grok competitor, I would say. So all of these different apps and projects are, are building on top of the same network on top of the same open social graph and the same, kind of persistence and, and, and, discovery, kind of infrastructure that's essentially being shared across all of these apps, and every new app brings new users not only to that app But also grows the entire network. So you can see how, like, that, that's a stark difference between, let's say, the legacy web, where you just are dealing with a, a bunch of silos. You know, you have X, Instagram, Reddit, et cetera, you know, Venmo, et cetera. Each of those, it has its own social network inside its, its own set of users with, which is siloed and they jealously guard the-" }, { "speaker": "miljan_from_primal", "time": "33:08", "start": 1988.26, "text": "This, this kind of, their, their own user base. Yeah. It's own-- Each" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "33:11", "start": 1990.72, "text": "thing is its own little walled garden, and the idea of Nostr is it's kind of like one N pub or your N sec, right, really controls your destiny across all these different, right? As an example for me, like e-even if I have, let's say, a hundred and sixty thousand followers on X today, Elon could cut me tomorrow, and I'd be gone, right? And I might have twelve thousand on YouTube, or I might have whatever, you know, Like it's one nPub or nSec that you keep, but it's across all these other different apps that other people can follow you. And I guess if you're a content creator, it can appeal to you because you kind of have this idea of, hey, I can't get shut down off this thing, right? Like I can post this, and people who wanna follow me, can just follow me. There's no, you know, and I'm, you know, I'm probably not at serious risk of getting cut off anytime soon. It could happen, I don't know." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "34:05", "start": 2044.94, "text": "but Has, you know, been banned off a lot of platforms. It, I can see the, you know, definitely there's a, there's a pretty strong appeal there." }, { "speaker": "miljan_from_primal", "time": "34:12", "start": 2052.32, "text": "Exactly. And like you said, each of these platforms is a walled garden, and the walls are getting taller. Like as time goes by, you will notice that you're able to access less and less content by, without being logged in on any of these, platforms. And Nostr is such a stark contrast to that, where everything's open to everyone. You know, we talked about the, the kind of The core concepts of Nostr and the key point is that anyone can create a key pair, anyone can run an app, anyone can run a relay, anyone can build an app Anyone can build relay software, and because of the, the, the, the core elegance and simplicity of the protocol, we have massive, developer partic-participation on Nostr. Of the twenty-thousand, twenty to thirty thousand active users on Nostr I'm willing to bet that the majority are actually developers, which is an interesting dynamic to build for that community because, you get really competent feedback, when the developers are involved. Yeah. And I'll point this out" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "35:17", "start": 2117.18, "text": "as well. I think it's also an underrated point, this network effects point, because It's not just that you get access, like, let's say from the content creator's perspective, that you can kind of keep your audience or your a- or audience can still follow you and whatever, it's also that the app developers can kind of plug in easily, right? Like, if you're an app developer, you might be thinking, \"Hey, I can make this app, and boom, it's already instantly accessible to, as you said, about two hundred thousand humans today, right now, and they can't shut me down.\" Right? So it's kind of like even as an- You could be a developer who is worried about getting shut down or a developer who wants to access that network, and the other cool thing is the monetization is already sort of native, right? Like we already use Bitcoin and Lightning. Now, obviously, if you're a listener, you're probably a Bitcoiner, right? And so you like this idea of having a social media network where Lightning is just built in, and I think that's really cool." }, { "speaker": "miljan_from_primal", "time": "36:14", "start": 2174.24, "text": "Right, exactly. And this, has vast kind of implications for both Bitcoin and Nostr, I think. so, you know, if you think of Bitcoin as, oh, as an open protocol for money Nostr is an open protocol for speech. and they are kind, kind of separate in, in the sense that each protocol stands on its own and can live without the other, but they have a symbiotic relationship in the sense that each makes the other one better. So, and I think that's a point that's lost on a lot of Bitcoiners. a lot of Bitcoiners haven't taken, close enough look of Nostr to realize what's actually going on here. so, Nostr makes Bitcoin better in, in multiple ways. I can think of five or six different ways where Nostr, is, is quite useful to Bitcoin. For example, like you just said, Nostr has become a de facto public Lightning directory Nostr public profiles, v-v-vast majority of them have, Lightning address assigned to them, so you can literally look someone up and send them money globally. So right, like out of the gate, we get a better UX than Venmo, and it's not contained within a sin- single app. So within Primal, we have, like you said, we have a built-in wallet, and I'm happy to talk more about that. so you're able to look someone up, I can look Stefan up, and, send him twenty-one sats or twenty-one thousand sats, and so forth. That's, and then someone using Mutiny who is also building on the same open network can do the same. And, so a Primal user can, send money to a Mutiny user. Now, of course, through Lightning, that's, that's, al-always been possible, but what's new is that I don't need a Lightning invoice from the recipient. I can just look them up and send the payment. This is like, a major UX kind of improvement in these kind of cash- Individual payments. You know, think about, let's say, splitting, you know, dinner bill between four or five people. Currently, the bottleneck is the person receiving the money because they need to issue invoices to everyone. so they, they paid, plus they're doing all the work. and, with Nostr, and we are observing this in, in real life now, people who are Nostr are actually doing it this way. Everyone just looks them up, makes the payment, it's over. The, the, the rest Recipient doesn't need to do anything. So number one, Nostr is becoming a de facto public, lightning directory. Maybe more, interesting than that is that Nostr is becoming a discovery mechanism for things like, eCash Mint. So we talked about this, idea of sprouting a web of trust between cryptographic identities, people that you might not know personally, but you do through this network. And, let's say you had, You wanted like, and to, to spin up an eCash wallet, but you're not sure which, you know, f-f, which, federation, FedIM federation to join or which," }, { "speaker": "miljan_from_primal", "time": "39:45", "start": 2385.3, "text": "you know, W-what's the other one? the cashew, you mean the cashew mint? Which cashew mint to join? So, you can rely on your Nostr, web of trust to, To see what your, what, what the people that you are connected to are, are using, and then, connect to that mint. So this is like a massive, improvement in the UX for, eCash, which is very exciting and probably going to be very important, in the long run. A-and this kind of discovery, of mints is, in the short run, probably quite, quite important because commercial entities are- Not likely to offer these types of services, so you, in, in until we, you know, overturn the Bank Secrecy Act, we'll probably have to rely on, these types of tools, to be able to use, and, and kind of continue growing this e-cash ecosystem, both in terms of mints and users. so that's exciting, that's something that, is off-- that's, that's a problem that Nostr is solving for Bitcoin. Beyond that We have, you know, onboarding new Bitcoiners, like you said, you know, th-this is something that, as, as I mentioned, where I had, have quite a bit of experience, trying to onboard people onto, self-custodial, Bitcoin first. what we've noticed is, that There are, there's a kind of, a group of nostridges, a group of nostr users, who have never touched Bitcoin before. They're probably in the minority currently, but there, there are, they, they exist out there, and many of them have been, onboarded onto Bitcoin as a result of, spending some time on Nostr, realizing what's going on, so speaking to some Bitcoiners, and then, getting onboarded. I think that going forward, I wouldn't be surprised that we get to onboard more people onto Bitcoin this way, than maybe in any other method we've used in the past, because it's a much more casual, it's a much more kind of, accessible and kind of widespread usage pa-pattern is to join, social, networks. And this is something that actually Primal, at Primal, we, focus on quite a bit. So we've, decided to, build Primal in such a way that it's, it, it's an equal parts, decentralized social media client and a Bitcoin wallet. So each of these thing-- two things is a full-time job for us. and we're, our goal is to do the best job possible at being, a Bitcoin wallet and as well as the decentralized social media client. Now, to be s-more specific here, Primal offers a custodial, Bitcoin wallet. So we basically review Wallet of Satoshi as our competitor, and, we've, you know, based on my previous experience, like for these types of casual users who are casually, trying something new out, what I found is that even if you nail the UX perfectly in terms of walking the user through backing up their key and so on And so forth. We were able to actually do that in my previous startup, but what we found over time that-- is that most of them actually lost their keys. And, I realized that I allowed my ideology to cloud my judgment a little bit and made me, design an inferior product in that sense, where, we were coming on too heavy, too early when people, n-not enough money was on the, at stake for them to care enough, to do this properly, right? So we're taking a different approach Approach with, Primal, it's a custodial wallet that just works out of the box. there is some light KYC involved. We, we need to do that to be able to offer this legally and not be shut down. So, we, we don't make people upload documents or anything like that, but we do ask for your name, email address, date of birth and country. Those are the things that, you have to provide for us to provide this service. But then the wallet just works, and you're able to even, get some SATs through an in-app purchase, both on iOS and Android, you know, you're subject to Apple and Google tax, but again, for these kind of casual users who just want a, want a few SATs to try the zapping experience, to try participating in, in this, it's very frictionless. So, the idea there is that We can onboard people easily, get them to start using s-some Bitcoin, using some SATs, you know, s-s-zapping other users, getting zapped, try and get a feel from this, kind of maybe follow what's happening with price and, you know, all other things that that might kind of, get people more interested, and then at a later point where people understand more and care more, we'll offer a path to, move to a- self-custodial solution. In fact, we currently, cap the, the, the, maximum kind of wallet balance is one million satoshis, so we don't want people holding like, non-trivial money in, in this wallet. but for these, for, for the zapping experience, for paying some content creators and even casual payments like paying for lunch or dinner and so forth, you can use Primal Wallet, quite well, and we have these scenarios where, you know You know, people, create new accounts, they maybe post something attractive, they get a lot of zaps, and they go and buy a meal with all within the same app, and it completely blows their mind. Like, this is impossible anywhere else. This is an example where, we are leapfrogging the legacy, You know, competitors like X and so forth, they've been talking about having payments within the app for years, but, Nostr is now a little bit ahead in that, particular segment." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "46:09", "start": 2768.99, "text": "Back to the show in a moment. 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Yeah. and the other element, you, you touched on this, this idea of coordination, it can be a coordination layer, and I know at a Bitcoin level there are Bitcoin developers talking about that too, like maybe I've heard one idea is called Joinstra, and so the idea would be like a coin join coordinated over Nostr. That's like another example. and so there are different ideas that Could be used. Another one, you mentioned eCash as well. I know, I wouldn't be able to perfectly explain this, but my basic understanding is the eCash guys are excited about this because as an example, let's say Miljan, I know your xPub, I can encrypt some eCash to your public key on Nostr that I know you already have. So it's kind of like you can- Send this in a way that only you can unlock it, and so that's kind of another special idea that some of the eCash guys are playing around with, like Carl and those guys. and so this kind of coordination layer and the contact list aspect of it is really cool. the other question, and I know I asked you this offline, but just for the sake of listeners, In the case of, you know, let's say we're out for lunch or dinner and, and you paid for lunch and I need to pay you back for my share, what if I search, you know, Miljan and I find, you know, spam versions of Miljan? How do you, you know, deal with that?" }, { "speaker": "miljan_from_primal", "time": "49:45", "start": 2985.37, "text": "Right. So th-there's something that's an inherent problem on, completely open network. We mentioned anyone can create a key pair. anyone can do any of these things on the network, including bots, so you can have millions of AMPubs and you can mimic somebody's profile metadata quite easily. so how do we know who the real, person is that you're, you're looking for? so where-- this is where these kind of web of trust algorithms come into play. and it's, they're actually quite simple to implement and, and to give you an idea When we implemented our own web of trust algorithm, we, we relied on a white paper that was published many years ago, and they were referencing, products like Alta Vista within them. just to kind of give, listeners, an idea of how th- these types of problems have been around and have been solved, for, for a long time. So the essential idea is that you need to kind of start with a kind of a seed group of users that you know are human and you can do so, you can, you can rely on, NIP five verification for that. So you can say, okay, let's say, we at Primal, we don't offer, kind of verified username at Primal, as a service yet, as a paid service or anything like that, but we've, given this out to people we know. So there may be five, six hundred people who have, verified names at Primal We know they're human because we talk to them. So, so that's a good seed. And then there are other services out there who, you can kind of on Nostr, anyone can, again, spin up, their NIP five verification service, and they all have different reputations, and they're all signaling to the network what they think about this particular endpoint. Right? So, you know, that's, again, one of the core questions that noobs, ask, okay, how do I get verified, and who is in charge of that? well, the, the idea, the, the, the answer is whoever wants to be, whoever wants to provide verifications, and then these verification services have their, reputation on, on the network. So going back to your question, you start with, a group of users that you know are human, you go through their connections, you go through the list of n pubs that they follow, and then, there are ways to, kind of filter Filter out, real users who are trying to bring some bots into the equation. You know, if, if I'm, a real user, but I'm following a million bots, my rank is gonna drop dramatically, and all those bots will kind of get filtered out. So like I said, these are relatively simple al-algorithms, and, many, Nostr clients, use them and are able to, filter out, the noise and spam and all of this is working today, and it's, no one is in control, but somehow it works. Pro- reminds us of Bitcoin in some ways." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "53:05", "start": 3184.86, "text": "Yeah, that's fantastic. I wanted to, yeah, obviously I, I knew the answer, but I wanted for the sake of the listeners, right? and also, I think it, it's interesting that you can self-host. Like if you want to, you can run your own relay, you can do your own NIP-05, and you can, as an example, if you're a BTC Pay user, you can use like the Lightning address from that as an example, if you want to, right? You can self-host and do some of these things yourself, but there are services that can help you as well, and, you know, they help you for a fee maybe. And so that's kind of an important point to understand that You know, you're not reliant on a particular service, you can do it yourself, and maybe some of these, package things will also, you know, like, like Umbral and Raspiblitz and these kind of Startnine and, you know, these different package things will do some of that too, right? Maybe they can help you run your relay or they can help you do your lightning address and things like that. So I think it's important to understand that there's a, there's a spectrum here of how self-sovereign do you need your Nostr to be versus how Just, you know, just use the Primal app, just use Damos app, etcetera." }, { "speaker": "miljan_from_primal", "time": "54:15", "start": 3255.06, "text": "Yes, that's exactly correct. So, so if you look at the kind of the, the, all of the different types of things you need, let's say to be a full-fledged Nostr user, of course you need your key pair. You need, you, it's, it's a good idea to have, verified account somewhere, you can do it yourself if you control a domain and can spin up a server that can kind of, provide a response when user is re-requested to say yes, this user actually exists on the server. So you can do that, you can be very self-verified. You, for your lightning address, of course, you can run your node and, and, get that going. And, other, then for posting textual content, you can run your relay. And for posting, of course, references to multimedia content like images, videos, sound, and so forth, you can You can also spin up, a file server to host all those things. So you can literally do everything by yourself if you want to. That's one, extreme. The other extreme is you can rely on one or more services to do these things for you. What's interesting is that in all of these cases, you're still holding your own key. So you can say, okay, I'll, I'll use Primal for my Lightning address, for my NIP5 verification, and for my media, for my media storage, and then, and I'll post to Primal Relay and a bunch of other relays, and then you can decide to change your mind and just update your, profile metadata to point to different things. You can literally- Change your, verification to be, you know, to use another verification service. It's literally a profile update away from you, i-in case you Don't like Primal anymore for whatever reason. The, as long as you're holding your key, you have full control over all of these, types of things on your Nostr profile." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "56:21", "start": 3381.01, "text": "One other big topic area that I think listeners would be interested to hear your views on is the whole DID question, right? Now, people saw recently, Michael Saylor announced MicroStrategy Orange. There was some criticism as well. There were people, like, Daniel Buchner from, you know, where he was talking about DID Ion, which is like the thing that he worked on when he was at Microsoft. And I know that, maybe in years gone by, there were kind of debates between some of the, let's say, DID people and Nostr people, and maybe Nostr is like too simple and doesn't have all these other things around, you know, these other little bells and whistles. But then the debate also is that Nostr is really simple, and that's why there's a lot of adoption. So I'm curious if you have any just thoughts to share on this kind of DID concept as opposed to, you know, as contrasted with Nostr. Yeah," }, { "speaker": "miljan_from_primal", "time": "57:09", "start": 3429.22, "text": "so the DID or, or spec is, quite elaborate and it's been worked on by many, companies over a number of years, is my understanding. Standing as, and I think Microsoft was, one of the leading, companies working on that spec. And, when I mentioned that I did a bit of research and tried designing my own protocol for decentralized publishing before I discovered Nostr, I was, definitely, planning to rely on the DID spec for that part of the, the protocol. So I, I don't want to throw them under the bus or anything like that, you know, like I, I only have love for every- Anyone who's building freedom tech, and I think those guys had, you know, the, the right intentions. But, when you look at, what actually happened, what, like, in terms of deployed systems, relying, that, that rely on these technologies I think there is no comparison, like Nostr is working today with a couple hundred thousand identities, a couple hundred thousand humans, using their, you know, Nostr key pair as their cryptographic identity. I'm not aware of major or any kind of, applications that are deployed out there, there, using the DID system in a way where users are actually holding their keys. There are some systems that are deployed where, this is being done for, for their users kind of behind the scenes. So, so the, all the keys are being still held on the server somewhere. I think Blue Sky is a good example of that, you know, like they, they, the tech they're developing, you know, al- allows for some sort of federated approach later on. It, it allows for multiple servers to be run. It, it allows for users to eventually hold their keys. But what's actually happening is they all, they're full in control of all of that user data now. So if you have a few million users on Bluesky, they might as well be on X. I, I don't honestly, like practically speaking today, I don't see like a, a, a, a good, a, a real comparison with Nostr there. And now in the future this might change, so let's talk about it in the future. But I think, I, I'll repeat it, you know, If you're looking for a real network, of, a web of trust that's based on cryptographic identities where there are hundreds of thousands of humans who are actually interacting using this network, there is no second best in Nostr." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "59:53", "start": 3593.43, "text": "Yeah." }, { "speaker": "miljan_from_primal", "time": "59:54", "start": 3594.41, "text": "And so I'll just like, one last point there. it's Nostr's simplicity that's the main strength here, and because Nostr is only Signed messages relayed, anything can be built on top of that. So all of these, quote unquote deficiencies that, highbrow cryptographers are seeing and technologists are seeing with Nostr, and by the way, that similar type of feedback the Bitcoin was receiving in its early days, these problems are being solved. The, the, like, these capabilities are being built, and, I think, I, I think on a pretty solid foundation." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "01:00:36", "start": 3636.07, "text": "Yeah, I think that's a totally fair answer. I think it's, it does come down to the simplicity, as you said, that it's, it's just a very easy thing for developers to build. And maybe that's also another point, because If it's a very complicated spec, developers might be a bit like, \"Uh, do I really wanna read and kinda understand all these aspects of it?\" Whereas Nostr is relatively simple, and so it's kinda easier for people to just build something there. So maybe that's also an important point. I, I guess the other big one is just kinda as things go on over time Will there just be a lot of data that Nostr relays have to hold and obviously relay? So do you have any thoughts on how you make that practical? Is it just a matter of charging more for more data? Is that, is that the answer, or is there some other, or is it like companies subsidize Nostr relays? Like, do you have any thoughts on that?" }, { "speaker": "miljan_from_primal", "time": "01:01:29", "start": 3689.72, "text": "yes. so a couple of different techniques can be used to scale the network, to scale to millions of users, and w-what we need- Need here obviously is global scale, right? And I'm, I'm, I have a feeling this will happen in kind of increments where we get an influx of new users, we're probably overwhelmed, and then the infrastructure needs to kind of organically upgrade here and there for, for these, for these new users to be able to, you know, access the network in a, in a highly performant manner. I'm sure that it's going to be a little bit ca-chaotic like that, and that's fine, this is how kind of the central- Truly decentralized systems work. but in terms of the techniques that can be used to, help scale the network, in Nostr we have something called the, the gossip protocol or the outbox protocol, where the idea is to spread out, to not use the top ten relays for everyone, because that clearly won't scale. that's, that's a scaling problem as well as, censorship kind of resistance type of problem if you only have, like a handful of relays that do everything. So there's work underway and like ma-much of it has already been deployed, and Primal is participating in this, where, users are kind of by default being spread out to, o- you know, a number of different relays. I mentioned eleven hundred kind of active relays, so we're making sure that, like, we're spreading users out. So that's-- and then there are ways to kind of make sure that you can find content from all these users, when, when you post or- Reply and so forth. Excuse me. the other category is, indexing and caching, and this is something that we've done quite a bit of work, on at Primal. So, you know, one of the, big questions or maybe critiques of Nostr is, the quote discovery problem. you know, the, the question is Who is going to run indexers to index all of this? And the answer, as always, is whoever wants to. And, when it comes to indexing, there are a number of different actors who, who have it in their interest to index the whole network. so Primal is doing this. We've built, an indexer wh- that connects to all public accessible relays and collects all the events. and, we've open sourced that indexer so others can run it. And- And others are already, you know, running instances of the, of this indexer, and there are other indexers too, like Nostr.build and so forth. you know, our incentive is we want to provide great search to our, to Primal users. the incentives of Nostr dot band, are they don't have a client, but they're selling these kind of indexing services to, they're licensing them to other clients. And again, notice there's no, there's no, central coordination, there's no, you know, like planning, central planning, anything like that. It's like just independent actors identifying needs, user needs on this network and standing up services to serve those needs, to- So to bring it back to your question about scaling, so once you have this kind of high level view of the network, you can provide caching services. So, a way to cache, most frequently accessed content in, in a way that's highly available in RAM, so you can get those, those response times that rival these, the centralized legacy competitors. But since the entire network Network is open, and since anyone can run these indexers, that becomes quite interesting because not only do you get performance out of this, but you also, get increased censorship resistance because you get just another copy of data. with every new indexer, the data gets more replicated, and it's this data replication that provides, more censorship resistance, to Nostr users." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "01:05:43", "start": 3943.87, "text": "On Nostr DMS, now I know this is something where people have kind of criticized this historically, and I- And I understand there's work being done, and I believe there was a guy talking about this idea of trying to make it more secure by having some kind of ratcheting, an encryption mechanism. so I'm curious if you can comment a little bit on that, and just, yeah, on how the Nostr DMs system could kind of improve." }, { "speaker": "miljan_from_primal", "time": "01:06:09", "start": 3969.37, "text": "Right. Okay. So to, to back up a little bit, and just look at the big picture, when it comes to freedom tech, you have two types of data. You have, the type of data that should be kept private and should be impossible to surveil And you have, the type of data that's, that should be kept public and should be impossible to bring down. Nostr, as a protocol, excels in the latter. Nostr, Nostr is designed really for, keep, making sure that the important data that should be in the public domain remains in the public domain, that it cannot be taken down easily. and, We do have private data and encrypted data in Nostr, and you mentioned DMs, you know, Nostr DMs are encrypted. But the issue, with the first implementation of Nostr DMs is that they're leaking kind of graph data. So if you DM me, the content of the message will be encrypted, people won't know what's in it, but everyone will see that Stefan DM Miljan at this time. So, so that's not good. so And again, this is one of the kind of typical critiques of Nostr, oh, it can't do proper DM encryption and so forth. but just like everything else in Nostr, people are working on it and there are, very credible proposals, and I'm actually surprised that there, there's, there's some new developments there in the last couple of weeks. It looks like we're going to have full end-to-end encryption in Nostr DMs, which, which kind of will make- Make Nostr quite competent in both of these types of data for, Freedom Tech, so I'm quite excited about it." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "01:07:54", "start": 4074.58, "text": "Yeah, excellent. I guess the other aspect that I wanna highlight Is that there's a very, for listeners who maybe, if you're not as, let's say, plugged into the ecosystem, I just want to highlight that there are a ton of developers who are really into this thing, right? So for listeners, if you were at- Bitcoin Madeira, Bitcoin Atlantis in Madeira, there was a whole segment of people of, like, developers and, you know, Pablo and Gigi are, are really, you know, kind of really leading the charge there. And there's a whole bunch of all these hackathon ideas, and I, I obviously I was sitting next to you and saw that, but just for the sake of listeners, there was a bunch of really cool ideas being put up there, things like Nostrum, but doing like meetup dot com but on Nostrum, effectively, and other, you know, all and so if you could just highlight a few of those, of any ideas or just speak a little bit to that ecosystem." }, { "speaker": "miljan_from_primal", "time": "01:08:49", "start": 4129.86, "text": "Yes, this is something that you can't help but be extremely bullish about. the, the, level of developer engagement and, the, the quality of the projects that are coming forward, both in terms of user-facing projects like the one you mentioned and many others, as well as protocol improve- protocol level, type of development and and And, kind of some side protocols. So for example, one of the, most exciting ones for me is the Blossom protocol, which is, which enables, Censorship resistant, data storage for media files and general kind of, binary files. This is, which, again, this isn't Nostr's strength. This, this isn't something that Nostr was built for. Nostr was built for, persisting textual data. and, when it comes to, linking to media files or already binary files, you really, you just link to a server that's controlled by somebody. Of, of course, that's not ideal. so one of the big questions from the beginning was, well, how do we, how do we deal with that? How do we make that more, robust and, resistant to, you know, censorship? And, this cohort that Pablo and Gigi, were leading, on in Madeira the sovereign engineering cohort one was extremely prolific, and we were both lucky, you and I, to, witness the, the presentations, they, they gave there at the end of the, the, the two month period they were, hanging out there developing stuff. And by the way, they made a point, Gigi and Pablo made a point of, making sure all these developers are kind of hanging out in the same place, cross pollinating ideas, and once a week on Friday nights they would- We would do a barbecue and they would, everyone would have to present what they did. So there was like a beautiful kind of iterative, collaborative, kind of s-system that they set up here that obviously, is producing great results. So Blossom was one of these, projects, and essentially it's extremely simple. It, it's relying on the fact that we now have Nostr. And that we have, this decentralized kind of open, web of trust that we can use for things. And we already mentioned things like discovery of mints and so forth. Well, an, an Oyster user can, publish an, an Oyster event stating what their, what their set of blossom file servers is. so for example, the, the, let's say They're hosting in Primal, and, to the extent that Primal is a Blossom server, and we're implementing this as we speak, so this is going to be available in the coming months. Blossom basically relies on two things. content is hash addressable. So every, you know, let's say image or video that you upload is, we do a SHA two fifty six hash of it, and that represents the, basically the address of that file, on our server. and as you probably know, every binary file produces a unique, hash, and, and even if you change one bit, the hash is completely different, so that hash uniquely identifies that file, and clients can verify that you- Yes, this is the file that I requested. It's not like the server, you know, playing games with me. and then let's say, that user gets banned on Primal they can publish an nostr event saying, actually all my files are on this other server and everything continues to work. Nobody will even know that, they-- that there was an attempt to censor that user." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "01:12:55", "start": 4375.12, "text": "Interesting. So it's kind of like you can repoint the files or repoint it somewhere else, effectively. it's a very" }, { "speaker": "miljan_from_primal", "time": "01:13:01", "start": 4381.26, "text": "simple idea and it's an example of a real world problem that can be fixed in a per- Pragmatic matter because we now have Nostr." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "01:13:09", "start": 4389.59, "text": "Yeah. So looking out into the future in terms of Nostr adoption, I, I, I mean, the way I'm-- Now, I, I use Nostr, I, I like it, I've been playing around with it, as you probably know. What do you see as being the real adoption moments? Do you think it's gonna be censorship on X or Facebook or Google or YouTube or something like that that then pushes more people to Nostr? Or is it certain use cases? Do you have any thoughts on where it's going?" }, { "speaker": "miljan_from_primal", "time": "01:13:38", "start": 4418.6, "text": "I think it's going to be kind of lumpy. There, there, we're gonna have different waves of adoption with different groups of users joining Nostr maybe for different reasons. that could be a cool new micro app just got invented and they decided to build it on Nostr because they wouldn't need to bootstrap a, a network from, you know, from zero. So it could be stuff like that. I'm hoping that we'll see a lot of that because that's kind of, as Jack Dorsey likes to say To say that people running towards something that's good, running towards, good apps, good features, stuff they don't have, elsewhere, as opposed to running away from, from stuff that's, bad, like, censorship, which, of, which I'm convinced we're gonna have a lot more of, so we'll get those cohorts of users as well. But I think the real- Killer app of, of Nostr, is openness in, in the long run. So it's not any, individual micro app or, or like a super app or anything like that, it's the entirety of the ecosystem that will, be more valuable than the sum of its parts. I think like all-- in the long run, when kind of this, when we have, even just a few highly polished clients that do different things, built on the same network, I think it will really click for users. They will, realize that something different is going on, Nostr" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "01:15:09", "start": 4509.45, "text": "Fantastic. Well, look, let's, finish up here. Miljan, tell people where they can find you guys, follow you, and of course, where can, where can people try out Primal?" }, { "speaker": "miljan_from_primal", "time": "01:15:19", "start": 4519.34, "text": "So you can download Primal from iOS or Android app stores, just search for Primal. Our web app is available at primal dot net. but I would also like to show other, Nostr apps. So definitely try highlighter dot com for long form content, for other social media clients, for- For, for iOS, Damus is a great, option. Nostr client is great. On i- on Android, you have Amethyst. on the web, you have, Nostrudle, Satellite, Coracle, and I'm, like, I'm I'm probably leaving a bunch of them out, but these, these are just the ones that are kind of top of my head. check out the Nostr ecosystem, i-it's a lot of fun. like I said before, this is a, a really nice opportunity to be a part of something special from a very early stage. So come check out the vibes are good and, yeah, come hang out and build a future with us." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "01:16:19", "start": 4579.74, "text": "Fantastic. Well, yeah, listeners, links will be in the show notes. Follow Miljan, follow me, follow us on Nostrum. And, Miljan, thank you for joining me today. My pleasure," }, { "speaker": "miljan_from_primal", "time": "01:16:27", "start": 4587.71, "text": "Stefan." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "01:16:28", "start": 4588.71, "text": "I hope you enjoyed the chat. Make sure to share this episode and press like and give us a thumbs up if you enjoyed this episode. Thanks, and I'll see you in the citadels." } ] }