{ "episodeId": "SLP623", "speakers": { "stephan": { "name": "Stephan Livera", "role": "host", "tag": "STEPHAN" }, "miljan": { "name": "Miljan", "role": "guest", "tag": "MILJAN" } }, "segments": [ { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "00:11", "start": 11.2, "text": "Hi everyone, welcome back to Stephan Livera podcast brought to you by Bold. You can find it over at getbold.io, that's for the American listeners who wanna stack Sats with Bold. Rejoining me today is Miljan from Primal. Miljan, welcome back to the show. Here's the fun, good to be back. So, I know there's lots of things to share on, Primal 2.0 and what's happening the latest in the world of Nostr. so, yeah, maybe you just wanna give us a bit of an overview, what's changed since our most recent, on, on the podcast chat about Nostr, just kind of generally, what's, what's the biggest, you know, update since?" }, { "speaker": "miljan", "time": "00:50", "start": 50.12, "text": "Yeah, I think we talked maybe a year ago or so, maybe a little bit less, like yeah, a little under, maybe" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "00:56", "start": 55.62, "text": "it would have been just after Atlantis, I think. So maybe seven, eight months ago, something like that, yeah." }, { "speaker": "miljan", "time": "01:01", "start": 60.56, "text": "Okay, yeah, that sounds about right. So eight months is a long time in Nostr, in a protocol that's, so young like this, you know, every year, like you see massive changes, right? So think about Bitcoin, let's say in 2011, 2012 type of Two years ago, Nostr was almost unusable. three years ago, you had to build your own client to kind of participate in Nostr. That's like the first cohort of users there were actually developers who were just, building the stuff out. But then, like you, you look at the rest of the trajectory, and then, you know, the back when we talked last, there were already a number of Nostr products, Nostr clients, services, and so forth, which by the way are being just stood up organically There is no central planning or coordination. This is an open protocol and people just build what they think is useful, and then users, kind of decide. The, the user is the judge, you know, in, in just like it should be in a free market. So, when we spoke, last time, eight months ago, we already had a number of, products on Nostr that were starting to be, quite usable, like it was starting to be user friendly even for those who aren't like super savvy or super motivated to kind of participate in this network early on. and you could kind of, if you squint, if you squinted back then, you could see Where things are going and how, you know, the Nostr products are going to continue to, improve rapidly and evolve and at some point reach and, in some ways exceed the capabilities of the legacy kind of, web apps. so I think now we're at the end of, twenty twenty-four, we're starting to see that. And" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "03:00", "start": 180.27, "text": "in, talk a little bit about, you know, what are, what would you say are the big thematic changes? Like, are there changes to the experience? Is it a change in the application types? is it, you know, the way we interact is updating?" }, { "speaker": "miljan", "time": "03:16", "start": 196.42, "text": "Right. So some of the early specs that looked very promising, let's say a year, a year and a half ago, I'll take, I'll use one example. I'll use the, DVM spec that was created by Pablo, the data vending machine spec. those of us who are kind of deep into this technology were super excited about this spec like a year ago. and to kind of bring listeners up to speed, the data vending machine spec is quite powerful. Essentially, it, allows you to use Nostr public relay infrastructure to request some jobs to be done and then kind of get, get a marketplace of, agents or, or bots to ac- accomplish the Those jobs. And it's quite versatile, it's, it's very generic, you can do all kinds of things, including creating custom feeds. So there's a subset of that spec that, allowed anyone to create a custom feed Of Nostr events, Nostr content of Nostr, on, on Nostr, and publish that feed. There's a special event where you say, \"Hey, here, I've created a, a, a custom feed and I've published it. This is how you can access it.\" And any client can then use that feed, it's like a collection of Nostr event IDs, to display this custom feed. So this kind of was created a year ago and a few devs were tinkering with it, and then it organically grew into something much bigger to the point where we now have, a public feed marketplace on Oyster. So if you kind of back up and if you look at the big picture of social media, You, the users don't get much choice. you basically on Twitter, you have, the, your follows and the for you feed. And the most, most other social media clients have, just the feed, the standard feed, right? You don't have much agency there. Maybe you've" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "05:20", "start": 319.6, "text": "got the list feature and you gotta manually pick and put things in lists and things." }, { "speaker": "miljan", "time": "05:24", "start": 323.73, "text": "Yes, you, you don't have much agency, as a user, on these kind of, closed, platforms out there. Nostr is open So anyone could create a feed, and any client application can decide wh-which feeds, to display. so this took a little bit of time to, mature, but then, you know, back a few months ago, we at Primal realized that this is already a thing. There is already like a number of feeds that were being, published by Like developers out there. And then there were already a few clients like Coracle, Amethyst, Nostrudle that tapped into this feed marketplace and they were displaying, the, this, these publicly kind of published feeds So at Primal, we looked at this and we're like, \"Oh yeah, this is exactly what we want to support. This is, we want to be a part of this.\" So we leaned into this in a big way. So in Primal two point oh, we've done three things to support, this feed marketplace idea. Number one, we re-architected the user interface of our entire app, or more precisely, the three apps that we have, iOS and Android and Web, in a way that enables displaying kind of man- managing an unlimited number of feeds. So when you're in the home screen, you can swipe left and right through any number of feeds, or you can pick, like in, in a, in a feed selector UI, and then, you can- You can, browse the feed marketplace. You can just press the button that says Add Custom Feed. We display the feed marketplace right there in the UI of the application, and then you can preview any of those feeds, and if you like it, you can add it to your list of available feeds. And then you can reorder your feeds, and you can set any feed to be the, your default feed when you open the app, that's the first thing you see. So this kind of, illustrates, the power of such an open network where, you know, we, we at Primal aren't going to be the ones to, decide for everyone what their, feed should look like. The user gets that, to, to decide, they have that agency and they can very easily, customize their, look and feel there. So backing up, we, we, rearchitected the UI of the app Application to enable infinite feeds, we incorporated the feed marketplace into the, the, this UI. And then at Primal, we build client applications, but we also, build and run services for Nostr. So we build a bunch of custom feeds, and previously those feeds were only available within the Primal, applications, but we decided that every feed that we create, will publish to the feed marketplace and Make it available to anyone on Oster and any other client application that supports this spec. So this is just one example Of how open networks win, or I would say in this, instance we're on the trajectory of winning. all of this, like we started off with a spec That was picked up by a few developers and few clients. Now there is a lot more support for this, approach, on Nostr. Many more users now and th-th-through Primal two point o are able to participate in this feed marketplace, which incentivizes more developers to build more interesting feeds and grow this marketplace, and by the way, these feeds could be free or paid for. and you can kind of see, you no longer need to- Squint to see how, this, how we'll end up with, the most powerful set of apps and the most interesting content on Nostr, which is, I think, the, the reason, ultimately why, why Nostr is going to win." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "09:35", "start": 574.85, "text": "Interesting. And this reminds me of, and I'm sure you saw this, there was a clip floating around from the HRF, Oslo Freedom Forum, I believe it was Lynn Alden interviewing Jack Dorsey, and he was making this comment that, okay, yeah, freedom of speech is one Actually, it's more about being able to choose your feed in that sense. So I guess this is kind of very much in that same vein of thought that, when you have different options of what your feed looks like, then maybe that op-opens up different options. I, I guess imagine, you know, historically when, you know, there were only a few TV channels and the state controlled them or had access to them, then there's sort of a certain level of control over what gets produced and what most people see. What media are they consuming in terms of television? Or radio in those days, when those were the only kind of mainstream forms. Whereas nowadays, we're sort of-- it's this anarchic environment where people can choose their own feed, so-- and I'm sure some people will maybe do manual curation, like it's, it's actually a human making it, and in other cases, maybe it's more like an automated feed that's picking up, okay, I'm gonna pick up these kinds of events, these kinds of topics that are interesting for the people who are subscribed to this feed." }, { "speaker": "miljan", "time": "10:47", "start": 647.25, "text": "Yes, absolutely. And, that's the, thanks for reminding me of that, because that's, that illustrates this kind of rapid development of the Nostr network quite well. When was Oslo, beginning of June this year, something like that? I" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "11:01", "start": 661.04, "text": "can't remember, yeah, around May or June, something" }, { "speaker": "miljan", "time": "11:03", "start": 662.94, "text": "like that. Late May, early June. And, Jack and Lynn were talking on stage there, and Jack was aware of the technology that, he was aware this was possible. but we didn't have all of these things kind of put together in a way that's easy to use. And now we're at the beginning of December, not that much later, and you have, multiple clients that have built this into their user interfaces in different ways. Every client developer gets to decide how to present this to their users. And you have, many more feeds published in this fe- feed marketplace. But this feels like it's actually now it's the beginning. Now this is This is obviously real to, to anyone who is paying attention, and I think that our next conversation in, in eight months from now, might be, quite a bit more interesting, even, than it is right now." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "11:59", "start": 719.24, "text": "Yeah. But let's try to put this into a practical context. So as an example, Do you see this being a way that different kinds of communities can come to Nostr, because they can sort of, people can set up their base of who they, you know, 'cause obviously, as you know, in the early days, it was kind of Bitcoiners and, you know, but over time, there are other groups of people who come, for various reasons. It could be that, they want, they like the free speech aspect of it. I've heard, Actually, from speaking to, Teriko, I remember at one point she was telling me that, there was, there were a bunch of Japanese Nostr users who didn't even care about the Bitcoin part of it, they just liked Nostr. So it's sort of interesting to see that there's different communities coming up. So can you, I guess, put that into context, what could that mean in terms of users of Nostr?" }, { "speaker": "miljan", "time": "12:49", "start": 768.56, "text": "Right. So, so there, we already have these s-several different communities without much overlap actually on Nostr, which is quite interesting, as, It's interesting to observe this entire phenomenon. I don't think we've ever had anything like this. Maybe the early days of the internet, are kind of a good parallel, where things are just evolving organically and people, do whatever they want to do on this network. they stand up services, they build applications, and they, participate as users in the network as they see fit. so this doesn't mean that it's a free for all everywhere. You know, we, at Primal, we run our own relays and our own caching service and our own clients, and we get to set the rules, of, of what happens in Primal, but every other participant of this open network can do the same thing. So, what does this mean? Like, what are other kind of examples or, or if we play this out, what, what does this idea of an open feed marketplace look like in practice, you know, a year or more from now? I think if we look at what's already there, the types of feeds that have been created, you kind of get, get a glimpse of it, you know, so, in addition to the usual kind of trending feeds and these types of things that are, to be expected, to, to be seen. you see things, you see feeds that are related to or specializing only in Bitcoin mining, for example. So there's a Bitcoin mining feed out there. So it's a much more specialized feed, catering to, specific community with a high quality of signal. You have Fluffy Friends feed with a bunch of, you know, cats, dogs, other animals, and it's like a fun feed to, to browse. At Primal, we, are kind of deploying some, AI models and kind of we're trying to analyze the content of the network and we're, we're going to release feeds as they are ready out, out of band with our kind of regular release schedule. Whenever a new feed is ready, we'll just release it. So one that I would-- that, that we're working on that I'd like to release, soon It's just a bloom scrolling feed, as, in contrast to doom scrolling that you get on Twitter, where, where, you know, like typically, at least the feedback that we get from a lot, a lot of Twitter users, that it gets quite dark there on t- at times, and they get subjected to some things that, don't make them feel good at the end of the, their browsing session, and I think it goes to the incentives of Twitter and these like- legacy social media companies which make more money the more \"quote unquote\" engaged you are, the more, probably, the more enraged you are, you're likely to, respond to something and kind of get, get entangled in some sort of a fight online. In contrast to that, the Nostr, we, at Primal, we decided to monetize in a completely different way, and we can talk about that maybe later. We launched Primal Premium, where the user is our customer we, don't make more money the, the, the more the user is engaged and the more time they waste on Nostr, we, make money when they see value in the products that we, develop and that, you know, which incentivizes us to create high quality signal and something that they are, that the users are willing to pay for. So this bloom scrolling idea would be, you know, good vibes on Nostr, like if, if you wanna see, s-s like s-some, be subjected to some positive, news and developments on Nostr, of which there are many, there would be a feed dedicated to that, So many other examples, things that we're working on." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "17:02", "start": 1021.91, "text": "So yeah, let's talk a little bit. So you mentioned Primal two point oh, I presume obviously as part of that, but can you just explain, you know, other than the feeds aspect, what else is kind of the, you know, what else are the big key things that people should know about Primal two point oh?" }, { "speaker": "miljan", "time": "17:15", "start": 1035.08, "text": "Sure. So Primal two point oh was a very big release. It took us a while to, push it out and, in retrospect, probably should have been multiple releases. So Introduce multiple major things in this release, starting with Reads. So Reads is a major top level tab which, covers long form textual content on Nostr. So it's a competitor to Substack and Medium. And like I said, we, decided to bring this type of content up to the top level, so it's a major tab on, in all of our apps, where you get the list of blogs, articles, essays, long- Form textual content, you get a feed for that, and in, in fact, you get many different feeds of this type of content. So you get, you know, Bitcoin related stuff or philosophy or sci-fi or cooking or whatever you're interested in. And the reason why I think it-- this, this content is, this type of content is important is because it kind of adds nuance to the public discourse. So, Primal already had the competency of dealing with kind of microblogging, short form content, kind of Twitter competitor. You can think of Primal two point zero as both Twitter and Substack, kind of baked into the same application. Nostrified. Yeah. Exactly, Nostrified. So reeds is the first kind of big thing that we launched, the, the next one is this feed marketplace concept that I already covered where, you can, you know, You can participate in, in the Nostr feed marketplace and, and every one of the top level tabs has the idea, the capability to tap into the marketplace. then we've added the, explore top level, item that allows you to discover different type of content or users on Nostr in a, in a very easy way. So the explore tab, gives you, again, the feed marketplace, it gives you the, the- Nostr, profiles that you might not be aware of that might be of interest to you, gives you top zaps. So we list all of the zaps, by, in, in the last twenty-four hours by zap amount, and you see who zapped whom and what, what, what was the content that was zapped. So it allows you to discover users who are zapping, users who are getting zapped, and the content that's, getting zapped there. So it's- It's a very interesting discovery mechanism. Then we have the media tab in the explore section that looks a lot like an Instagram kind of grid layout of thumbnails of videos and, photos. Again, that's a, a different way to discover new content. And the last one is topics. So, the most popular topics in the last twenty-four hours, based on the frequency of that hashtag appearing in notes and so on. So forth. So that's the new explore section. And then on top of that, we, implemented advanced search, which in itself probably should have been a, a, a release in its own right. I think that Nostr now has the most advanced search of any social media so we can get into that, in a bit more detail if you're interested. and then finally, we launched Primal Premium, where for seven bucks a month, you get a Primal name and you get, a bunch of powerful Nostr tools, sort of to power users. So, so Primal name, the Primal name gives you a verified Nostr address, like stephan at primal dot net. it gets you, Friendly lightning address for our built-in custodial, lightning wallet, also as stephan at primal dot net, and it gives you the, VIP, URL on primal dot net, so primal dot net slash stephan So it makes it easier, to find you on, on Oster. And then we have a bunch of Nostr tools as a part of Primal Premium, which we can get into if you're interested." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "21:42", "start": 1301.58, "text": "Back to the show in a moment. This show brought to you by CoinKites dot com, the creators of the best Bitcoin hardware security devices, such as the Coldcard Mark IV and the new Coldcard Q. Now, we use Bitcoin hardware security devices to keep our keys offline, our private keys offline. Now, the way these Work is you can do that setup, write down your twelve or twenty-four words on the, the seed word cards, and keep that secure. Now you can use this device to interact with the Bitcoin network using software such as Sparrow Wallet, Electrum, or Bep20 Desktop or Nunchuk as a few examples. Now you have a range of security features that you can use with these devices such as passphrases, you can use seed x or, or my favorite is multi-signature. 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The Bold vault is a two or three collaborative multisig where you hold two keys and Bold holds one as a redundant backup protecting against loss or theft. You can use Trezor, Ledger or cold card hardware wallets to spin up a Bold Vault in just a few minutes, and the Bold Vault is the only collaborative custody vault available with zero monthly fees. They're also offering zero fees on your first ten thousand dollars of Bitcoin buys and twenty five dollars of free Bitcoin when you buy a hundred dollars of Bitcoin or more. Try Bold today and upgrade your stacking experience over at getbold dot io. And now, back to the show. Yeah, and I mean, I think it's, yeah, I've been quite impressed with the app myself. I down with it and having a look at some of the features, I like, I was having a play with the reeds, component, right? Like you mentioned. And, yeah, I, I think it's interesting seeing the, there's so much stuff people are writing, you know? And, and, it's, yeah, it's really good in that way because Yeah, I think it's gonna be really interesting just to see where the competition goes in terms of like Substack versus, you know, Primal and kind of Nostr, long-form content, text form, let's say, and, even X, which also has their kind of articles as well. So I think it's kind of- There's gonna be all these different ways that you can put material out there, but, I think there, there is an advantage around Nostr and the open aspect of it that it's just kind of, you can-- And, the other thing that I find interesting is that you can, You can use the, Primal. Now, yes, you could copy-paste the note identifier, but that's kind of a bit clunky, whereas if you just copy-paste and you can share like the Primal link for that, then it's actually a bit easier that way as well. but yeah, I guess I'm just curious to see or to hear your thoughts on how the competition goes there between, you know, the various different forms of posting long-form, material. do you, do you see this as a kind of- You know, in the, in the old days, I guess, sorry, long question, but in the, you know, in the old days, people had RSS, right? So I, you know, you probably did this and I did this, like I had a RSS feed, right? And I would subscribe to different blogs and I would read, you know, like that. Nowadays, you've got, you know, the world of Substack and all these different things. So I'm curious how you see Nostr, I guess, evolving and competing in this kind of modern era On the, on the reads front." }, { "speaker": "miljan", "time": "25:44", "start": 1543.87, "text": "This is super exciting to me. so you mentioned, you know, creators of long form textual content have a number of different options at their disposal currently. So you mentioned Substack or Medium and, Twitter slash X have their own articles now as well. there, and then there's Nostr, and only one of these is actually open. And let's, let's kind of dissect this and see what happens when you, publish on an open network. because we're not only talking about articles themselves, we're talking about a number of different artifacts that are, related to those articles. Right. Like the way we interact with" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "26:27", "start": 1586.96, "text": "those things, yeah." }, { "speaker": "miljan", "time": "26:28", "start": 1587.98, "text": "Exactly. So let's say, you wrote, a long form article and I was reading through it and I create a highlight. if a-and this isn't something that's new in Nostr, I, I believe it was maybe Medium or this-a product like that that introduced this idea years ago But when you highlight something on Medium, that highlight is forever trapped in that kind of closed silo and doesn't really do much beyond that. whereas when you create a highlight on Nostr, highlight is a Nostr event that gets published to, Nostr relays and becomes available to any Nostr developer to do whatever they can come up with. And, as a consequence, you get these, like, you get a proliferation of these artifact types, and the, the, the, the, the schema that you get to develop against, on Nostr becomes much richer, and the number of applications that these types of things surface in kind of proliferates as well. and as a consequence, when you create a highlight today On a Nostr article, you will see much more engagement, around that highlight than you would on Medium, even though Me- that Medium has many orders of magnitude more users, and, Nostr is still young, you can see that this, there, there's like a level of liveliness there, around these artifacts that get published on Nostr, and we're just beginning. We're not even, you know, in the first one thousandth of Of, of the kind of user base that Nostr is eventually going to have. As," }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "28:13", "start": 1692.73, "text": "as a quick example, some, I could imagine people could build out apps that, let's say, curate and take the highlights across all these different long reads or primal reads as an example, in this case, and kind of present to people, oh, here are some of the top highlighted sections, right? Like if I'm thinking back, kind of unrelated but sort of related, if I think about Amazon Kindle, right? Sometimes when you're reading through Kindle, you can sort of see, oh, So maybe it, it would be interesting this, this part of the book. So maybe it's a similar kind of thing, but it's, it's obviously a more open platform, right? It's not kind of Amazon, Jeff Bezos' sort of closed platform. It's kind of just this open thing, and it's just out there, it's flying around on all these different relays, and you just kind of pick and choose what relay you wanna work with and what, you know, what a-account you wanna follow or what pub key you wanna follow to be more precise, I guess. So way of engaging and hopefully we will see interesting products and services that are built on top of this, right?" }, { "speaker": "miljan", "time": "29:16", "start": 1756.36, "text": "Yes, absolutely. So this has to-- we see these benefits in these artifact types, but also when it comes to discoverability. the, integrating, social media feeds with long form feeds and long form artifacts like highlights and comments and highlights and so forth. is a great way for new-- for users to discover this long form content. it's, it's very interesting to observe what happened when Primal launched support for, long form content in such a major way as a major tab. Everyone's reporting, and this is quite evident, that the amount of activity around long form content just exploded, where there are many more articles being published, the articles are getting, supported financially, a lot more More than before in terms of Zaps, there are more comments, more highlights, et cetera, et cetera, where if you take Twitter and Substack as the kind of counter example of that, where, Elon famously stopped linking to Substack, he, at some point, and, and by the way, that was Substack's main, source of traffic for years, that Twitter was top of their funnel. One day, Elon just decided to stop this. So we're talking about these walled gardens where the walls are getting taller, and then the, kind of the contrast, the stark contrast to that is Nostr, which is a radically open network where everything is open to everyone, both in terms of users and developers. so I think there's a lot of reason to be optimistic about the way this unfolds from here." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "31:05", "start": 1864.67, "text": "Yeah, really interesting. And the one, I get I guess one comment I would add to what you're saying there is, of course, you know, if it's a private platform, of course, people can do what they want with their private platform. I think the concept, though, of a public town hall sort of led, at least in the historical years of, you know, Twitter before all these other things came up and before it became X There was a sense in which this was kind of the public record or the, you know, but they wanted it to be, that's the place people go to get the updates, right? So obviously everybody's competing for that. People want to be the place everybody goes. but at the same time, there's this, there's this kind of duality of people like being able to go there because that's where they might find as a jumping off point, but then when Elon bought X and, look, on Net, I think that was a good thing, but on Net, though- He did want to try to keep you inside that garden, because again, that's, that's the incentive. He wants to make this the number one platform, and so by limiting the visibility of linking out to Substack or linking out to your YouTube channel or whatever else, it kind of It, it was sort of a, a double-edged sword for the creators on the platform, because then, now if you're a creator on the platform, you're feeling a bit more like, \"Oh, okay, I get it, like Elon is trying to push me to create natively for X, right? To write an article on X and not write on Substack or write somewhere else and link to it, because that won't get, boosted in the algorithm per se, because again, it comes back to there being kind of one algorithm as opposed to this feed marketplace.\" So Yeah, there are all these different components that are competing, but in the world of Nostr, the, the argument is, look, it's all open, it's on relays, you subscribe to those relays, you get updates from those re-relays, whethe- wh- wh- whichever relays you want, and there's not really a sense of, oh, I'm worried about posting this particular link because it might deboost me or it may limit my visibility and therefore not get views and clicks." }, { "speaker": "miljan", "time": "33:05", "start": 1984.56, "text": "Yeah, I, I agree. it-- there's no doubt that humanity needs, global public town square. this is quite a powerful concept, and we have the technological capabilities to have this. the question is, what should that look like? Should it, should it be, service, a platform that's controlled by one company or one person? I think everybody agrees that nobody should have that kind of power. It's just like even if, if the most benevolent leader is going to, run into all kinds of problems trying to run a service like that. So there is that one problem of control. The second problem is one of authenticity. How do we know that on, on Twitter or X, there's no way to know that somebody then ac- actually posted something? You can, just because it was posted by a certain account, it doesn't mean that that person actually posted it. There's no, there's no signing, there, no one holds their keys. there is one company that holds everyone's keys when it comes to posting. so there's no way to verify that any content is actually authentic. on Nostr, we have that. all Nostr users hold their keys, and there's no way to forge any, any, anything that- Published on Nostr, there's an easy way to verify that it was actually posted by that person or that company. so this combination of control and authenticity, is something that absolutely needs to, be resolved for something to be a credible public town square. And Nostr is the only game in town. It's the only protocol that enables both, that kind of brings both of these things." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "34:54", "start": 2094.32, "text": "This show brought to you by Mempool.Space, the world's leading Bitcoin Visualizer, and now they've got an accelerator program. So if you have a transaction that you sent at a fee that was too low to get confirmed, now you can fix this at, with the mempool accelerator. The way it works, you can go and search your transaction, scroll down, click accelerator, and you don't need an account, you can pay with Lightning, and then it'll show you it's now in the process of being accelerated, and then after a few minutes, it's confirmed. And so this is a great way to help you out if you are stuck, and this can happen RBF or CPFP, or it might help you in situations where it's impractical to go and re-sign, so for example, multisig with keys in different locations. And thirdly, even in some Lightning scenarios, perhaps a forced close, you might not be able to use RBF, and so in this case, the mempool accelerator can help you out. So keep it in mind, and you can find out more over at mempool dot space slash accelerator. This show also brought to you by Nomad Capitalist. Nomad Capitalist is a leading provider in terms of offshore tax and lifestyle. Strategy, planning, and implementation. They can help you go overseas and legally lower your taxes. As many of you know, I grew up in Australia, but I left. I was sick of it in terms of the taxes and the COVID tyranny and all these other things. And so that's why I left, and now I live in Dubai. But that's not necessarily the place for you. You have to think exactly what works for you, for your family, for your business. And Nomad Capitalist have worked across dozens of different countries. They've helped people get passports, residences, bank accounts, and all Importantly, it's not just about choosing one place, it may be multiple places, and it may be also about making the pieces fit together in terms of how your business fits with your family and you as an individual. Nomad Capitalists have helped many, many people in terms of going overseas, and if you're interested, go to nomadcapitalist dot com slash apply. This is applicable for people with a net worth above one million US dollars. That's nomadcapitalist dot com slash apply. And now back to the show. Okay, and so, I am also curious if you had any thoughts on things like social media bans or, as an example, I'm thinking of a case in Australia where they recently passed a ban for social media for under sixteen-year-old people. now, I believe that comes into, to play in twenty twenty-six, and I'm presuming the way the Australian government is gonna try to do that is to sort of go after the providers and say, \"Ah, see, you need to put in some kind of age verification.\" Obviously, there were arguments around this being a dig-- an ID sort of forcing function to force everybody to KYC because the only way you can do it in the, if-- 'cause how else do you know if that user is over sixteen? These kinds of things. I'm curious if you see something like There, like, do you think that, let's say, that could play a role where under sixteens in countries like this might say, \"Yeah, I'm gonna use Nostr instead\"?" }, { "speaker": "miljan", "time": "37:54", "start": 2274.46, "text": "Yeah, it's very interesting. I just, saw that headline a few days ago, and you might be more up to speed there than, than, than I am regarding what's actually going on in Australia. I just thought it was crazy, and I thought-- I had the same thought as you, where I was like, \"Oh, this smells like, like an attempt to Some sort of digital ID on everyone, in order to, quote, save the children, right? Right. And it's, it's a, the type of, argument that can be made that a lot of people might swallow, but I think it's going to be interesting for them to try to actually enforce something like that when something like, Nostr exists. It's so easy to c- create like a key pair and participate on Nostr. so it, it might be one of those cases where- Where, it's like, oh, China banned Bitcoin for the tenth time. It might be like Australian government banned social media or banned Nostr for the fiftieth time. Of course, if you have the capability to ban something, why do you need to ban it multiple times? so, I don't really have any more sophisticated thoughts on the topic other than that, but other than just to see the how interesting it's going to be to see, watch this unfold." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "39:16", "start": 2356.11, "text": "One other thought, I'm curious to get where you see, to, to understand where you think, or to understand how you think on this. What about in cases of, let's say censorship? It may be, you know, not just Australia, but, you know, other countries around the world where technically it might be illegal to post certain forms of message or material, Do you think people might still be deterred because they might think, \"Look, even if, you know, the government has shut down X or some other access to some other social media?\" They might be worried that if they post something on Nostr anyway, you know, that it could just be against the law anyway, you know? So do you think in practice it will end up being a censorship-resistant network, or do you see it more like people will self-censor because of, you know, the laws or the, you know, whatever country they're in?" }, { "speaker": "miljan", "time": "40:05", "start": 2404.98, "text": "So the power dynamic is different on an open network versus like a closed network that's owned by a company, right? So, let's take Primal as an example. We are a company. we exist as a legal entity in multiple jurisdictions. Our apps exist in app stores, our servers exist in multiple jurisdictions, et cetera, et cetera. So as a company, we are subject to laws and we have to, you know, make our own decisions regarding what, what's allowed on our platform and what, and what isn't. but we have no power Over Nostr. So on Nostr, let, let's con-contrast that to Twitter, let's say, or X, where-- well, that's the end of the story. You know, X is a company and they're subject to laws, and, you know, if a judge in Brazil says you have to censor these accounts, after a lot of bad noise, you end up censoring those accounts. I think that's how that played out. And I sympathize with, the, the struggle there, where, you know, X- Tried to fight this and, and, and, and final analysis, realized they couldn't. so in contrast, you have an open protocol that is Nostr Where a number of different projects, a number of different kind of players exist there, Primal is one of many, even though it's so early, there are hundreds of projects already. and, governments can lean on companies, and we, we have to comply with laws, of course. but you only get so far By, leaning on Primal, let's say. and, given that it's an open network, anyone can run a relay, and anyone can create a key pair, and anyone can stand up a service or build a client, it's going to be, much harder to enforce this on an entire Nostr network." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "42:16", "start": 2536.46, "text": "Yeah, I see. And so hypothetically, they could say, I mean, a, a government could come to you and say, \"Hey, ban this, ban that, whatever. You're not allowed to relay this content, you're not allowed Allowed to serve this user, whatever. But ultimately, Nostr exists. It is a decentralized network, so anyone can set up their own relay, set up their own, you know, thing, and just start posting out updates. And there's, it's, I mean, it's, it's like the internet, it's like trying to stop information on the internet. So I guess it's, it has that benefit going for it. so yeah, it is, I think it's a good point you make about the power dynamic there. And so, yeah, let's see what happens. I think part of this is, you know, Nostr is still young, it's still very early days, and so the real test may come in the future, like let's say, you know, a year or two years down the line, three years down the line, maybe Nostr has grown and maybe at that point it is starting to pose a threat to some politician or some government somewhere, and they try to, you know, stop it, but it's sort of maybe they kind of realize, but that'll be interesting to, It'll be more like they go to the relays, maybe they go to the apps, they try to sort of stop certain forms of content being shared, but they can't actually stop it, they can only stop maybe some people viewing it through certain apps." }, { "speaker": "miljan", "time": "43:32", "start": 2612.22, "text": "I think that's the way it plays out, and hopefully the network develops in a way that makes it like, that makes the prospect of trying to censor content on it like that almost like hopeless, for, for actors who, who would like to try that. I'm sure we're gonna run into this. So let's see what happens." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "43:51", "start": 2631.33, "text": "Yeah. and then I guess if you've got any thoughts on, or I don't know if you have any stats or any idea numbers on how many people are using Nostr or how many, you know, events are being posted, this kind of thing?" }, { "speaker": "miljan", "time": "44:04", "start": 2643.98, "text": "Yeah, we publish those stats. So, so, for listeners, we, Primal runs a, a global Nostr indexer. So we attempt to index all content that's published to all public relays. And we, publish those stats in real time. If you go to primal dot net slash explore, you can, in the corner there, you will see, the latest stats. it isn't easy to decipher, it's not like totally trivial to decipher actual real human users compared to bots and so forth, and this is not only the case on Nostr, this is the case on every social media network. And I think most legacy network kind of pump their numbers By including bots in there and so forth. in terms of active users, active human users, our estimates are that we're probably on the order of like a couple hundred thousand. So it's not, it's not a large network in absolute terms, and sometimes people get discouraged when, when they look at these numbers and they compare, you know, this to, let's say Twitter, Facebook, or even some of the up and coming networks like Bluesky, that, you know, recently added millions of new users. so what I'd like to point out in these scenarios is, it, it's not a really an apples to apples comparis-comparison. It's like comparing Bitcoin to Venmo. you know, Blue Sky is, even though they have some sort of quasi protocol going on, really it's one company that controls the protocol. it's-- they hold everyone's keys and they run the biggest server so, and then they have a marketing department that, you know, promotes the product and onboards users and so forth. if we're looking at a real self-sovereign network, where, two conditions need to be met users need to hold their keys to actually be self-sovereign this network, and anyone should be able to run any part of the infrastructure on this network, a-and not just be able to run, but we need to see evidence that actually infrastructure out there is being run by a number of different actors and not just centralized in, in a few hands. only Nostr satisfies these two criteria. only Only on Nostr do you have a couple hundred thousand users who are holding their own keys and bootstrapping this new self-sovereign network, and only on Nostr you see, thousands of people running relays and hundreds of projects building applications and services on top of this open protocol. Nostr is quite unique in that sense. Yes, its growth is quite a bit slower in terms of user base, compared to s-some of the centralized networks. But when you look at, developer mindshare and the kind of developer growth, it's, it's a different story altogether. It's extremely popular among developers, and the developer ecosystem around Nostr is quite vibrant. And when you look at, the incentives for developers who are starting new projects, where, you know, the, the dilemma might be, should I bootstrap my own network from scratch or should I tap into an existing- existing network that, that's there for me with a number of users and actual content that I can tap into. the, open network is much more attractive, so we'll-- I'm sure we'll be seeing more and more of this. And as these, products and services that are being built on top of Nostr become more and more sophisticated, and there's a lot of evidence for that, I mean, we've covered some of those examples in, in our conversation today. as those projects become more sophisticated, they will attract users, and they, which will in turn, produce more content and add gravity to this network. So I think we'll see some inflection points where Nostr ends up growing rapidly, and, it's, it's quite exciting to see, and it, again, it feels like we're participating at, at the very early stage and, and something that's extremely special," }, { "speaker": "miljan", "time": "48:57", "start": 2937.02, "text": "so yeah. So, I mean, you touched on this" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "48:58", "start": 2938.14, "text": "earlier, but if you, if we were in Bitcoin years, where is Nostr? Like, what year would it be?" }, { "speaker": "miljan", "time": "49:03", "start": 2942.62, "text": "I would say twenty eleven, twenty twelve. So, so a, a lot of listeners here, maybe a hundred percent of our listeners are Bitcoiners, so think about just in those terms, and, and no, and by the way, there's a lot of high quality Bitcoin content on Nostr, that's, that's actually It's like, oh, it's too much Bitcoin content. I kinda disagree. I think there's not enough Bitcoin content. I think we need to lean into it even more and, have even more Bitcoin content, especially now with a long form, kind of textual content being a first-class citizen, let's say, on Primal. and again, we're seeing that, like, where, you know, I wanna bring in the Bitcoin classics essays, for example, on Nostr, just like, of course This, this needs to happen, we'll, we'll make sure it does, et cetera, et cetera, right? So, yeah, this is, it's a great time to be a part of something special at an early stage." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "50:05", "start": 3005.28, "text": "Fantastic. so, any other big updates on Primal" }, { "speaker": "miljan", "time": "50:09", "start": 3008.94, "text": "that we missed? So I mentioned Primal Premium, and this is another, kind of big topic, on Nostr, which is how to ethically monetize. you know, a social media company, Primal is a company. we kind of look at Nostr as a way to solve many of the problems that exist in legacy, in the legacy web. we already covered topics of control and user sovereignty, but also, the topic of perverse incentives that exist on legacy web, those, those types of problems need to be solved involved and, it's Nostr looks very promising when it comes to that. So, at Primal, we don't monetize user data, we don't, sell advertising our incentives aren't to kind of spy on our users to provide the best possible product to our customers, who are advertisers. So that's not the model we're, following. Instead of that, we, the users are our customers. And we wake up every morning to make the product better for our users. so, Primal Premium includes, as, as I mentioned, the Primal name, as well as a bunch of Nostr tools which are useful to Nostr users. This includes a premium relay, advanced search, which is extremely capable. You can search in all kinds of different ways in Nostr, and w-- I think we've completely destroyed the narrative that Nostr has a disadvantage Discovery problem, Nostr now has the most powerful search of any, social media network. I invite you to try it out. And then you can create custom feeds using this kind of search mechanism where you, where if you have a very advanced search that you, would like to go back to, you can simply save it as a feed. so that's available there too. we, offer, con-- full content backup for our premium users, where when you publish content on Nostr, you publish it to a number of relays, and there is no guarantee by any relay that they will keep your content for any amount of time. That's why you publish to a number of relays. Primal Premium, includes this capability to save all your content over the long run and gives you the ability to very easily rebroadcast your content to any, number of relays, as well as to download, copies of your content so you can save it locally. so there's a lot more coming in Primal Premium, but, the response so far has been overwhelmingly positive and And we kind of have already, it's been all just over a week, maybe ten days since we launched, we already have enough signal to know that this, it looks like this is going to be viable And are looking forward to, serving our users and not caring about advertisers." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "53:28", "start": 3207.94, "text": "Yeah, I think it's a really fascinating thing, and yeah, hopefully, It's, it's gonna be one of those things where, people might be on one hand sort of disappointed that it's not like mainstream already, but on the other hand, also excited because there's all this potential of what you could build and, you know, sometimes there's, there's an excitement of going west and kind of going somewhere while it's still young and early and the kind of there's an opportunity to sort of be in on the ground floor or relatively early, even if you're not exactly ground floor, maybe, you know, we're just kind of Establishing their niches of what kind of things they post and talk about on Nostr and some of that's different to X as well or other platforms. so yeah, let's see where, where it goes. where can people find you guys online?" }, { "speaker": "miljan", "time": "54:18", "start": 3257.92, "text": "Primal dot net is where you can find our web app and primal dot net slash download is, where you can find all of, all of our, or both of our mobile apps." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "54:29", "start": 3269.09, "text": "Yeah, fantastic. Well, yeah, I wanna encourage listeners, follow Miljan, check it out. Have a go with Primal, I've enjoyed my experiences so far, so, you know, give it a try and, let's see if this whole decentralized, you know, Nostr protocol works out, hey? We'll make it work out. All right, well, thanks for joining me, Miljan. Good to be here, thank you." } ] }