[00:03:24] William Casarin: And the minute you try to make things more decentralized, typically the user experience gets very poor. These networks tend to be kind of a little bit more complicated than a centralized solution like Twitter. So now we’re just trying to figure out what’s the best way to do this in a way that we can scale it out to more and more people.

[00:03:38] William Casarin: So this is where Nostr comes in. We, we think we have a pretty good idea of how to do this with like not just one person in control, but maybe like a small set of people. So it’s like a little bit more decentralized and it’s a tough problem, but I think we actually might be able to crack it with this one.

[00:03:50] Preston Pysh: What’s the foundation? Because my understanding is that you have an event and I think it’s really important for people to understand that you’re going to the protocol level. And then we talk about the client level. So get into some of that and also talk more specifically about this idea of the event and the simplicity around the event.

[00:04:08] William Casarin: In the protocol level, the way I like to describe it is if you’re not familiar with like internet protocols, they underlie a lot of the, the technology we use, like our web browser, you know, it speaks the HCTP and TLS protocol and that allows us to contact any server. The browser knows how to fetch the page and render it, and things like, There’s other protocols like email where we can run many different email clients, so like Gmail Outlook, and they all can talk to each other because they’re using this underlying language.

[00:04:31] William Casarin: So this is all what a protocol is. It’s just an underlying language for the computers can use to talk to each other. So what Nostr is, we’re trying to, what’s the language, what’s the computer language for social media? The basic idea that we’re trying to go for here is instead of like, we’re a Twitter like model where you’re just sending a tweet to a single server, you just send that event or that note, like you mentioned, you just send it to like any server you want.

[00:04:49] William Casarin: Like, but they all kind of have the same, they understand the message that you’re sending them, so they’ll, they’ll understand like, okay, this is a tweet that this person send out and they save it to their server, and then other people who are also connected to those relays can just pull those messages.

[00:05:01] William Casarin: So instead of just getting it from one server, you’re just now getting it from 10. So that kind of decentralizes the risk in terms of you being censored or you being like your speech being controlled. But it also, you get the benefits of having like high performance servers and versus like some type of peer-to-peer model where we’re all trying to get it from each other, which can be kind of bad for performance.

[00:05:17] William Casarin: It’s a new type of protocol, not knowing, I don’t know that many protocols that like do it in this particular model, but for the use case of social media, it works really well.

[00:05:25] Preston Pysh: How are you able to make the size of the events small enough? If a person runs a relay or their own private server, that it’s just not, how do you truncate that and make it small, but still carry the underlying message?

[00:05:39] William Casarin: There’s all this blockchain craze that took off recently and this idea where you just collect everyone’s transaction. Everyone has a store, everyone’s transaction. This is not what Nasra is. Nasra is not a blockchain. It’s not these, like, you’re not trying to achieve global consensus. So if you want to just run a relay in your own house that just stores your messages and your messages for your friends, that’s completely okay.

[00:05:56] William Casarin: You probably don’t want us sync Twitter’s database to your note at home cause you’ll probably, your computer will catch. It’s kind of specifically designed in a way that allows you to get the messages from the people you care about, from your own nodes, and then you can ignore a lot of the other busier stuff.

[00:06:09] William Casarin: And so we can kind of start to talk about like different types of relays there might be in the future. I, I’m sort of thinking about this a lot now in terms of like, what’s a public relay versus like a private relay. But yeah, we’re just starting to see the beginnings of this, because right now they’re just a bunch of public relays that everyone’s just kind of sending all their messages to.

[00:06:23] William Casarin: But it’s starting to get kind of crazy with like a lot of crazy people on the relay. So we’re trying to think about how we’re going to scale this out and what, what that’s going to look like.

[00:06:30] Preston Pysh: That’s one of the biggest questions that I see is five years from now, scale-wise, how in the world can something like this scale, when you talk about the incentives around people running their own and you, and you’re using the term relay for people that might not be dialed in, just think of that as like your own personal server or anybody can host as many of another person’s persona that they want or as few as they want.

[00:06:54] Preston Pysh: But go ahead and and explain a little bit of that scale.

[00:06:57] William Casarin: So the way that I look at a, a relay, a relay in some sense is like you take the Times Square. So Twitter and Elon is trying to, you know, Twitter’s going to be the nude public town square on the internet, that’s fine, but it’s in control of one person.

[00:07:08] William Casarin: So what a relay is that in my mind is it’s democratizing the town square on the internet. So, so that anyone can become a platform of speech that you can connect to. So they’re kinda like free speech nodes on the internet. The way that I see it breaking down is I can see it, there’s probably going to be like a public good or like a public relays, which are kind of crazy.

[00:07:23] William Casarin: There’s going to be a lot of spam, but anyone can go there and get their their message out, and it might be a shelling point for meeting up and things like that. But maybe you don’t want to have that crazy, hectic, wild west of communication. So maybe you’d pay some money to whitelist your pub key and get onto another, like maybe more semi-private public relay where you can have a more civilized conversation.

[00:07:41] William Casarin: But the cool thing about clients is they can connect to both. I can connect to the public relay, I can connect to the more, you know, chill relay that’s like less crazy, and then I can turn them on and off at will and just see different perspectives of the worldwide conversation. Those are like the two modes I’ve been thinking about recently.

[00:07:54] William Casarin: And then you can have a note in your own house just to back up your own speech, which, which is cool is every time you, you send a speech into the internet, it’s getting backed up onto your node or, or in your house. And then if you ever want to broadcast your, your, your history of your speech, you can do that to the internet and just backing it up has that benefit of no one can just delete your speech off the internet or, or take you off the internet.

[00:08:12] William Casarin: You can always broadcast it to new relays. So yeah, it has a lot of cool properties in that.

[00:08:17] Preston Pysh: There’s a lot of people, Bitcoiners specifically, that are already running their full nodes, and I’ve seen a lot of chatter with people saying, Hey, I want my Umbr full node, which is for people not familiar with Umbral.

[00:08:30] Preston Pysh: It’s basically a turnkey, really simple. You don’t have to have a lot of technical chops to be able to run your own full node if you’re running this Umbral version. And so people were saying, I want an application on my umbr that I can just basically run my own relay my own Nostr relay by clicking a couple buttons and it sets it up on the hardware that I already have that I’m running my umbr.

[00:08:53] Preston Pysh: Is something like this possible, if it is possible, how many personas could you basically load or store on something like that for somebody who’s just running maybe a terra of hard drive on their.

[00:09:06] William Casarin: I actually do this. I don’t have an umbrella, but I have a machine at home that I connect to over like a vpn.

[00:09:10] William Casarin: So I have a private relay that I connect to. And the reason I do this is A, to back up my speech just in case even, I mean, I run a public relay and I’m like, I’m not worried about that going down, but it’s just nice to have a local cash of my speech that I have backed up. And I think that’s a really good, just, just to start a really good use case just to backup idea.

[00:09:25] William Casarin: But you could also use that as a, a local cache of speech that you want from the internet. So for. Let’s say I have a bunch of people that I really want to make sure that I, I get their speech from the internet, so maybe I’ll know that they’re on certain public relays, and I’m worried that those relays might go down so I can sync their speech to my local node and only store the things that I care about and it’ll be really fast, and it’s on your local network and things like that.

[00:09:46] William Casarin: I see that as a really cool use case of having an umbrella, like free speech node just for those use cases. But in terms of like syncing the entire public relays to like to your local node is probably not, is not reasonable. There’s no reason why you want to do that unless you really want to just see a public conversation and have it backed up locally.

[00:10:00] William Casarin: You could do, it was just, you need to have a lot more space in that sense. But to give you an, an idea of how much this takes the store, I’ve probably been running the biggest relay for a couple months now, and I’m only up to like four or five. That’s going to Wow. Because it’s just small text. It’s just text.

[00:10:14] William Casarin: We’re not starting any, all that’s in an, an event is just a content, some tags, a signature and, and your pub key, which is just a hex pub key of, of your snor key. It’s very small in terms of what, what you can store.

[00:10:25] Preston Pysh: Do you think that there’s been enough functionality built into the events, these individual events of the Nostr protocol, or do you think that, I know there’s similar to Bitcoin, there’s this submission process.

[00:10:38] Preston Pysh: If people think that there needs to be more functionality added into the protocol, there’s kind of this community. Talk to us about that process and then talk to us about the additional functionality that you think might need to be added into it or removed.

[00:10:52] William Casarin: So the interesting thing about Bitcoin is that, you know, it requires some form of global consensus.

[00:10:56] William Casarin: So anytime you try to change the protocol, everyone kind of has to agree. If, if people don’t agree to upgrade, then everything starts breaking and we don’t want, like, Bitcoin know it’s breaking around the world. Cause some people can’t transact and it’s not good. Bitcoin is very restricted in terms of like how you upgrade it and things like that.

[00:11:08] William Casarin: Whereas Nasha doesn’t require global consensus. So I didn’t even talk about this yet cause I was specifically focusing on the social media use case, but Nostr isn’t technically, doesn’t need to be a, a speech or, or social media pro protocol. It actually stands for notes and stuff transmitted over relays.

[00:11:23] William Casarin: And those notes can be, have content of any kind. So there’s some people using it for like playing chess. You know, there’s like chess games going over us right now. And the way that works is that each note has like something called a kind and all it is is a number. Speech notes are just kind one. Your contact list is kind three and there’s direct messages and end-to-end encrypted direct messages, which is like kind four.

[00:11:42] William Casarin: But there’s like an integer number of kinds you can do. So if you have a custom application and you want to run it on nas, The protocol is flexible enough to do that, and, and there’s nothing we can do to stop you because you can just run your own relay and put your own notes of your own kinds on, and that’s fine.

[00:11:54] William Casarin: That’s what it’s meant for. So it’s really extensible in terms of types of applications you can build on it. So that leads into like, okay, maybe there’s going to be a, a CK for Nostr where you can just, you don’t even need to run a, or even, yeah, so content publishing or publishing blogs. You don’t even need to run a server.

[00:12:08] William Casarin: You can just publish it to the public relays. There’s a lot of cool use cases that people are not even exploring yet.

[00:12:14] Preston Pysh: So you, I think you said kind four was encrypted messaging. When we set up this discussion, that’s how I contacted you, was over this encrypted messaging system. I’m curious if, in your opinion, do you find that to be more protected from a privacy standpoint than something like Signal?

[00:12:33] William Casarin: So Signal is probably much more secure because they’ve, they have like hardcore crypto people who are working on state-of-the-art ratcheting technology for to make sure it’s forward secret. Our encryption spec right now isn’t that good. It was kind of just thrown together. So there are some flaws with it.

[00:12:46] William Casarin: So for instance, if you ever leaked your key or I’ve ever leaked my key. Yeah. Or some got access to it. Yeah. You can see both of our conversations whereas. That would be much harder to do on on signal because they have much better properties for that. But there’s no reason why we couldn’t build something like Signal on top of Nasra cause of the Extens sensibility.

[00:13:01] William Casarin: So I have a bounty we’ll get into that, but I have a bounty. That’s like if you want to implemented cool signal, like level spec on top of Nasra, I’m happy to pay to get that going because I, I definitely want better secure comms as well.

[00:13:12] Preston Pysh: Going back to the discussion on the Umbr, as far as people running their own full node.

[00:13:18] Preston Pysh: Let’s say that there’s an app that’s built an Nostr app that’s integrated into it, and I want my node to basically monitor a hundred different people that I personally follow very closely from a storage standpoint. Going back, you were talking about how small the storage space is. Do you think that for the typical person that wants to closely follow a hundred people, that should be no problem to basically input those addresses of of those people?

[00:13:44] William Casarin: I think for most people they won’t even need to run their own node, right? So this is more already the power users. This protocol is set up so you don’t need to run anything. So it already has a somewhat advantage over Bitcoin in the sense that you don’t really need to run your own node. Yeah. Again, the protocol is Zion that way, just so it’s just that easy.

[00:13:59] William Casarin: And not only that, you don’t need to run a node, you don’t even need to have a, a phone number or an email address. You just look, just generate a key and get going. So that is already huge compared to like what most things you, you’re used to online where you need to like K y C yourself and things like that.

[00:14:11] William Casarin: But if you do want to run your own node and you do want to sync stuff locally, yeah, it’s super trivial. . And even if it does get too big, it’s not like a blockchain where you need to keep the whole history. You can just like chop off the data. because a lot of the time there’s this thing on social networks where older data seems not that interesting or not as useful or the value of older data isn’t that.

[00:14:28] William Casarin: Unless you’re like going back and looking for old tweets, there might be a concept of like an archival relay and maybe more just like a real-time relay that you don’t really care about the older data. It’s very flexible in that.

[00:14:38] Preston Pysh: What if somebody, okay, so let’s say I’m running my own relay and I wanted to be nefarious and say, well, we’ll just take your feed as example, and let’s say that I’m, I’m trying to misrepresent something that you’re saying, and I want to create an event that says the opposite of what maybe you said.

[00:14:56] Preston Pysh: And so then I’m propagating this event. That’s a, that’s a fake event. How do the clients, I know it has to do with you signing, basically, signing that event, but if I was going to try to misrepresent something, how is that protected against walk people through that?

[00:15:11] William Casarin: So these messages are, these just small js o blobs and so JSON is just like, you know, data format that’s very simple.

[00:15:16] William Casarin: Text the content. So the, yeah, the content, the tags, and pretty much all the data on, on the note is signed using something like very similar to a Bitcoin key and it’s called, that’s just your nasr. That signature is, is included in the message. And when you send it to a relay, the relay will actually check the signature and it won’t even store that message unless it’s like a valid note from that person.

[00:15:36] William Casarin: So that’s why that signature is really important, because your client will say, yes, verify this is from this person. But there are some things that people can do, like phishing, like a text, because there’s no u there’s no unique username on this protocol. Really the only thing unique is, is your pub key, which is like a long.

[00:15:51] William Casarin: you need some way to distinguish if a person is like, like how do you, like, people are not going to be memorizing people’s pub keys. So we have a way of, the way that I do it in, in the DOIs client is that if you’re following the person, it’ll show like an Icon X their name. Like, hey, this is someone you know?

[00:16:03] William Casarin: Mm-hmm. . But if someone’s trying to pretend to be someone else, you know, it’s, it’s very visible cause it’s from a different key. And there’s other things we’re doing as well, which is domain verification. So you can have like JB five five, JB five five.com and it’ll be very apparent on your profile. So you know that that person actually is who they say they are.

[00:16:18] William Casarin: Amazing.

[00:16:19] Preston Pysh: Okay, let’s talk about the clients. For people that are non-technical listening to this, I’m going to provide what I think it is and then I want you to correct me and give us the actual definition. But so like people are familiar with Twitter and so they like, they log into quote unquote Twitter, and that would be, let’s just say that that’s a client.

[00:16:38] Preston Pysh: Then you have Facebook that might be another client that people hear and recognize from like a brand standpoint. These are just interfaces to the Nostr protocol. That that is all the messages people have created throughout their lifetimes. And so like you’re developing a client right now, talk to us about this client, this software that you’re developing that allows people to tap into this network of messages that are out there right now.

[00:17:05] William Casarin: Since all the social media companies, they, they’re not using any underlying protocol. Their protocol is simply their API to their centralized servers, and it’s usually very locked down and they don’t interop operate. If you send a tweet on Twitter, it’s not going to show up on Facebook. Right. It’s just, it’s not something that people expect cause it just seems so ridiculous.

[00:17:20] William Casarin: But the minute you have an underlying protocol, sending a tweet and yet showing up on Facebook would be a very reasonable thing. Or even just retweeting a tweet from Facebook if that’s, I don’t think, I dunno if they have pret tweets haven’t been there, Twitter, whatever, whatever those things are called.

[00:17:32] William Casarin: It might show up on the Twitter side as long as you have some common language. Right. Yeah. This is kind of how it works right now. So I, I’ve written an iOS client called Damas. It connects, it doesn’t do anything fancy. It doesn’t connect to my servers. It just connects to relays. And then, so the messages you see on that client are, could be from, people could be posting from the web clients that I, I don’t even write that I, that I, I haven’t written.

[00:17:50] William Casarin: It’s just people con have written, there’s probably like 10 or 20 clients that have not, people have written on Nostr and people are all communicating each. Yeah, it’s just, it enables this more flexibility in terms of what types of clients you want to use. Like for instance, I know someone who runs a terminal client, and this might be really good for people who, for accessibility reasons, just being able to use a text mode version of your Twitter client.

[00:18:09] William Casarin: Yeah, there’s a lot more flexibility in terms of what the experiences you would want to have on Usher, just just by having that flexibility between the client. So, I can tell you,

[00:18:17] Preston Pysh: so like I have my iPhone, I have the, the Damus app downloaded. It’s D A M U S for people. It’s in test flight right now. So if you want to download it onto your phone, you have to download test flight, and then you go to the DOIs website and you can download the app right off the app store.

[00:18:35] Preston Pysh: And it works just like Twitter right there on my phone. I mean, it looks a lot like Twitter, the feel, the interface, everything is very much like Twitter. And then I go to my computer. and I go to astrol.ninja. Yeah, . And I entered my, I signed in with my private keys and which that’s a whole nother thing for people.

[00:18:56] Preston Pysh: Yeah. There’s a safer way to do it, and we might get too technical through the, an app called Alby, which is what I would highly recommend people do if they’re working off of their, their desktop computer. But for simplicity, I went to this astral.ninja website. I logged into my account that I’ve been creating.

[00:19:14] Preston Pysh: Effectively tweets from my iPhone through the DMO app, and it’s almost like what we were describing earlier where I was logged into Twitter on my phone and then I went to my computer and it was like I logged into Facebook and I’m seeing the same exact messaging. It’s crazy.

[00:19:31] William Casarin: Yeah, it’s and it’s, and we all support like different features.

[00:19:34] William Casarin: Like I think ESL Ninja doesn’t even have likes or anything. It causes a lot of confusion because we’re like, when people are talking on the network, they’re like, oh, this is broken. And then everyone’s like, okay, what client are you talking about? What, what’s broken? ? So there’s a lot of like interoperability we still gotta figure out.

[00:19:46] William Casarin: But for the most part, like if you’re just sending that text messages, we can all kind of communicate with each other, which has been really cool and, and has this network effect. And I think this is going to be very underappreciated. I think it’s underappreciated the network effect that you have. There’s a reason why emails still lit like everywhere is because the network effect, like everyone has it.

[00:20:02] William Casarin: Everyone has servers and everyone has clients and we’re just so used to it. Imagine if, I don’t know it. Just having it as a protocol is really helps it spread to a wider audience.

[00:20:10] Preston Pysh: Well, explain this to me. So we have an email protocol. Why couldn’t we use that protocol for this type of activity? What’s the differences?

[00:20:20] William Casarin: Yeah, so with email, there’s not a concept of querying notes. Cause if you, let’s say I wanted to like pull an email thread from somewhere. There’s not a really a good way to do that. Maybe there might be a way to do it to hack it, but it wasn’t really designed for that use case. It was more designed for like sending these like long worded letters and stuff between servers.

[00:20:37] William Casarin: Whereas this is, we are trying to build it more for a Twitter like experience. So you maybe you could build Twitter over via, over the email protocol, but that would be Yeah, pretty, pretty crazy.

[00:20:47] Preston Pysh: Well, it seems like that protocol was designed for point to point where this is more designed for just broadcasting, right?

[00:20:56] William Casarin: Yeah, yeah. So you’re just broadcasting a message to the public and then people may or may not hear you, but depending on what tree laser connected to. So it’s very much different than maybe it’s more closer to the Usenet or whatever the old school mail servers or something.

[00:21:09] Preston Pysh: But do you see the clients, so like you’re doing the dam.

[00:21:14] Preston Pysh: Do you see clients specializing in certain benefits or restricting things in the future that gravitate and and does that potentially cause kind of a split in the network or these compartmentalized groups?

[00:21:30] William Casarin: I think we’re going to see lots of different things play out. There’s going to be some clients that just are maximum interoperability and just want to work for all the different types of messages.

[00:21:39] William Casarin: There’s some clients who are just going to, okay, they, well, they want to craft a more friendly user experience for their users. So maybe they’ll block like all public messages unless you’re verified on their platform. And that’s okay. I think we might have them as like a company. Slack. You have an internal relay within your company and you just use that for communications.

[00:21:55] William Casarin: Mm-hmm. , and you can use all the standard clients to talk to your company Slack, and it’s not controlled by Slack and . You control your own data, so you get a lot of flexibility for these use cases. I can see it, you know, in many different ways. It’s just we’re very early and I, I’ve yet to see, and it’s really just public relays right now, so we’ll,

[00:22:11] Preston Pysh: So I don’t think that Bitcoiners would have this concern, but I think people, other people might, where there’s a bit of protection that you currently get with the centralized servers where you don’t have pedophiles, you don’t have people doing racial slurs and this type of stuff because it’s being monitored with this.

[00:22:28] Preston Pysh: This is the wild, wild west. I mean, you could literally go on there, say anything you want. From a masked, no one would know you’re, everything’s anon unless you want to be known who you are. And so it opens up this free communication where people can hide behind. So like, how do you see that playing out? I, this can’t be stopped, this protocol can’t be stopped.

[00:22:49] Preston Pysh: So I think that that’s out of the question. I’m, I’m curious if you would agree with that, but what are some of your thoughts on this?

[00:22:54] William Casarin: Again, I think it’s just going to come down to, you know, there’s going to be a wild west part of the network of the public relays and just crazy people shouting at each other.

[00:23:02] William Casarin: But even in that mode where you have the public wild West, you can still build clients that only pull messages from your friends. Clients will have very strong filtered capabilities, and I suspect clients might even compete in terms of like creating the best algorithm for filtering a lot of this garbage.

[00:23:17] William Casarin: And this, again, should always be a, a client choice. We shouldn’t, initially I was always like, oh, well maybe relays should just be completely dumb and just never filter anything. And, and I still kind of along those lines and I think that clients should provide the tools to filter everything that the, the people don’t want to see.

[00:23:32] William Casarin: But it’s hard to say, like I totally imagine there’s going to be a situation where you have like private relays that just filter all their stuff and have heavy moderation. And people who are on the metaverse right now, they kind of prefer that. Like maybe there’s a certain type of people who prefer heavy moderation, and that’s fine, and you can only connect to those relays.

[00:23:45] William Casarin: But even just today, just having the public relays and all this crazy stuff going on. Just being able to just only see messages from your friends and friend to friends already filters out all out of the nonsense. Again, it’s, there’s so many different ways to deal with this fam on this network and just, and I’ve been brainstorming like all the different ways and I think it’s going to be okay as long as we have this underlying protocol that’s just uncensorable.

[00:24:03] William Casarin: I think that’s the most important part so we can start to build these type tools on top of it.

[00:24:06] Preston Pysh: So I can tell you from personal experience using your app, so I go into the settings where it’s just the people that I follow. I think I’m following like a hundred people on the platform. and I mean it’s just pure signal.

[00:24:20] Preston Pysh: It’s so nice because all the politics are not in there . It’s just, it is awesome. You can see everybody building and then I’ll click on the global search and I’m seeing like the global conversation and I mean there’s a lot of cesspool there and I, I guess I’m kind of curious, I’m assuming you’ve had the same experience, but from a spam standpoint.

[00:24:42] Preston Pysh: How do you start basically putting a cost to spam and bots and all this? I mean, you’re seeing it on Twitter, it’s a disaster of bots. So how does that work with Nostr?

[00:24:55] William Casarin: So I’ve been thinking about this a lot and I think there’s a couple ways, ways to do it. Again, there’s two kind of modes. There’s this one mode where you may only want to talk to your friends, and that’s easy cause you can only pull messages from your friends.

[00:25:04] William Casarin: That’s just a query that says, only gimme these messages from these P keys. And you’ll never see anything from anyone. That’s fine, but if you want to have more of like an open, you don’t know who wants to talk to you. You want to have, be able, be able to accept messages from strangers. Unfortunately, messages from strangers aren’t always the nicest messages.

[00:25:19] William Casarin: I think there’ll probably be a mode and, and I’m planning to do this in Damas, where any message from a stranger that either shows up in your dms or notifications is going to have a cost associated with it. I put together this spec on, I’m not sure, called the proof of work spec, that it’s based on hash cash, so Adam Adam’s hash cash.

[00:25:33] William Casarin: It’s basically identical to hash cash. It’s just counting the number of zeros on the ID of the. And then we have a special way to query number of leading zeros in the protocol. So you can say, okay, if it’s not from my friends, but I still want messages from random people, maybe okay, you can send it to me.

[00:25:48] William Casarin: But it’s going to, you gotta do some proof of work before I receive that message. And maybe we can put that as a label on your tweet that says, if you’re a stranger, you want to send me a message. Just just know. But I won’t get anything. Cause I’m not going to create, but if you want to try to send me a message, you gotta run your CPU for like an hour.

[00:26:01] William Casarin: So I think that’s kinda like one cool way. I don’t know how scalable that is, but it’s kind of. Another way I’ve been thinking about it is this whole idea that Michael Sailor was talking about at one point is like the orange check. Imagine you go to some service provider and you can just buy a badge.

[00:26:16] William Casarin: We’re working on the badge specs, so you can attach badges to your profile and it’s kind of fun. Maybe you buy this orange check badge and your client recognizes those as you can use those despite spam. So if someone has that badge, okay, fine. You can, if you’re a stranger, you can reply to my, my thread.

[00:26:29] William Casarin: Those are the two that I’m looking at in terms of getting message. . But yeah, there’s other, there’s other things as well, like just paid relay, so everyone who’s on the relay is pays, wants to get on. Those are the things I’ve been thinking about right now.

[00:26:38] Preston Pysh: So for people that aren’t familiar with Michael’s idea, I would just describe it like this, and this is how Michael also describes it and when he is trying to explain it to people, is just, if you go to a hotel and you check in, They’re going to swipe your card for, call it a hundred or $200, and they’re going to put a hold on the card so that if you would go into the hotel room and break the faucet or do whatever cause damage to the room that they’ve already taken some money from you that you can’t claw back.

[00:27:07] Preston Pysh: When you think of like your Twitter or Nostr or whatever and you’re posting a tweet and somebody comes in there and is just wrecking havoc and is just a total idiot. They would have to post some type of collateral, some small amount. Let’s just say it’s 25 cents to make a post. and if they’re in there, you know, swearing at you or just, you know, whatever, they’re a bad actor, you can basically take their 25 cents within a certain period of time.

[00:27:34] Preston Pysh: Let’s say that it’s active for one hour or one day or whatever, that they have to basically post this collateral and you can take it. If they’re a bad actor and if they’re not a bad actor, well then you don’t do that because then you’re going to get some type of, there would have to be some type. This person takes any amount of money that’s posted to their feed.

[00:27:52] Preston Pysh: So there’s like a star ranking or something that talks to your history of whether you’re taking people’s posts or, or you yourself are a bad actor on that policy. So that’s the idea, is just there’s an economic consequence to being a bad actor. And so where I’m going with this, William, is you, have you, I saw this on Nostr, you said none of this would be possible without the Lightning.

[00:28:15] Preston Pysh: You believe none of this would be possible without the Lightning Network. Explain what you mean by that.

[00:28:21] William Casarin: Lightning enables a very fast point to point transactions without like dealing with like the legacy financial system. So this allows for really tight integrations with incentivizing relays to stay up because it costs money to run a relay.

[00:28:35] William Casarin: So we we’re going to need some ways to, in incentivize relays to run. If there was an option. And so this originally came about because I’m starting to integrate lightning more and more into Thomas. So right now you can post a lightning invoice and a tweet or in a post and it will just like render a little cool widget.

[00:28:49] William Casarin: You can click pay. So people love that feature. But this is just the start of this where maybe there’ll be a a SAT button where you click it and then you can just send stats instantly to another person on the network. So I started thinking about like, what is it going to look like when you, anyone in the network can sense that instantly to anyone else on the network.

[00:29:04] William Casarin: And you have these network effects where people are doing this all the time. Well, maybe it’d be cool if you just a portion of that and just send it to all the relays you’re connected to, to incentivize them to run, as well as to maybe even whitelist your key for some temporary amount of time. Imagine like, okay, you send me some SATs, so I trust you for now, so I’m going to, I’m going to let you post to my thing for and the next day, and if you keep sending SATs, so that, that is some sense, an aspect of what you were referring to of the orange check where you’re putting down collateral, you don’t get it back.

[00:29:28] William Casarin: I, I mean I guess that Relay could send it back to you if, if you, once you’re done. But I think that’s one po possible way to fight Sam and I think it’s really cool and I think a Lightning specifically enables that because it’s just so fast and. Relays can put a little lightning invoice or Eleanor on their, on their relay, and it’s, and your client can easily connect to it and send to it without any coordination, which is really important.

[00:29:45] Preston Pysh: So do you find traditional social media platforms being able to benefit from this protocol by incorporating it in some kind of way? I mean, it’s all centralized for them today, but maybe they move a little bit towards decentralization and then it allows them to optimize their performance. Is that something that you think is.

[00:30:06] Preston Pysh: So this is already happening. .

[00:30:07] William Casarin: Oh really? Props to bill@minds.com because we had a call with them a couple months ago and with their team and we’re like, how can we integrate nasra into your platform? And they were so, because we talked about Activity Pub and the previous protocols they were looking at and they’re like, oh, it’s so complicated.

[00:30:20] William Casarin: And they’re like, well, let’s try it with Nostros. So they’re, they were able to build a nostril relay that you can connect to it. It’s still kind of buggy but we’re still working on it. But if you connect to it, you get like this fire hose of events from their platform. Cause they have a lot of users.

[00:30:31] William Casarin: And it allows you to, it uses this feature that they developed called delegation. So they, they actually created a new spec so that if you go onto the platform and do a post, it can create events on behalf of ano, of a Nostr key that, anyway, so it gets, that’s a bit more complicated, but it basically allows them to post events to, to Thomas and it just works.

[00:30:47] William Casarin: So, so minds.com is a Nostr client that sends nodes and there’s no reason why Twitter or for instance, could implement Nasra. It’s really a flexible protocol where you can, any large platform could, in theory implement it. So it’d be cool one day, hopefully one day DOIs can connect to like Twitter.

[00:31:01] Preston Pysh: Would that save them on cost because they’re not having to store as, as much data on their own servers?

[00:31:07] Preston Pysh: Or like, what would be the benefit for them or the incentive for them to do something like that?

[00:31:12] William Casarin: In some sense, the, the Nostr relay would just be an interface to their database, so they still store all the data. The benefit to them is they get access to the wider, if Nostr eventually takes off and, and everyone’s using it, then your Slack channel communicate via DM to like Twitter or something.

[00:31:25] William Casarin: Right. Just like they get the benefits of that network effect. And then Twitter could just become, Twitter could just become the best Nostr client. Cause it’s a pretty good client right now. Like I love Twitter. I’ve been using it since like 2007. So I wish they would implement Nasra and, but I think it’d be technically kind of challenging just cause they built all of their infrastructure around Twitter, but they could totally run a, an nasra relay.

[00:31:42] William Casarin: Even with, without the Twitter client itself being a, a direct Nasra client, other clients could still connect to Twitter. I don’t know, it would be hard, but it’s doable and that’s kind of cool that it’s even possible.

[00:31:51] Preston Pysh: So, so we had mentioned earlier that you’re designing this dais client that connects into the Nostr relay of all these messages.

[00:32:01] Preston Pysh: And this is on iPhone iOS. The first question I saw on Twitter whenever I said I was going to be interviewing you is when? When W E N , when Android.

[00:32:15] William Casarin: This is my number one question and I’m like, oh yeah, I’ll just, I’ll, I’ll do it tomorrow. I’ll just put together a whole Android client. Yeah. But I was working on one when, when things were like much more chill and I was, I had time to like tinker and like build multiple clients.

[00:32:26] William Casarin: But yeah, I have so many users on iOS now. It’s just, I’ve been just trying to put out fires over there and I would love to get back to the Android client. I’m just hoping with someone to just build one and then I can just use that so I don’t have to do it . I’m still waiting for that and there’s a couple in in progress and I hope they’ll be up to speed and up to feature parody with Donis one day.

[00:32:41] William Casarin: But yeah, I would love to, but I don’t know if I have time to do.

[00:32:44] Preston Pysh: When do you think you’re going to get outta test flight?

[00:32:47] William Casarin: I’m going to do it soon. I probably like, I’m going to try to submit it today or tomorrow. Oh wow. Okay. Because we hit the, we hit the beta limit, so we hit 10,000. We went from like 5,000 users to 10,000 users in like two days.

[00:32:58] William Casarin: I didn’t even know there was like a beta limit on test flight. I was like, okay, I guess I should get releasing this app now.

[00:33:03] Preston Pysh: So that’s a good sign.

[00:33:05] William Casarin: Yeah. Gotcha. Thanks to Jack. Like ever since, ever since Jack started tweeting about, it’s just like everything went crazy.

[00:33:11] Preston Pysh: So biggest challenge you face right now on the Damus app?

[00:33:17] William Casarin: I think the biggest challenge right now is getting the UX up to par with like what people are familiar with on Twitter. because like I have this real, okay, I’m not even an iOS developer, I just had an iPhone at the time and I just wanted an app for Nostr. I have the first time I ever built an I iOS app, so I have no idea what I’m doing.

[00:33:31] William Casarin: So the UX is completely terrible. I’m not even a UX person, so I’m surprised that it’s even like usable, but I’ve had a lot of people who are helping me out and making it much better. So that’s, . Other than that, once I get once, once I get released it to the public, my biggest concern is this, the spam issue.

[00:33:44] William Casarin: Because yeah, if people have a really bad experience, we have like Nazi propaganda of like flying the global feeds, like that’s going to be instantly probably banned from the app store to begin with. And so I’m going to need a way to filter that. So I was thinking maybe just, maybe there’s a premium version where you can like get a an a paid relay or something.

[00:33:59] William Casarin: But then again, we’re already starting to move to like this. Privatize relays, but maybe it’s inevitable. Inevitable. I don’t know. I’m just worried that people have a bad experience. They don’t, because a lot of times they’ll join an app thinking it’s just going to be like another Twitter and everything’s moderated for them.

[00:34:10] William Casarin: But reality, this is like, this is wild west. Right? And then I can’t control what people see in some sense. because if they connect to a relay, I’m like, I can’t control what you see. It’s just, that’s what you got from that relay. I mean, I can’t stop that speech. Right? That’s my biggest concern right now is if I, once it starts getting more,

[00:34:24] Preston Pysh: For a person who’s hearing what you just said, they might think, oh my God, this is going to be, it’s just going to turn into a centralized thing.

[00:34:31] Preston Pysh: Yeah. If the app store can moderate these apps, these clients like this, yeah. But I would maybe push back and say, I don’t think that it is a centralizing force because anybody can go out and run their own relay and it’s not hard to do. Well, I won’t say it’s not hard to do cause I’m struggling, but I think in the future it’s going to be very easy to do.

[00:34:52] Preston Pysh: And the cost, the, the barrier to entry to run your own small relay is going to be very minimal in the grand scheme of things for people to do it. And so I can still check into all these notes via web browser, right? That’s not something that Apple controls. I’m curious, so if somebody’s posting content there, it’s not your app that’s creating that content.

[00:35:16] Preston Pysh: So how would you be responsible for the global messaging that’s happening on the Nostr protocol and how would you be held responsible for that? Or, or would you or would you not?

[00:35:28] William Casarin: And that’s the thing. In some sense, it’s just a web browser, like, you know, is Chrome responsible for every crazy website that someone puts up?

[00:35:34] William Casarin: It’s like, that shouldn’t be the case, right? So maybe like I have some responsibility for the bootstrap relay list that I, that I initially, so there’s some initial set of relays that you connect to. So maybe that would have to be locked down just because like, well, I’m providing. I don’t want that to be the case cause I want this to be like an open hour.

[00:35:47] William Casarin: But I, it really depends. I have to look through the Apple terms of service and because I don’t, I don’t want to get banned. I, I really like this, the Apple I’m working on, but if I do get banned on, I’m actually not that worried. It’ll just gimme more time to focus on the Android version or something. It would be sad but it, I could totally see Apple maybe getting upset about this app just because it’s too much free speech or something.

[00:36:02] William Casarin: I don’t know. too much free speech.

[00:36:05] Preston Pysh: Holy mold, shut ’em down. Biggest reward that you’ve experienced building this.

[00:36:11] William Casarin: I just love seeing people get excited. Like it kind of reminds me of the early days of IRC or like kinda the old school internet protocols where people just like join these crazy fun, weird networks that people are communicating with each other freely.

[00:36:22] William Casarin: Just the, the amount of feedback like I’m getting from people saying like, this is revolutionary. I’m like, this is like change. This is blowing my mind. And they’re so, people are so excited. I’m like, oh, it’s cool. I’m just sending json messages over web sockets. I guess it’s kind of cool, but in, in some sense, it does have these wide-reaching implications and so I, for me, it’s always just been kinda like this toy thing.

[00:36:38] William Casarin: And, and this was always the same thing with Bitcoin as well. I just, I got in like 2010 just playing, just always just a toy. To me, I didn’t know anything about monetary. The more I, I start to build it out. I’m like, holy crap, this actually does have some pretty, pretty, pretty big implications. And then and I think that’s why people are excited.

[00:36:51] William Casarin: It’s like they can see the future where, you know, free speech is not limited on the internet. And then that it’s easy. It’s easy to communicate with people without getting blocked.

[00:37:00] Preston Pysh: We have a lot of people that listen to this show. What would help you out the most for people listening to.

[00:37:07] William Casarin: I think if people just want to get involved, if people want to even just contribute code.

[00:37:10] William Casarin: If you’re a coder and you want to contribute, or if you’re like a designer and you want to design, suggest improvements to the app or if you want to write about it, if you’re a writer and you want to spread the word, all these things are are helpful. because I think education is going to be a big part of this just because.

[00:37:22] William Casarin: It’s just a new thing and it’s, it’s kind of confusing. So just be able to like communicate what it is and what it isn’t. It’s not another like true social platform. It’s not like, you know, this is a, a truly a, a different beast. You know, just learn about it, you know, write about it, like help out, contribute.

[00:37:38] William Casarin: It’s like a, it’s a very, it’s an open source project everyone seems, and everyone’s very welcoming. So yeah, get involved and that’s a, that I can’t ask for more really.

[00:37:46] Preston Pysh: I’ve seen some comments about ment being incorporated into this, and I’m not so sure that I fully have wrapped my head around the implications of that.

[00:37:54] Preston Pysh: Can you first of all explain very generically FEI and then talk about how that fits into Nostr?

[00:38:01] William Casarin: I actually don’t know anything about Femine . So I am a Bitcoin dev and I, I work in Bitcoin core and Core Lightning. I love light, I love lightning. I haven’t had a lot of time to jump into like the ecash.

[00:38:10] William Casarin: Whole thing. So I couldn’t give like a, a technical breakdown or even a high level breakdown. But more generally, what I was trying to say with that post was, I really want Damus to be a Bitcoin only. I want like a Bitcoin only app on top of Nostr where you can make it real. Just everything related to Bitcoin and, and interacting with Bitcoin with your friends.

[00:38:26] William Casarin: I just want to make it easy as possible to do that within the app. So if there’s some way to send e cash using ment over Damas and, and maybe do another widget that like we do with the Bolt 11 widgets, I think that’d be. Making it easier to do multisig stuff on Thomas would be fun. Like imagine if you have a group DM chat and you all want to cooperatively sign a Bitcoin transaction or something.

[00:38:43] William Casarin: You can just paste your PSBs in a chat and then it’ll like build up this, it’ll combine the PSBs and whatnot to like have a for a multisig transaction. So anything that makes it easier to use Bitcoin inside this app. That’s kind of what I want to focus on and want to make the best user experience for. because you know, I’m a Bitcoin.

[00:38:57] William Casarin: I love we, a lot of the underlying protocol is built by Bitcoiners. I’m leveraging a lot of that energy and and that’s not to say DOIs is like a Bitcoin only app. It’s just right now we have a lot of Bitcoin users and I want to support them so

[00:39:09] Preston Pysh: well, when we look at Bitcoin Lightning and we see the immediate settlement and we see the fees, which are for all intents and purposes, non-existent, it almost seems like that’s just the natural thing to be used for something like this.

[00:39:24] Preston Pysh: When you look at these other things that are quote unquote blockchains, even though we kind of smirk when we say, From a fee standpoint, I just don’t know how any of that would even work as seamlessly as, as Lightning would on this. Would you agree with that? And I’m assuming that’s where you see the future going based on how you’re working your clients?

[00:39:42] William Casarin: Yeah, so it’s interesting because Nostr doesn’t really care about what you use it with, right? Nasra has nothing to do with Bitcoin or Lightning. I just think lightning is great and the way to show that is great is to maybe integrate it into a social network. So that’s what I’m trying to do with DOIs, but there’s no reason why you couldn’t create like a, a Manero client.

[00:39:59] William Casarin: And you and all people who love Manero, they want to use Manero in the app. And you have little tit buttons for Manero. Like sure you can do that. So we can totally maybe see in the future where there’s clients that have all these different tokens and people can use them in any way they want, but we can still all inter operate and I don’t have to like see a a manero tip button my client.

[00:40:14] William Casarin: Lightning makes so much sense, just the instant settlement. And it’s and the protocol is decent. There’s still some issues with lightning in terms of liquidity and stuff, but, and I’m, I’m hoping maybe this network will uncover some of those issues and make and improve liquidity. Just, just, just from people trying to pay each other right.

[00:40:26] Preston Pysh: People are familiar with Mastodon as a former free speech platform that can’t be shut down by any central entity. Why is this different than Mastodon or other attempts at doing this in a decentralized.

[00:40:44] William Casarin: So this is a, a really good question because, you know, I spent probably two years on Activity Pub or Mastodon or whatever, macon’s a client for activity, pub activity pub’s a protocol.

[00:40:53] William Casarin: And what ended up happening, I noticed there were some severe flaws, some very bad flaws with Macedon early, just the way that the federation on that protocol is set up. So typically your typical experience when you joined this platform is that you’ll join an instance that’s called, so it might be Macedon social.

[00:41:08] William Casarin: And then you’ll get in an account, you have all your followers set up, but that server is run by a single admin and they have sole discretion to like ban you at any point for anything you say. And then once they do that, there’s no way you have to start over. You have to go to another instance. Hopefully they, but you’re already like psychologically scarred and you’re, I noticed I was like censoring myself just because I’m like, I hopely, I don’t say anything bad until the I’ve admin bands, we have to start over.

[00:41:30] William Casarin: Even on the Bitcoin instance, like I know, I, I know N VK is is cool and he runs a Bitcoin hackers instance, but like, I’m like, if I say something bad about cold card, maybe I’ll get banned. So like, whenever you have one person in control of like, of a social graph, it gets really bad. So I think that’s the, the biggest, and it’s a huge flaw with Macon.

[00:41:45] William Casarin: and that’s why I eventually, I was trying to write it in an activity pub node and clients and stuff. I’m like, I give up. This is just not going to work. And that’s when I started focusing on nos. Cause I’m like, okay, this nasra solve a problem because your contact list and your social graph, you control it.

[00:41:56] William Casarin: You can put it back it up on your, on your note and you can broadcast it anywhere and you can’t be, you know, you don’t have to start over every time.

[00:42:01] Preston Pysh: Right. I mean, I just look at the, the amount of time I’ve spent on Twitter in the past decade and if I got banned and they just deleted all that history of, of those interactions.

[00:42:14] Preston Pysh: I mean, it’s just, it’s a massive blow to people that are interacting in a public kind of way. And so your point there, as far as like admins controlling it, I mean it’s just this needs to happen .

[00:42:26] William Casarin: Well, yeah, some sense, some sense Masson is worse than Twitter because like I thought I was getting, I got banned from like three instances in this span of like, I’m not even a controversial person.

[00:42:34] William Casarin: I just, like I said, Bitcoin once and like it’s so full of like people on the left, I just got banned for just saying Bitcoin. I’m like, all right, this is crazy.

[00:42:41] Preston Pysh: So there’s a There’s another attempt at decentralized social media with Blue Sky. What are the differences between Nostr and Blue Sky?

[00:42:51] William Casarin: I briefly looked at Blue Sky.

[00:42:53] William Casarin: It seems about what they’re trying to do is they’re trying to build a, specifically a social media protocol. And sometimes that’s what we’re doing on Nostr, but Nostr is a bit more general. and they’re trying to design it for scale, so you have like really big nodes and it, and then it, that it’s really easy to set up these big nodes and they’re very performant and things like that.

[00:43:09] William Casarin: And I think that’s actually a really interesting way to do it. And I think that we should totally explore that and maybe one day nostril can interact with those types of nodes. So I think it’s not a waste of time as much as I’m like a Nostrom Maximalist, but yeah, they, they, it’s really just subtle differences in terms of how data is communicated and, and types of technology they.

[00:43:27] William Casarin: They’re very similar. And this is the cool thing about, there’s so many decentralized protocols now, and we can kind of just battle them against each other. So I love to see, like I’ve, I’ve been getting ideas from other protocols like, Hey, that’s a good idea. We should implement caching at this part of Nostr.

[00:43:38] William Casarin: So I think the competition is good and I, and I think that’s yeah.

[00:43:42] Preston Pysh: One of the things that I’ve noticed with using it is it’s a little bit slow to load, but I, but I don’t have my own personal relay set up. If I had my own relay set up, would that solve that? Or how do we get kind of the speed that we’re accustomed to with Twitter through Nostr?

[00:43:59] William Casarin: The relay that I’m running is like written by like this one guy who just built it in his spare time and it’s, there’s not even that, like we’ve been going back and forth and trying to optimize some basic stuff, but there’s almost been no performance optimization done on the relay. I was working on something called, it doesn’t have a name, but it was just a, a caching relay so they can sit in front of your relay that will, doesn’t have to do the full query, but can return results.

[00:44:20] William Casarin: We don’t even have basic caching yet on the relay side. So anytime you experience slowness, it’s just because everyone is querying everything at the same time. Yeah. And we just haven’t done that part of performance tuning. But these things will come with time and just for now, it’s just adding more relays kind of spreads out the load and seems to help a little bit.

[00:44:35] William Casarin: But yeah, we definitely need to improve performance on relay.

[00:44:38] Preston Pysh: Would you have cashes on the client side as well, which would help improve the speed?

[00:44:45] William Casarin: Yeah, there’s I mean, DOAs doesn’t do this, but it could just like cash more things. I don’t, I don’t like the idea of storing like a huge historical cash in DOAs cause it’ll start to get bloated.

[00:44:53] William Casarin: Imagine all the data has to store from, like, there’s no reason why it couldn’t store. Like stuff you’re tweeting in real time, it doesn’t really help in the cases when you’re trying to pull an old thread. Cause the client definitely probably wouldn’t have that. And that’s the case where it seems to be the slowest because we don’t have the relay caches yet.

[00:45:07] William Casarin: Hopefully o in time. I hope we can get it. More

[00:45:09] Preston Pysh: performance though. In general, what do you think brings the user migration to Nostr? Is it just the freest and most open way to communicate’s going to win in the long run? Or like what do you, what’s your thoughts around that?

[00:45:24] William Casarin: I think just because it made it so easy, you know, you don’t have to, you know, create an account, you have to add your phone number.

[00:45:30] William Casarin: It’s just so easy to onboard people onto the platform. They, and it’s just, and they just get it instantly. I think that’s a, that’s a huge one. Obviously. Obviously Jack talking about it, Jack Dorsey is just tweeting about it. So that’s, that was a huge boost. But it was cool just to see so many people get in and that it was somewhat stable and, and it didn’t just crash right away.

[00:45:45] William Casarin: So people just seeing that it works and it’s somewhat stable, they’re starting to be like, Hey, this might actually work. And like that was something I always wanted to do with the DOIs Kline. It’s like, prove this, that it could actually work. It’s still come somewhat of a prototype. Is this going to work at.

[00:45:56] William Casarin: So we’re up to 10, 10,000 users now. I, I, I think I see like 2000 or so people connected to my server at any given time, who knows what the next stage of scaling is? Let’s see if we can get this up to like 30,000 to hundred thousand. Yeah, we’re still early, but William,

[00:46:09] Preston Pysh: I can’t believe how active Jack is.

[00:46:12] Preston Pysh: Jack Dorsey is on the platform right now. I mean, he is very active. He’s called you. What are some of your thoughts around Jack being so active?

[00:46:22] William Casarin: I think he got it so quickly just because this is what he in some sense wanted Twitter to be. I’m guessing it’s like nostalgic for him. Cause it probably reminds him and he tweeted about this, this reminds him of Twitter, sub 5,000 users, but better.

[00:46:33] William Casarin: Right When he said that my servers went down, basically that, that caused so much fomo when he said that. But yeah, I think Jack just, he sees the potential of the protocol and he just wants to support that, even though he’s also supporting the competing protocol, blue Sky, right? So he has the same idea, like, let’s see which best protocol win.

[00:46:47] William Casarin: And so it’s cool. Yeah, it’s cool to have the support and to see how we call him the the Walmart, like greeter guy. because he just, he’s always there. He’s like, Hey, he just sends this emoji to everyone. . So it’s funny, he, he’s been, he’s been a very active user on the network, which has been awesome to see and hang out with him.

[00:47:02] Preston Pysh: So, last question is just your bitcoin.

[00:47:06] William Casarin: I think I just saw it on Hacker News in like late 2010, and I just like, just jumped on, started playing with it, jumped in the IRC channel and just like chatted. I was chatting with some, some of the people at the time, someone of his named sipa. I didn’t know who he was.

[00:47:17] William Casarin: Turns out he’s like now a major cord offer. So he got me in into the, in the system really early. Yeah. And then, you know, I’ve, I’ve always used it. I, I worked at a record label and I we were selling our albums in 2013, a record label called Monstercat. So that was kind of cool to see if we could actually start selling stuff on this network.

[00:47:33] William Casarin: Yeah, I just, it was always just kind of this fun protocol, kinda like Nostr, I just like, it was just fun thing to play with. I, I wasn’t like super into monetary theory or like, you know, some of the stuff I know now, but the community has really like educated me on all that stuff afterwards. But it was just, it’s just been a while to see it.

[00:47:46] William Casarin: It just see it grow from the start.

[00:47:49] Preston Pysh: So, William, I know you’re active on Nostr for sure. You’re definitely active on Twitter as well. Give people a handoff. I’m assuming you’re going to get some interest from this discussion of how people can help. Tell ’em where they can find you and anything else you want to highlight, we’ll have links in the show notes to, to all this stuff so that people can quickly access you, but give them a handoff.

[00:48:12] William Casarin: Yeah. So for Nostr, I highly recommend checking out our GitHub. It’s it’s github.com/Nostr-protocol/Nostr. I think. And then we’ll have a, there’ll be a link there to the Art Telegram. We probably have like 4,000 or something people in there by now. So it’s a huge group of people who just, you can ask questions there.

[00:48:27] William Casarin: They’ll help you get, you, get you onboarded. You can find me on, I’m not going to announce my whole pub key. I don’t know if I could say that , but I’m sure you’ll find me talking on there. If you go to the global feed, you’ll find me. And just my Twitter is JB five five, my website JB five five.com. So, yeah.

[00:48:41] Preston Pysh: Fantastic. We’ll have links to all that in the show notes. I know you are an extremely busy guy right now, , so taking time out to have this conversation for a full hour. I really appreciate that and I know that all the listeners are going to appreciate it as well. So thank you for your time.

[00:48:56] William Casarin: This has been awesome.

[00:48:56] William Casarin: Thank you so much for having me. So thanks.

[00:48:59] Preston Pysh: All right guys. I hope you enjoyed this one. I know I personally learned a ton. Just a note to the listeners, if you’re wanting to try this Nostr Social Network out, one of the many ways you can do it and to open an account is through the Damus app, which we were talking a lot about during this episode which is being built on Apple’s iOS.

[00:49:20] Preston Pysh: But the Damus app is still in test flight and isn’t officially released to the public. Interestingly enough, apple will only allow 10,000 people to use a test flight application, and will is still stuck in the test flight status with Apple. And so it’s maxed out at the 10,000 users. With that set.

[00:49:42] Preston Pysh: Since this is a de decentralized social media protocol that doesn’t have any centralized servers, you can still create an account and start using it by going to a different software. One of the more popular software clients that are out there is, is just go to a web browser and, and type in astrol.ninja.

[00:50:01] Preston Pysh: Hit enter and it’ll take you to an interface that you can create this social media account from. and you can start interacting on Nostr right now. And, and you’d be amazed at how many Bitcoiners you’re going to find on this social media site and how much it feels like Twitter. I’ll be sure to have a link in the show notes to that astrol.ninja.

[00:50:21] Preston Pysh: One other thing, . So through all of this, you have a lack of verification to know whether a person is real or whether there’s robots. I secured a website called Nostr verified.com. And similar to like Twitter’s verification process, anybody can, because you’re dealing with a decentralized protocol here, anybody can verify themself through their own website.

[00:50:48] Preston Pysh: And so this verification process I, I thought maybe might be something that people need. So anyway, you can go to, it doesn’t cost anything. You just go to nostrverified.com and you can verify your Nostr account. By just filling out your, your pub key and all this stuff that you’re going to get whenever you open an account.

[00:51:07] Preston Pysh: So, pretty straightforward, easy. You don’t have to even enter an email address or anything like that. It’s, it’s really to try to help reduce spam and the bots which I know anybody who’s on Twitter has a deep appreciation for getting rid of that. And I think if people go onto the platform and check it out, I think you’re going to be really surprised at.

[00:51:25] Preston Pysh: There’s just a total lack of all of that happening over there right now. So anyway, I really enjoyed this chat and thanks for tuning in, and I’ll catch you guys next week.

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