“Nostr is what the internet could’ve been.”

Pete & Gigi try to talk to lawn mowers.

Websites & other stuff mentioned:

• Sovereign Engineering
• The Good Stuff

In this dialogue:

• ECash fixes 402
• Eucalyptus in Madeira
• Pete’s time at Fedi
• Lighting equals Swift, ecash equals payments
• Chaum’s paper
• ECash for Localism, farmer’s markets
• Square terminals accepting bitcoin
• BTCMap and merchants in Madeira
• It’s normal to pay in bitcoin
• Bitcoin for babysitters
• 1st Lightning Conference in Berlin (2019)
• Australian Bush Bashes
• BTCPay terminals (with NFC and stuff)
• Costa Rica: Bitcoin Jungle
• Super easy, super fast, green checkmarks everywhere
• Cash-only shops are incredibly based
• Credit card fees
• ECash to replace APIs
• Subscription Hell aka the Netflix Problem
• Open Router, Routstr, ppq
• LAWNMOWERS
• Dumb models vs smart models
• Economics of LLMs
• ECash fixes subscription hell & sign-up barriers
• NIP-60/61 as pocket money
• Corner stores and consumers taking the risk
• Stripe excludes half the world
• Aaron Swartz & RSS
• Pieter Levels & his dad’s credit card
• “You can just charge for things”
• DHH vs Apple & his Rails keynote
• KYC payments = begging for permission
• Sovereign Engineering: build something new every week
• Lemonade stands in cyberspace
• Relocalization
• Moving from AWS to bare metal
• MORE LAWNMOWERS
• Rent your excess compute & earn ecash
• “The internet is fucked” - do regular people actually agree with that?
• “nostr is what the internet could’ve been”
• Old ladies cleaning up phones
• UK’s child protection law: scan passport to watch YouTube videos
• EVEN MORE LAWNMOWERS
• Ideological use vs necessity
• Sideloading apps & Zapstore
• “Asking for permission is not a good pattern”
• Payment deplatforming in the US: gaming, porn, gambling
• “Fix the money, fix the internet”
• We’ve come far!
• “If bitcoin wouldn’t work I would literally starve”
• The fact that nostr works is amazing
• The norm in nostr is that there’s no global view
• Nostr came incredibly far, considering it was only 3 short years and had very little funding
• Funding: how could it be solved?
• “Funding implies the wrong thing”
• Benefit of AI: cost goes down, cheaper and easier to build useful stuff
• Cost of experimentation needs to be low
• If people are getting paid you don’t need to fund them so much
• BitChat is a great example of a useful tool built on nostr
• “Zaps are bitcoin?” —Normies
• Compute is a scarce resource, as is storage
• Paid relays, paid blossom servers, paid video hosting
• Nostr is the largest bitcoin circular economy in the world
• Still too small for businesses to move in though, probably
• “There’s lots of ways to earn money and also be on nostr”
• SoapMiner, Leathermint, Isolabellart, etc.
• WIND
• MORE WIND
• Arbitrage opportunities in businesses & the value trap
• Agents doing paperwork vs agents doing coding work
• Using agents to create open-source mashups
• Allen Farrington’s take: Vibe Capital Accumulating
• LLMs and atom bombs
• Vervaeke, Meaning, Salience Landscape
• Abundance, Radical Life Extension, and Meaning
• The Meaning Crisis & the Suicide Epidemic
• The train meme
• Pessimism vs Optimism
• LLMs allow us to get away from the computer
• Strong local communities, shake your farmer’s hand
• Bitcoin is local & global at the same time
• SovEng: good vibes, good ideas, good people
• Shipping things, vibing, and getting the idea right
• “I’m not as married to nostr as a I am to bitcoin”
• No Solutions spawning The Good Stuff

Recorded at 914,219.