← THE Bitcoin Podcast
THE Bitcoin Podcast
BITCOIN & NOSTR, FASCISM & COMMUNISM, FREEDOM & FATHERHOOD | ALEKS SVETSKI
01:44:26
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- [00:00]
A
From the beginning of time, human beings are wired in such a way that we will engage with danger or hysteria much more quickly than we'll engage with just normal stuff, which is, you know, the classic saying, if it bleeds, it leads, right? Media is just naturally the thing that alerts you to something. It's the fucking red flashing button or the red flashing siren or the warning sign. And what's happened over the last, particularly of the last four or five years, is that these algorithms, and I don't say this in a way that it's conspiratorial, although I'm sure some of it is conspiratorial, but they've just metastasized naturally because of the human condition, and they have become less and less and less about the network that you have socially and more and more and more about the media and the engagement. So here we are, we find ourselves in 2025 where everything is some level of hysteria. And it's. It's very tiring. Bitcoin is more important than the idea of bitcoin, but the idea of NOSTR is more important than, than nostr. So with bitcoins, the actual chain, it's every record back to the genesis block. The fact that all of the economic activity is done there and that everyone is in sync, that matters. People can take the bitcoin idea and apply it elsewhere, which is why we have so many shitcoins, but none will ever be Bitcoin. Bitcoin is a true zero to one phenomenon. It's a one off. And if it fails, society is really up shit creek without a paddle. With nostr, on the other hand, it's actually the idea that matters, not the implementation itself. The entire protocol could technically be abandoned tomorrow and nothing truly of value would be lost. You know, social media content is worthless, and so are throwaway digital identities. Like, neither of those are inherently valuable. Bitcoin's not a fucking iPhone. It's not going to just follow the same adoption curve that every other technology's followed. I was like, bitcoin is a techno socioeconomic phenomenon. Like, it's much bigger. You know, the downside of me being wrong about an iPhone is $1,000. The downside of me being wrong about bitcoin is my entire wealth. The concept of NOSTR is about a semantic web, and that is a great concept. And it will be attempted again and again and again until the best approach is found and the most activity converges on said network. For now, it looks like nostr is the horse to bet on, but Worst case, if it fails and is replaced tomorrow by something else, that's totally fine. The idea of having a bearer instrument as your identity and using that to not log into websites, but to unlock access to a website, that was the dream of the Internet from the beginning. It just, it just never happened that way. Bitcoin is Bitcoin and it, it is the implementation that matters. But nostr is nostr, and it's not the implementation, it's the idea that matters. There's, there's some deeper psychological, cultural problems that need to be dealt with. That's, that's got a, that's got a. It's going to require action today with stuff that's just not going to look sound and feel nice to our liberal conditioned minds, because that's what we've, we've been living in that paradigm for the last 50, 60, 70 years. And yeah, it's going to sound extreme, it's going to sound racist and bad and this and that, but it's got to happen in order for these other worst things not to happen again.
- [03:07]
B
Greetings and salutations, my fellow plebs. My name is Walker and this is the Bitcoin podcast. Bitcoin continues to make new blocks every 10 minutes and the value of one bitcoin is still one bitcoin. If you are listening to this right now, remember you're still early. This episode is brought to you by Blockware. What if you could lower your tax bill and stack bitcoin at the same time? Well, with blockware you can. New US tax rules let miners write off 100% of their mining hardware in a single year. So earn bitcoin daily while saving big come tax season. Get started at mining.blockwaresolutions.com Titcoin use the code Titcoin to get $100 off your first miner when using the Blockware marketplace. This is not tax advice so go speak to team at Blockware to learn more. That's mining.blockware solutions.com Titcoin Head to the show Notes for links to find the show on centralized social media platforms and on Noster. Or just go directly to bitcoin podcast.net you'll find it all there and kind reminder that you can support this show by becoming a paid subscriber on Fountain. Or don't. Bitcoin doesn't care but I sure do appreciate it. Without further ado, let's get into this bitcoin talk. Welcome back man. It's. You've been, you've been on the show this is your third time on the show, right? Third time.
- [04:29]
A
Only three. I was hoping it would be the 30th time, but I'm gonna give you.
- [04:34]
B
Give it a few more years, but welcome back.
- [04:38]
A
Thanks.
- [04:39]
B
Quite a lot has changed in the world and personally, by the way, are you. You're good. Talking about.
- [04:46]
A
Sure.
- [04:46]
B
You're. You're a dad now, so congratulations. Like, that's. That's a hell of a change. Yeah. How you holding up? How's. How's life?
- [04:55]
A
Very good, man. So this is the first podcast I've been on since. Since the baby first public appearance. So congratulations.
- [05:04]
B
You get to break the news.
- [05:08]
A
No, it's been. I sent a message to. To a friend of mine and I was like, man, like I said to you when we just, just were off camera, the everyone tells you all of these things, it's going to be different. You. You won't expect it, all that sort of stuff, but it's one of those truly experiential experiences, for lack of a better term here that you have to feel to really experience. And it was. It was wild. Like when, when he first came, I wasn't sure what to make of it. And as I told you, we had quite a long, long labor. All natural, all good. But it was. It was three days and it took a couple days for the little guy to grow on me. But it's sort of been one of these like hash rate charts, you know, like it just keeps getting more and more and. And yeah, man, just little bundle of joy, little bundle of love. And yeah, the sort of the shift in the focus on oneself to sort of the focus on this little being that entirely depends on you is. It's humbling, man. And it's a really beautiful experience. So thank you for asking, but everyone, everyone's doing great.
- [06:26]
B
I'm glad. That was one of the big realizations for me was all the cliches are true. All the cliches are true. And you can't realize that until that light switch flips on and you're in it. And then you can't possibly go back. You are forever. I mean, unless you're a clinical psychopath, in which case there's a lot of other issues there. But for the rest of us, it's like you are changed for the better forever. And I think it's a beautiful thing. For me, it shifted my time preference so much thinking that you have this low time preference that you're planning for the future, perhaps you are. But then having a child and realizing, oh, now I Truly care about what happens after I'm gone. I care about not just what is my, quote, legacy, but what is my legacy, meaning what am I really going to leave? What kind of a world am I going to build? What sort of an advantage am I going to try to give my child? You have to really think about those things deeply. Not just in a philosophical, you know, kind of academic way, but, like, really come to terms with that as a man. And that's like. It's powerful. It changes you.
- [07:33]
A
Yeah, I think there's. If I had to pick three things, there's. One is the legacy. Point number two is the, like, a increasing ruthlessness in terms of prioritization and time. Man, I've just gotten so much better in the last couple weeks of just saying no to shit. I was like, okay, yeah, no, no, fuck you. No, no. And just. I think that's very interesting. And I remember Jimmy Song actually mentioning that to me early on sort of in our friendship, and he was like, look, once you become a dad, he said, you will actually be a 10 times better time manager than you ever were, than you ever thought you could be. That's the second thing. And the third thing.
- [08:12]
B
Fuck.
- [08:13]
A
It was just. It was top of mind. And of course, you talk about one thing, you forget about the other. Legacy prioritization and something else. When it comes back to me, it's, it's. It's sort of like a third big realization for me in this. In this process.
- [08:30]
B
Yeah, the time management piece is so real too, because it's just like, you just don't have any extra time. Like, any, like, any extra time you had is, Is now completely gone like it should be. You know, you're not, you're not just around anymore.
- [08:42]
A
Like.
- [08:42]
B
No, there's a. There's like a little being here that needs you or they will not make it. Like, they, they can't. They can't do anything themselves. They're literally helpless. Like, and you need to do things for them. So it's like, yeah, you. You quite quickly, like, are like, I. Okay, Yep, no more messing around. I'm going to be. Yeah, it's a good way to describe it, like, ruthless with your time management. But it is easier to say no. That's. It's honestly, like a nice thing. You can just like, no, that I don't want to do that at all. And I'm just not going to.
- [09:08]
A
Yeah, the helplessness thing, it's both, it's both true and it's funny, man. Like, I just grabbed a little guy and holding him like, hey man, what's going on? You gonna do something? And he's like just making all these funny noises like this, man. I love it.
- [09:26]
B
It's awesome. Well, I'm glad, glad mama and baby and dad are all healthy and happy.
- [09:33]
A
Thank you.
- [09:34]
B
It's going to be a beautiful journey. And bitcoin baby number go up is also important. We need to do our best to repopulate the world with well, good people. Yeah. With people that are going to be raised well by loving parents and ultimately leave a positive impact. Leave the world better than they found it. That's the goal, right?
- [09:55]
A
100%, man. 100%.
- [09:58]
B
Well, dude, so, I mean there's. So we have a bunch of stuff to get into today. Obviously. All of this is also kind of against the backdrop of it's been a pretty wild time, just I guess, news wise happenings wise. There seems, it feels to me that we've had a sort of really vibe shift. Like we've had a turning point, if you will. There's been a tipping point. Whatever analogy you want to use. It feels that things have somewhat shifted and changed. And I don't know if this is just because we are so inundated with information given the interconnected nature of our world and the 24 7, 365 news cycle or if like we were mentioning just before this with Irina and both Charlie, two very different situations of brutal murder, one a, you know, really a political assassination ultimately of a non politician. But these things, I think for anybody with a heart and a functioning brain, they really shook up a lot of us very deeply and caused us to reevaluate and cause us to think and cause us to just kind of wonder like what happens next and is there ever any reconcile here or reconciliation here. And it reminds me of something you said in one of our, I think was our last conversation where you had been kind of moving further away from let's say the just bitcoin only type of conversations and interactions and moving more towards a, let's say a broader political focus or a more realistic pragmatic focus in terms of how you were viewing the political. I'm just curious if you're kind of still at that like approaching with that mentality because you're also building on and around or you know, you're building on Noster with Atlantis or utilizing Nostr obviously like you've been a bitcoiner for a long time. Where, where are you at right now with everything that's happened? Has that shifted for you especially and you just became a dad during all of this. Like there's a lot. What if you could lower your tax bill and stack bitcoin at the same time? Well, by mining Bitcoin with Blockware you can New tax guidelines from the big beautiful bill allow American miners to write off 100% of the cost of their mining hardware in a single tax year. Bit that is right, a 100% write off. So if you have $100,000 in capital gains or income, you can purchase $100,000 worth of miners and offset it entirely. Blockware's mining as a service enables you to start mining right now without lifting a finger. Blockware handles everything from securing the miners to sourcing low cost power to configuring the mining pool. They do it all. You get to stack Bitcoin at a discount every single day or while also saving big come tax season. Get started today by going to mining.blockware solutions.com TitCoin Again, that's mining.blockware solutions.com titcoin Use the code TitCoin to get $100 off your first miner when using the Blockware marketplace. Of course, none of this is tax advice from me. Go speak with the team at Blockware to learn more. One more time. That is mining.blockwaresolutions.com whether you're mining bitcoin, buying Bitcoin or earning bitcoin, you need to make sure you keep those coins safe by going to Bitbox Swiss Walker and using the promo code walker for 5% off the easy to use fully open Source Bitcoin only Bitbox 02 hardware wallet. Then get your coins off the exchange and into your own self custody. With Bitcoin. Ripping your stack will soon be worth a heck of a lot more in fiat value than it is today. So make sure you take the time to lock your security down tight with Bitbox. Plus, I cannot emphasize enough that the Bitbox 02 is easy as hell to use. Whether you're brand new to bitcoin, it's your first time setting up a hardware wallet or you are a well seasoned psychopath. It is bitcoin only and again fully open source. Head to their GitHub and verify that for yourself. No need to trust me or Bitbox. And when you go to Bitbox Swiss Slash Walker and use the promo code walker, not only do you get 5% off, but you also help support this podcast. So thank you.
- [14:16]
A
Man, there is like it's a lot has shifted. It's. It's almost like I'm in the and we're all in the middle of like this sort of tumultuous storm, right? And I feel in a, in a, in a weird way vindicated because for, for a long time, you know, you've got people from both sides of the aisle saying, you know, our bitcoin is about sort of like peace, love and freedom and all this sort of stuff, you know, the sort of the libertarian bent and you know, there's even books out there talking about like the progressive and leftist case for bitcoin and stuff like that. And you know, I've always, you know, maybe I was one of the earlier kind of like right wing bitcoiners and I think I really tried to early on make clear that hey, you know, leftism is not just about, you know, the people who are sort of leftist oriented and not just magically created by a money printer. It's like there's a, there's a deep psychological issue here at play and to not take these people seriously is, could result in, you know, bad things happening. And I know, it's just, it's, it's sick to me that, you know, you, you get some young innocent girl can step on a train and just literally get stabbed in the fucking neck. Like, holy shit. That, like I couldn't get that scene out of my head for days. And it, it shook me up. And I don't know, man, it, it made me all the more militant in my opinions that, you know, these kind of people, this kind of ideology can't be tolerated. And it's, you know, a lot of people always say, oh, you know, it's not about left or right, you know, it's the state and this and that. But I've, you know, my, my position has become more and more, as I think you use the right word, pragmatic, is that there is no sort of imaginary state that doesn't include a state. Right? Like the sort of the libertarian fantasy that we can somehow replace the nation state with, you know, a bunch of large scale corporations or insurance, you know, companies that can, you know, ultimately like, you know, if you, if you really press libertarians on all of their theory, everything ends up amounting to the market will solve for it. Insurance basically is the final economic sort of backstop to all things that could potentially go wrong. You know, I've, I've really come to believe that that's horseshit. I think, you know, the, the concept of a collection of people will always exist and the question should not be whether we have a state or not. The question should Be. How can men and women of, of exceptional character and virtue be in the driver's seat? That, that should always. Because as soon as you leave a vacuum, the parasites, the uglies, the envies, the idiots gain hold of it and then stuff like this happens. So I think my, my position has become more like, hey, the, the practical reality is that power will and always will exist. Power is, Power is more likely to be channeled by those who can organize well, it can't be channeled by the individual. Like this sort of idea of extreme individualism is something also that I, and I think we discussed this last time, but something that I've moved away from a little bit. I even gave a talk about it in Prague where I said, sort of it's time we killed the sovereign individual and started putting together the sovereign tribe or the sovereign collective, which is much more important because the sovereign individual is weak. And I gave a story about how I learned that firsthand during the lockdowns, actually, when, you know, I got, I got arrested four times on airlines for not putting my mask on. And I refused under any circumstance. And I would always imagine to myself, I thought, you know, imagine if there was like 10 dudes that all just said, no, fuck you, we're not putting our mask on, guaranteed the airline wouldn't do shit. But, but it was, it was because they could pick on one person that they decided to, to play, you know, Gestapo commies. So anyway, I think where I'm getting with all of this is that, you know, there's that saying. It's like you can. I can't remember exactly what it was, so I'll butcher it. But like, you can ignore politics, but politics won't ignore you.
- [19:00]
B
So it's like, you may not care about politics, but politics cares about you.
- [19:04]
A
Something to that, yeah, yeah, something to that effect. So it's. I think it's incumbent on those of us who have the capacity to do anything and say anything to do that and say stuff. Now, doing is much more important than saying, and the doing is going to vary amongst different people. Some people's doing might be building stuff. Some people's doing might be getting political, getting, you know, running a podcast, going to universities, like Charlie Koch was doing, whatever the case is. So everyone doing is going to be different. But yeah, man, ultimately I, I think I've come to the realization that more and more what I, what I wrote in this freaking thing here, man, unfortunately, like, it's not a shill of the book, but it's like I, I said in there. Capital is not enough. The character has to count as well. And there's a, you know, the world, as you said, it's. There's a turning point here and we need to lean into the, the kind of the, you know, it would be a fucking shame for these two events to kind of be forgotten and lost in the malaise of the next current thing. Right? Like, these things need to be remembered as much as they are painful and used to continue fueling the kind of cleanup that has to occur in order for stuff like this not to happen again. And people may not like it, but that's actually going to take. It's going to take some strictness. It's going to take, you know, the implementation of some things that people don't like. There was a, There was a great tweet I saw which is, you can't escape violence. You have to choose your violence. And it was like a photo of Daniel Perry or whatever his name is, choking the guy out on the train or, you know, Irina getting stabbed, like, pick which one. And that's. That I think, is a reality not a lot of people want to admit because they're sort of more comfortable saying, oh, yeah, fix the incentives, get rid of the central bank and everything else will be fine. Well, it's not. There's. There's some deeper psychological, cultural problems that need to be dealt with. And that's, that's got a. That's got a. That's going to require action today with stuff that's just not going to look sound and feel nice to our liberal conditioned minds, because that's what we've, we've been living in that paradigm for the last 50, 60, 70 years. And yeah, it's going to sound extreme, it's going to sound racist and bad and this and that, but it's got to happen in order for these other worst things to not to happen again.
- [21:45]
B
I think people, we've. We've gotten to this point where the idea of the state has become so corrupted, like, there is nothing inherently evil about, quote, the state, right? It's like it's. It doesn't have any wants or desires or anything. It is, you know, nothing but a collection of men and women. But this idea, and I always go back to, to Bastiat for this, which is, you know, what, what is the. Like, where does the state come from? Like, it starts with, like, the law. Well, like. And why do you have the law? Well, the law is there to organize for the collective defense of private property. The, the law is Literally just there to protect private property. That also that the most private form of property is you. Your, Your, you know, your own body, right, Your, Your life. So you're organizing for that collective defense. The state exists to enforce the law. What does that mean in reality? That you are giving a group of people the. You were giving them the permission to enact violence on your behalf because you have decided that that is ultimately better than any time somebody wrongs you, you string them up from a tree, you know, like, because we've decided, you know what, it's actually better to be a little bit more civilized about this and to say, yeah, like, and also, you know, most people don't want to get their hands dirty. Another thing that it comes down to. But, like, that is the whole. That is the really the sole purpose of the state is to enforce violence on behalf of the rest of society. Now, it turns out that this doesn't represent the people they rep. Yes, the people they represent. To be very clear, there not just some, like, behemoth state that exerts violence. Now, the problem is that, and this is what Bastia laid out a long time ago, this is not a novel concept. But the state exists to enforce the law, to protect the individual from the plunderers. But the state has become the plunderer. This is the problem. The state has become the plunderer. The state will use its monopoly on violence. And this is where the monopoly on the money printing comes in. Because you have an unlimited monopoly on violence then too, to be able to enforce what they have as a perverted law. And that's where you get into a problem is because. And this is what you see where you have. When your point about choose your type of violence, this is what it comes down to. But the reality is that it should actually be neither of those. If the state was actually doing what it was supposed to do, it would be neither of those things happening. It wouldn't be Irinating getting her throat slit, and it wouldn't be Daniel Penny needing to choke out a guy because apparently there's no actual law and order in any of these, any of these cities. Like, it would be the state making sure that neither of those things happen because both of those people who committed those crimes, not Daniel Penny being the one who committed a crime, I think he was trying to keep everybody else safe. Right? But the, the people that are committing violence should have had violence committed against them by the state probably a long time ago, but they did not, because we have a perverted state that is not actually protecting the private property of the individual in any meaningful way. And they are themselves becoming the plunderer and also enabling other plunderers at the same time. And that completely destabilizes any meaningful enactment of society. It literally breaks society at its core. When you have people that are supposed to be keeping everyone else safe, that's like what's been agreed. And those people are not only not keeping anyone safe, but are actively encouraging the violence ultimately by their actions. Like, I'm not saying that they're saying, yes, go kill that person. I'm saying that their actions are what enable that to happen in the first place. And I think this is a long roundabout way of saying, like, I don't think we ever live in a purely stateless society. Because a state is ultimately just like it's you, you want a community, you want a tribe, you are stronger that way. And you will organize for your collective defense of private property. And then you've just created a state again. And yes, cryptographic tools enable the individual in cyberspace and to a limited extent in physical space to have more defenses, more asymmetric defense. But most of that is in cyberspace because when you get into the physical realm, physical violence is still what rules the day. It doesn't matter if you have your cryptographic keys and your cryptographic identity. If somebody puts a bullet in your head, well, you're gone. And no amount of cryptography is going to save you. So I think that's where we're at. And obviously we both. This is something that I think is riled up a lot of us a lot seeing these, because it's just so blatant. Like, it's just, it's just so obvious that like something is really, really, really deeply broken. And I do think a huge part of that is the money. I also think there is something inherently just disgusting and anti human about the, let's say the extreme leftist ideology. It's not to say that extreme right wing ideology is anything better. I don't think extremes generally are great. But man, I mean, if we just want to compare like orders of magnitude, communism's killed like an order of magnitude or more people than fascism. So like, if you really want to talk about, like, if you want to. I was having this discussion with somebody the other night. They're like, well, communism is not inherently bad. I'm like, again, it doesn't matter. It doesn't matter because it's killed hundreds of millions of people. So like, I don't know. Now I'm ranting.
- [27:09]
A
But yeah, no, no, no, it's, it's a. Look, it's a hard discussion to have and it's a hard discussion to have in public as, you know, you get labeled things very quickly. And I think, you know, we should both for our own, you know, public sanity and everything like, you know, maybe just keep it there. But it's like, yeah, there is, there is degrees of, of evil and one thing is generally more of a reaction to the other thing. Right. You know, and sort of to me, you know, communism is like a, you know, an extreme leftism is a, is a disease and a sickness. The extreme, extreme right is usually what happens to sensible people and people who, because we are naturally, you know, structured and ordered societies. Order is a more right leaning thing. Structured and ordered societies are generally more right wing. And what happens is that they end up going extreme when the deranged fucking left send them that way, right? You end up getting this massive polarity which is why things happen the way they did in history. Post the Bolsheviks, post Weimar, post etc, all of these things were extreme leftist movements. So you know, we shouldn't have to like fascism is a, There was, what's his name, the guy who wrote that fiction book, that guy, Devon Erickson. Yeah, he, he did a great tweet about this. He's like, fascism is an allergic reaction to extreme communism. That's what it is. And, and that's the best way to sort of think about it. It's, it's, it's not something you want to instantiate because you don't want to make everything so strict and so hierarchical. And so like, because if you think like if, if communism is the idea of being, everything's being equal and flat, fascism is sort of the other way which is everything is hierarchical and sort of excellence driven. Now if I had the choice, I know which one I would pick. I would certainly pick the excellence and hierarchical. The thing is it's the, the more you swing to the extreme, FASC gets steep. It becomes an extremely uncomfortable Mount Everest instead of a nice sort of hill that you can hike. Right? So that happens as a, as a result, as an allergic reaction to extreme leftism which occurs more in civilization. Because envy is much more, I guess, insidious. Like envy is like a fucking cancer that spreads and you know, it becomes a sickness to try and bring everyone down. And then those that don't want to be brought down first do their best to avoid all of it until the point where they just get pushed, pushed, push, push, pushed until they're like, okay, I will not tolerate this anymore and I don't care. And you're getting thrown out or you're getting eliminated or whatever the case is, and shit gets ugly. But it's, it's just unfortunate because, you know, then the, the allergic reaction gets the bad rap, you know, not the thing that caused it. You know, it's the symptom that gets the bad rap, not the cause.
- [30:17]
B
It's maybe the last thing I'll. I'll say on this is just that, because I do want to talk about positive things. Yeah, but, but American Hodl had a really great analogy for this. We, we did a session after, after Charlie Kirk was brutally assassinated in front of his children. And we were all just kind of like needing to talk through this. And he pointed out, he's like, the left views, like, for the left, violence is like a knob that they kind of tune up or tune down. But it's always like, there's always a certain amount of it. And you know, it may like. And they turn it up when they need to to, you know, they're to stoke the fires. Right. With the right. It's just an on off switch.
- [31:00]
A
It's just. It's either.
- [31:01]
B
It's either no violence or kill everybody. And he's like. And you don't want either of those things. Like, you don't want the left's volume knob and you don't want the right turning that switch on. Unfortunately, it looks like we might get both. And that's like. So, you know. Well, fuck. Anyway, on that happy note, there are. There are reasons to be. To be positive and optimistic. One of those reasons is all the incredible open source freedom tech being built on Bitcoin and on Nostr, you are actively building some awesome. I would call it social tech or network tech. I actually wanted to. I read your article that you did in Bitcoin magazine, kind of this beyond the feed. I really enjoyed it. I thought it had some really important points that I want to dig into about where we're at right now with Noster adoption, specifically why we're there and what it takes to kind of get to that next level. Do you maybe. I'm trying to think of the best place to start here, but do we maybe want to start with kind of where your article starts a little bit, which is like where we're at right now with Nostr as you see it. Just to set the stage a little bit, because I think that's really helpful for describing the way that you went about building Satlantis. So if you can kind of give. Like, where do you think we're at right now in terms of NOSTR adoption? Has it lived up to what we thought? Are we just early? What's your read of the situation?
- [32:23]
A
Yeah, so maybe I'll even take a step further back.
- [32:25]
B
Yeah, yeah.
- [32:26]
A
So there was. I wrote a little post that I haven't published yet. And maybe the best thing for me to do is actually read that out because I think it, it gives us a good place to, to start from. So let me just find where I wrote this. And it's sort of about the concept of, of. Of NOSTR in general. So here it is. It's called, it's called category error. It's like just a short excerpt, but it says Bitcoin is more important than the idea of Bitcoin, but the idea of Noster is more important than Noster. So with bitcoins, the actual chain, it's every record back to the genesis block. The fact that all of the economic activity is done there and that everyone is in sync. That matters. People can take the bitcoin idea and apply it elsewhere, which is why we have so many shitcoins, but none will ever be Bitcoin. Bitcoin is a true zero to one phenomenon. It's a one off. And if it fails, society is really up shit creek without a paddle. With Nostr, on the other hand, it's actually the idea that matters, not the implementation itself. The entire protocol could technically be abandoned tomorrow and nothing truly of value would be lost. Social media content is worthless, and so are throwaway digital identities. Like neither of those are inherently valuable. And sure, some people will built up digital reputations and follower graphs, but because those reputations are actually associated with a person, they can always be rebuilt elsewhere. Which is why when people get banned off Twitter or whatever, they create a new account. We're back. So, you know, is it annoying? Sure, but is it disastrous? Not at all. So the concept of NOSTR is about a semantic web and that is a great concept. And it will be attempted again and again and again until the best approach is found and the most activity converges on said network. For now, it looks like Noster is the horse to bet on. But worst case, if it fails and is replaced tomorrow by something else, that's totally fine. So that's sort of like the, the framing that I wanted to, to start this off on is, you know, Noster is a concept, and I think people have talked about this before. It's. It's not inherently new or novel like the Idea of having a bearer instrument as your identity and using that to not log into websites, but to unlock access to a website, that was the dream of the Internet from the beginning. It just never happened that way. Like, if we want to think about this in terms of a mental model, if you think of the Internet as sort of these four layers, right, the tcp, ip, all that sort of shit, and applications living on top of that, Identity has always been a feature inside the applications, which is why we have the feature built in every single application. And you know, you, you have to log in to all of these different applications because your identity lives on the client side, on the application side. So what Nostr and any other Semantic web proposal does is it pushes the identity down to the protocol level, so that way the identity is held by the user themselves and they can unlock or get access to any application that is built above it. So that's conceptually what we're talking about here. So Nostr just happens to be, of all of them, probably the most robustly kind of developed, the one that has probably the most activity on it, the one that got a little bit of that early critical mass, which is why we decided to bet on it as a business, we decided to build with it. But what I'm trying to, trying to sort of do myself personally as a business owner, but also just as. As someone who is interested in the space, is I'm trying to take a pragmatic look at it, which is why I sort of did that comparison. Like Bitcoin is Bitcoin and it, it is the implementation that matters. But Noster is Noster and it's not the implementation, it's the idea that matters.
- [36:30]
B
And, and I think that makes, that makes a ton of sense. If I can ask you something here too, just. Yeah. Do you think, because you talked about that early burst and there was certainly a large burst and just maybe very quick. For anybody who doesn't know what Nostra is, who is listening to this, there's multiple other shows I've done with this. You and I have talked about it, I think at length as well. Notes and other stuff transmitted by. Realize I'm streaming it live on the show, live on Nostr right now. You could just Google it. You can go to. This is not going to be necessarily a introductory course to Nostr, but one thing I did want to ask you about was that early push that Nostr got, especially right after Jack posted about it. That was the initial push, then Snowden. Those were huge, huge waves, huge influxes of Users. Now if you compare, Nostr had a head start on bluesky. Bluesky. Now, in terms of user base. Now granted there's a specific political bent to its user base, which we don't need to get sucked back into that. But like, how do you think that was? Like to me that that was almost surprising as it was happening. Why do you think that? We saw Noster's growth start to kind of stagnate a little bit and Blue Sky's growth like really go up. Even though Blue sky was like a larger barrier to entry, there was like a wait list and all these, you had to have like a code to get in there. What's your read on that?
- [37:55]
A
Yeah, so let's, let's dissect it. Very good question. I think there's a couple things. One is that messaging matters, right. So the messaging around Nostra was freedom of speech. It attracted bitcoiners. Bitcoiners are as much as they like to call themselves in the middle, they are more naturally right wing. It just happens that way. Sure there are some left wing bitcoiners and all this sort of stuff, but they're kind of more delusional than anything else. So you've sort of got this like natural kind of community that is already like that. And then the, the positioning clashed directly. So, so at the time Nostra was launched, Twitter and all this sort of stuff was still perceived as a, anti freedom of speech and everything like that. But by the time Nostra like sort of, you know, the clients got good and everything like that, which the clients are 10 times better now, 100 times better than they were a couple ago, right?
- [38:58]
B
Yes.
- [38:59]
A
By the time that sort of occurred, the, the, the winds, you know, the, the, the tailwinds have shifted. Now the perception is that Rumble substack and Twitter are freedom of speech. Right? So the messaging there. And even though we know that technically speaking Noster is superior in all of these things, the trouble is that when people hear it, like I, I downloaded Rumble the other day to watch your guys, your guys show. Right. And you, you, I think you made a comment like something like a thousand views on YouTube and 80,000 on Rumble, right. What's the opening statement on, on the Rumble app when you download it? Free speech something, right? Like the free speech platform. So that space in people's brains is already filled and Noster is sort of competing as a protocol with, with that messaging. And I don't want to say it's losing, but it's certainly not out competing Rumble or Substack Or Twitter in that department. Right. Whereas on the other side, Bluesky decided to get rid of free speech and anything like that. And they just literally, the invite only actually helped them significantly is they just position themselves to build a community around Elon the right X. Yeah. And that was just a very clear message and it just attracted like, you know, moths to a flame. Everyone that wanted to move away from that thing. So they just ended up there. So, so that's sort of my, my best analysis here is it, it's got nothing to do with the protocol. And this is sometimes, you know, this will drive builders crazy. It's like, you know, you'll sit there and look at it and be like, oh wait a minute, like Noster is actually better for you unhinged leftists and you know, you right wingers and free speech guys. Like, it's technically better but the, the messaging, what, what people perceive is different to what the, what the underlying technology actually suggests. And, and this is so important but it's, it's, it's hard to work with. It's hard to, it's hard to capitalize on. And in my opinion, it's one of the reasons why, you know, I've been watching the stats and I, I put some charts in the actual article, but someone reached out to me and said, oh, you know that those statistics websites are not being maintained anymore. So maybe the data is not accurate or whatever. I don't know when it stopped being maintained, but I've been watching those stats for the last year and a half and I can tell you it's just been flat. So whether it was. Stopped being maintained last month or three months ago or whatever, like the, the, the flatlining is real. I, I think and I get that sense also from Nostra. I mean, you know, there's people doing good work onboarding people and stuff like that, but the, it doesn't feel like there's been a new wave, anything of the order of magnitude of what we had previously. So, so anyway, that, that's sort of where I'll, I'll shut up. But that's.
- [42:03]
B
I was just saying. And I appreciate that. I think I agree with that analysis wholeheartedly. Primals user count, which I know is getting more actively maintained than maybe some of these other sites. 234,931 and I don't know exactly. I know they do some various filtering some different things to like okay, these are obviously bot accounts or these, you know, but like, so theirs is probably maybe a little bit more honest. But the Point is that, like, I think that that's lower than where people thought it would be. Now, that said, what always surprises me, though, even. Or perhaps it shouldn't be surprising as much as it is, like, what's heartening is that even though we haven't seen this massive explosion in users, or perhaps because of it, the people that are on Nostr who have stuck around, who have continued to use this, continued to really actively engage on it, people like you and me and a bunch of other folks that we know on Nostr, it's a very. It's a very active space. It's a very positive, very, like, let's say, building focus space, whatever it is that you're building. It's also just like, it's a good space for dialogues and there is less of that, let's say that X toxicity that you get sucked into, you have more algorithmic options as well. Now Primal and a bunch of other clients have built out various ways to do that, to kind of choose your own adventure. So it is still a great, Like, I've still. My experience on Nostr continues to get better because my experience on Nostr is not really dictated by the total number of users on there. That said, when it comes to, like, if you know, right now you're looking at building a business and using Nostr and Nostr technology as like, part of that backbone of it. So maybe this is a good place to kind of talk about. First of all, why are you doing that? And do you. One of the things you talked about in your article a little bit was the. The difference between kind of like the social media versus the social network. And I thought that was a really important distinction that kind of. We started out with social networks back in the day, and then it got towards social media. So can you maybe. First, the first question would be kind of talk about how you see that difference. And then second, why did you decide to put your eggs kind of in the snowstorm basket and build on this protocol?
- [44:20]
A
Thank you. Great question. Let's start, yeah. With the social media versus social network. So for people who are old, like us will remember MySpace and Facebook and all that sort of stuff. And, you know, these things were the opposite of media. These things were like media was where your parents sat there looking at the TV and flicking, you know, the news channels and watching the news. Right. You know, fuck are they doing? You know, so we all migrated to. To the social networks and we wanted to know what our friends were doing and stuff like that. And I don't know if you remember like the old activity feed that was on Facebook, right, Your wall, it's like, oh, you know, your friend checked in here, they did that, you know, this person's birthday. And there was like, it was more, it was more about activity from the people you were connected to and less about content. Now, over time, it became a little bit more about content, but it was still your social network. And you know, you sort of had the emergence, the natural emergence of early virality, which was content that people were more likely to engage with. And then of course, that leads you to the next step, which is, well, if people are engaging with content, well, it's creating more screen time. So therefore we can probably sell some ads here. And then that starts to lead you down the path of, well, maybe the metric we should be measuring is engagement and screen time, because that's what gets you clicks and advertising and all this sort of stuff. And these are the things, it's like you, you get more of what you measure, right in life. And that's with anything personally, business, industry, whatever the case is. If that's, you know, if you want to measure GDP and you want to like turn your nation into just an economic zone, then you will certainly immigrate everybody in because you'll just replace your own people because it makes economic sense, purely right? So if that's your metric, you, you know, don't be surprised that you replace your own people in the process and turn it into whatever the you turn it into, right? So it's like there's some things that you might want to measure that may not be purely economic in nature. So anyway, coming, coming back to the social media thing, it's around 2016, Google's DeepMind team developed sort of like the first real algorithmic Recommendation engine for YouTube. And it was, they were trying to solve the problem, which was they had people would watch a video on YouTube and then they would go do something else, right? They wanted to increase the chances that somebody would be suggested a video next that they were likely to watch. So they wanted to increase the screen time and they nailed it. They, I think they increased it by 300% or 3,000%, something ridiculous like that. And it was copied. That same approach was copied by the ByteDance team in, in China for, for their apps at the time. They had a news app and they had an early version of TikTok back then. Then of course Facebook copied it. They were like, wait a minute, we should do something similar as well. Recommendation engines increase screen time. So they started doing that and the Thing is, from the beginning of time, human beings are wired in such a way that we will engage with danger or hysteria much more quickly than we'll engage with just normal stuff, which is, you know, the, the classic saying, if it bleeds, it leads, right? So media is just naturally the thing that alerts you to something. It's the fucking red flashing button or the red flashing siren or the warning sign. And what's happened over the last, particularly of the last four or five years is that these algorithms, and I don't say this in a way that it's conspiratorial, although I'm sure some of it is conspiratorial, but they've just metastasized naturally because of the human condition, and they have become less and less and less about the network that you have socially and more and more and more about the media and the engagement. So here we are, we find ourselves in 2025 where everything is some level of hysteria. And it's, it's very tiring. Like I just told you before we got on, on the call, like, I just deleted my Twitter for, you know, maybe I'll reactivate it or not, but I've just, like, not just deleted it from my phone, but, like deactivated my account completely because I just need a break from the madness and the hysteria. But to, to bring that back to Noster is. Nostra does have some sort of, you know, social networking difference now, which is something I like because it's a, it's a much more raw social graph. But I'm not sure that just because we build stuff on Noster and, you know, we're ever actually going to avoid that problem. I think if the, if the end goal is to bring, for example, content creators and increase the engagement and to do all the stuff that, like, because I feel like there's a, there's a. I'm trying to say this while I'm thinking, right, I'm chucking a pita teal here. What is the metric we're trying to use to measure success in the Nostra space? Because if it's like, okay, yeah, we're going to defeat Twitter and all this sort of stuff, well, it probably means Noster itself needs to become the new news source, right? Which, because of the human condition, not because of Nostr, not because of the underlying technology or anything like that, but because of the human condition. The companies that are building on Noster, the ones that are probably going to get the, the biggest growth if they're focused on being content, sort of driven businesses will probably have to surface the news or the media. So I don't know if we're gonna end up in the same place. And if that is not the metric, if that is not what we want to do, if we want to sort of keep this social network kind of thing, then maybe we're actually not going to get the, the broad growth that we were sort of thinking on Nostra is like it's going to become the new social layer for the Internet. Maybe that doesn't happen, in which case, maybe it just remains a small network for half a million or a million people to communicate on. Is that a bad thing? Maybe not. It's certainly not the, the vision that everyone sort of has espoused that Noster is going to change the Internet. And, you know, we're gonna, we're building a new Internet and all this sort of stuff kind of like, you know, there's these sort of two things that don't work. And then as I was sort of exploring all of this, I was like, you know, is there, is there another use case for a social graph? Is there something else we could do with it? And you know, from the beginning of when we started building Stellantis, you know, we had this one idea and then it evolved and became kind of like TripAdvisor 2.0. And then we're like, okay, can we use the social graph for, you know, more like travel related content and all this sort of shit. And then we realized, okay, you know, where we sort of come to at this point is like, man, getting people to post content on something other than Twitter, TikTok or Instagram is like pulling teeth out of their mouth. Like, it's really, really, really, really hard. Even if you tell them you can just copy and paste the same content like, you know, outside of our little network, no one fucking cares. So, you know, I've come to the point where I'm like, okay, maybe maybe this idea of like a feed and a social thing and everything like that, maybe. Well, at least for us, maybe it's not the right approach. Maybe there's something else we can do with the social graph. So I'll pause there for a minute and we can pull on a couple of those threads that I mentioned maybe about social media networks and everything. But then we can kind of go into where I think we at least have found a pathway that may ultimately be a way to bring a bunch of activity to Nostra that is not as evident or not as directly competitive to Twitter, Instagram, TikTok and Substack.
- [52:19]
B
Yeah. So tons of different things there. One of the things that I think is really the most, it's like this chicken, the egg problem of sort of okay, if you want more people to come use this new social network, this new social protocol, well, they have to have a reason to come there. And I think you described, and this is a way, I've talked about it in the past as well, like it's this push pull dynamic. Right. You either need to be, you know, or thought of it another way. You're running away from something or you're running towards something, right?
- [52:50]
A
Yeah.
- [52:50]
B
So you maybe you're running the running away from is how a lot of the positioning around nostar has been framed so far. I think you're running away from the potential of being censored. You're running away from the centralized algorithms, you know, and you could say, well, no, we're talking about running towards freedom and towards it. But like really that's, that's been kind of the positioning that's ultimately not as. That's effective once you get that push to run away. But until that push is strong enough, you don't run away because there's nothing actually pulling you. Like you're, you. It's, it's a getting smart by force versus getting smart by choice. You're. You're more likely going to get smart by force and then, you know, you know, like, you know, maybe it's too late, but whatever, let's leave that there. The other side is, okay, I'm running towards something. I'm being pulled towards something because of a better user experience, because of a more rich feature set, because it gives me some sort of utility capability, whatever it is, that I don't have where I'm at currently. And I want that. Or it gives me a set of, let's say from the other side, content creators or, you know, whatever people that are producing things that I like and I want to consume more of that are doing that over in this other place and I can't get it anywhere else. I mean, this is honestly on my very, very small scale, this is the reason I live stream only to nostr, because I could live stream everywhere, but I never wanted this to be a live stream show. But I was like, well, if I'm going to do it anywhere, I'm just going to do it on nostr because maybe that's at least a poll for a couple people. If they like the live, they want to see something live, they can only do that here. Now, obviously there's much, much larger creators, podcasters, whatever, than I am, that if they came over to Nostr and said, I'm just going to be posting this type of content here, that would draw a lot of people over. But the question is, what's the incentive for those creators to come over? Because the audience isn't on Nostr yet. They'd be bringing their audience and us telling them, hey, it's the censorship resistant open protocol for communication and hey, you can get bitcoin tips on there. They're like, I'm already making, you know, a million dollars between Spotify and YouTube or whatever. Like, there's not enough incentive. So like that chicken and the egg problem, it's like to get more people over, you need more people there. But like, it's, it's tough. So I mean, is that kind of how you see this right now? That it's like, okay, there's not enough of a push yet for them to run away from something. There's not enough of a pole yet for them to run towards something, to be pulled in by it. So let's create the pull versus just like waiting for the push to happen. Fair characterization.
- [55:27]
A
Yeah. So let's dig into that a little bit more. So the not enough push, certainly. And in fact, I think we've reached the point where we've pushed all the people we're going to push from the censorship resistant angle. I just don't think there's anyone else who gives a fuck, unfortunately. But that's just the case. I think everyone who really, really cares is there already. And then that is further, I think hampered by the fact that the narrative now around Rumble X and Substack is they've kind of like claimed the mind share for anyone who is interested in that anyway, it's done. Like even, even people that have been, I mean, I think I said this in the article, like, even Instagram, as much as we know what it is, like there's stuff that, that floats around on Instagram now that goes viral that you would have 100% got perma banned for six months ago. So it's like even like so, so the culture has shifted. So I feel like that window came down. Maybe that window will reappear. But is it going to reappear two years from now, five years from now, ten years from now? I don't know. I feel like, as you said before, like the turning point has occurred. There's a different expectation now. And it's very hard for these tech companies to go back to what they were in 2021, 2022. Right. So. So I think the push side is sort of done now. The pull side, as you said. If we're going to pull people, these products need to be 10x better. Now, I don't think, and I don't see this as an indictment to anyone. Like, I, first and foremost, I say this on Atlantis, the product that I'm building, we are certainly not fucking 10x better than Instagram or Twitter or any of that sort of stuff. No fucking way. Like there's, you know, and, and even in the Nostra space. I saw a really good post from somebody on Nostra who said, amethyst works really well for me. There's absolutely no reason for me to use another client. So. And then that makes me sort of think it's like, okay, well, we've got Amethyst, we've got Damas, and we've got Primal. My guess is that Primal is certainly the leader in the space. You know, this sort of idea of like many, many clients and anybody can build a client and all that sort of stuff. Okay, well, so, you know, if we build another client and it's the. Another feed of the same people that you follow, like, is that really valuable? Like, I, I don't see the, you know, the, the like, if you're going to build a business, you want to do some, something either different or 10x better, right? I don't think anyone's going to get 10x better than Primal. I think Primal is the gold standard right now. Which kind of leaves you to different. That doesn't. You know, there's one more piece there which is, is Primal 10x better than X? I don't know. I'll leave that up to the audience to decide. Like, you know, there's, there's probably differences in opinion. Like there'll be Noster. Hardcore people will say, yeah, yeah, it's way better because of this, this, this, this, this. You know, there'll be many more people that'll say, you know, X is certainly better because of this is where the audience is, the user experience is smoother, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, all this other shit, right? So there's like differences in opinion on there. But even within the Nostra bubble, you know, it's better or different. So this kind of leads me to where we are now is we tried to do some different stuff with our feed. We tried to create a for you algorithm. We tried to add different things like posting anything from an event to a places carousel, to map pins and icons and all this Sort of stuff. But we found that, you know, people just like getting them to come and create any form of content on a new platform was too hot, like too hard. I would need, need $50 million in our bank account, like to continually go and like cajole people along the way, you know, maybe to go and sponsor Mr. Beast, you know, to come and do something dedicated, you know, on our platform and that's it. Which is not gonna happen.
- [59:31]
B
One video for the 50 million too, you know, exactly. Maybe not a 10 second video from Mr. Beast for 50 million. I'm sure that's honestly not far off of what it would cost.
- [59:41]
A
Touche. So, so, so my then question is like, okay, what the else can we do with this thing? And that's kind of where I've stumbled on to something that was kind of almost always there in the Atlantis messaging and pitch, but kind of got buried under all the social stuff we wanted to do. You know, like we were thinking, oh, you know, we'll get all these travel content creators, we'll get these Nomad content creators, these longevity people and get the, and start creating, we'll start to build a critical mass, you know, now I'm kind of looking at it and I'm like, okay, well done, Alex, you're on drugs. And you thought that, you know, you had unlimited money and you could do all that sort of stuff. No, we can't. How about we build a tool where the social piece is a improvement or it gives the tool an X factor that other similar tools don't have. And then that started making me think it's like, okay, maybe the way that Noster and the social semantic web succeeds is that there's a bunch of fucking tools that get built that replace pre existing tools where the account mechanism for those tools is a public private key pair. It's like, it's just purely like. And I'm not saying that the tool itself needs to necessarily be a Nostra tool. Like you don't need to necessarily create a new nip and you know, make it a standard and that wait for everybody to adopt the standard and all this. No, that stuff can come later. Like the beauty of a protocol is that It'll be here 5, 10, 15 years from now. A business can't operate at the same time frame, right? Like a business has to find product market fit, has to find customers, has to charge customers, has to actually make money, whereas a protocol doesn't. So there's different circumstances here. So maybe the, a better approach or a different approach. Let's not use the word better here. Let's use a different approach here specifically for us and maybe for other people who want to build on Noster is not to try and build another social app, but to try and build a tool where the login involves logging with Noster and the account is actually a npub where. And, and then maybe as an extension to that, the tool utilizes the social graph that is inherent to Nostr to surface some information for said user that might be useful and make the experience better than what you'll find elsewhere. So that's the, that's the ingredients of what I'm trying to play with here is like, like, hey, direct utility tool, social as an enhancer. Can we do something there? And I think, and I think I've stumbled onto something which we can, which we can get into next. But I don't know if you want to dissect that a little bit.
- [62:38]
B
Well, maybe, maybe we'd just like to ask, like, okay, so all of that said then, how do you sum up what Atlantis has become? Like, because there's a, there's a lot there like, so what has this actually evolved into?
- [62:53]
A
Yeah, good question. Even since I published that essay two weeks ago, or whatever it was ten days ago. I actually wrote that about a month ago, so it took me a little while to polish it. It's actually evolved even further. If I had to summarize. What the hell we're doing with Atlantis now is we are going to make the best global events app. Imagine eventbrite meets meetup.com with Bitcoin native payments and ticketing and a social layer to it. So when you are vping to an event, you can actually see who of your network is there. You can see who people that you follow are following and all this sort of stuff. So you get the social layer in there and then we'll add like group chat so that way people can dump telegram and WhatsApp. So you got kind of like events, group chat and bitcoin payments in one. That's it. Like I'm literally turning this into an events app. All the other shit for, you know, where we wanted to do like cities and travel content and nomading and a feed and all this sort of stuff. Maybe we'll come back to that two, three, four, five years from now when we've built a really successful events app. But what fucking hit me like a ton of bricks was Eventbrite. Even Luma. Luma is a fantastic new events app built by some shitcoiners might add, but didn't know that. Yeah, it's built by some Solana guys. Even those apps, they are, they are bound by the fact that you can only do ticketing if you connect stripe. So basically 90% of the world doesn't count, right? So it just hit me, I was like, holy. There is no eventbrite/meetup.com because eventbrite meetup.com is slightly different, right? Event Eventbrite is more about events and ticketing. Meetup.com is more about like community and meetups. It's less about ticketing. But there's something that sort of can live at the nexus of these things that can support both meetups and that can support both, like self serve ticketing events. But you just fucking make bitcoin native in there where the wallet is native. So you download this event app, you can RSVP to any event. You have like this discovery experience, like. So one of the beautiful things about the discovery experience, in fact, if I can share the screen here, I'll share in a second and I'll show you what it looks like. This is something you haven't seen yet. No one's seen this. It's just on my phone at this point is you can discover events happening all around the world and you can one click RSVP to them. And if they have tickets, you can literally zap the fucking ticket and you're in and you have the ticket on your phone and everything. And then the Nostra piece obviously is not just the bitcoin payments there, but it's also the fact that as I said, you can see who you're connected with based on your social graph, you will discover events that are more relevant to you. Right? And based on your interest graph. So if you are following a bunch of bitcoiners, that tells Atlantis that you're interested in bitcoin. So therefore maybe bitcoin events come up in your list. You know, if you're following a bunch of nomads and travelers, maybe nomad events and stuff like that. So you can make the experience better through the social graph and you can get some extra perks. But ultimately the tool is an events app and the problem we're solving is making events global and ticketing global through Bitcoin. So now you have Bitcoin and Noster in the stack, but you're not a bitcoin company, you're not a noster client, you're an events app. But these things power it. So. So that's the kind of the shift in mentality that I've been making, and that's how. That's a. That's a long way to answer what the fuck this thing has become.
- [66:27]
B
No, no, no. I think. I think that that makes a lot of sense. And honestly, I, you know, thinking about it now, I honestly did not. Did not realize there weren't any kind of, let's say, bitcoin native event apps out there. It's honestly, like, kind of. Kind of shocking, right?
- [66:43]
A
Yeah.
- [66:43]
B
And that is the biggest point of friction or needing to download a different event app in, like, if you're going to events in other countries or whatever, needing to get, you know, whatever event app you should be using over there, and it just like you're. And then there's another email list and then there's like, it's. It's actually not like that great of an experience. Illuma is like, was pretty good. I've used, like, they kind of came out of nowhere, and I've used that a few times for. For events recently over the summer. But again, it's like you're. You're cutting out still most of the world there, you know, So I, I think this is a. A nice step forward there. Do you want to. Do you want to kind of share the. Your screen now and just talk through maybe some of the. The features that y' all have built out?
- [67:26]
A
I would love to, but it seems like it's going to make me quit because I don't have the permissions. Bummer. Okay.
- [67:35]
B
Okay. Well, you know, I can if you want. I mean, I have your. I have your. The website pulled up, if that's at all helpful.
- [67:42]
A
No, it's. It's only on the app. It's the app experience. Oh, good.
- [67:46]
B
Okay. I would love to show this. If you. If you end up like, doing any screen recordings, this or whatever, I can always. I can always add them in the show notes, like with a little. Little call to action there. Damn. It doesn't give you the option to. To share here. I thought I had it turned on for everyone.
- [68:03]
A
Yeah, it gives me the option, but I need to quit Chrome and come back, which is gonna probably kill. Yeah. Yeah. Okay.
- [68:10]
B
Okay then. Yeah. Yeah. Okay, well, we'll have to imagine it, but you want to. You want to talk through it a little bit then.
- [68:17]
A
Yeah. So I mean, it's a imagine. So you know what Spotify looks like, right?
- [68:22]
B
Yeah.
- [68:23]
A
And you know how on Spotify you've got this kind of like, discovery experience? So it's got, like, you click on Discover and you've got, like, artists and playlists and songs and new stuff and everything. So imagine that experience, but for events and for places, right? So. So we're still keeping like, events and places in there, but like, events is kind of becoming more the flagship now. But yeah, you can see you've got like these horizontal carousels now of like popular events, new events, events for you, meetups, conferences, bitcoin events, if you know. So there's like multiple carousels. So you can imagine that sort of replaces how you would. It looks and feels very much like Spotify. So the experience is less like a vertical scroll of content, more like a horizontal set of carousels for stuff that you might find relevant. And you click into the event, you got the event details there. You can one click rsvp, you know, event hosts now. So we've done a bunch of stuff there for event hosts to do, like gated events, private events, you know, be able to hide the location, all this sort of stuff that probably considered standard in event apps in the world today, but certainly nothing exists in the world that is a bitcoin native event app that has all of these features. And that's. Man, Hindsight is always 2020. I wish I could go back and slap my earlier self from 12 months ago and be like, you idiot, don't fucking build all of these things. Just get the damn events app right first and then we can build the other stuff. But obviously I'm retarded. So I decided to build all the other stuff along with events. Like, we practically built six apps in one. We built fucking meetup.com, we built Google Maps in there, we built like a whole fucking Instagram look, we built all of this sort of shit in there and like, we worked our asses off over the last 18 months, like Bled ourselves dry and we're like, oh, wait a minute, the events piece looks like that's where the fit is. So we're there now and in the next, like two, three weeks, you're going to see like a really slick release that is going to be public that just is. It's beautiful. And I think it's going to be the first useful nostr tool that is not a social app. I think, I know I could be wrong. Maybe, maybe there is other stuff out there, but I'm not aware of it.
- [71:00]
B
And on the kind of nostro integration side, would you say that the biggest benefit of that, obviously, besides, okay, you've got the, you got the sign in, you got the identity piece, right? That's one side. But there's also that kind of social graph side. So being able to having that social graph, that trusted network, do you view that as kind of one of the primary value adds then for this in that it enhances that discoverability not only because, okay, yes, you're interested in these things. We're going to show you more of these things based on your intro preferences that you put in, but also because you can say, oh, this particular event is either being attended by or has been previously attended by or is being recommended by these people within my Nostra social graph. Therefore, I know, okay, this is probably something of a, a high quality event. Like because they're only going to be, you know, there's, there's no way to like spoof that or you know, tied to their, their public key. So is that kind of where you see that additional value add coming in 100?
- [71:56]
A
Yeah, like I, I can see like if so. But there'll be some privacy settings here where you can sort of make public whether you're, you know, you want your, want it to be public for people to know whether you're going somewhere or not. But you could maybe set it to your mutuals. So I can see that hey, you know, Walker is hosting this event or Walker's going to this event. Okay, that's sick. And the, the fact that you are going to that event and if you and I sort of sharing our mutual activity there, I will actually be more likely to discover it because I follow you, whereas maybe I wasn't going to see that before. Like, like if you RSVP to or registered for an event on eventbrite, I'm never gonna know that in a million years. Yeah, like, but, but here I will actually be more likely to discover that and I will be more likely to discover the one that says Walker is going to. Hodl is going, Matodel is going, Marty, Ben is going and all this sort of stuff. Because there's a concentration of people in my social graph that are there and it'll show me like these kind of, you know, the, the follow icons that we're used to. It's kind of like on, you know, this is on Primal. It's like you can see 17 people follow this person. So it's like, it'll, it'll show like a couple icons plus 17 people going here. And that's like people that you know. So it immediately creates a way for you as a potential attendee and guest to an event, like to get some real social information because we make these decisions socially anyway. It's like you Know when you go to a fucking event, you're like, yeah, I want to go there because I know some people and at the same time for hosts. So for people who are hosting events and creating events, it gives them natural discoverability in a way they were not going to get in the noise that is eventbrite or meetup.com or loom or any of this other shit. So I, dude, I have not been this excited about the app since we first started building it. I'm like, okay, we finally like, we went halfway around the world to come back to the same point and be like, okay, well actually this is the piece and I'm gonna make this piece so good with the guys. It like mobile, native, all that sort of stuff. It's going to be sexy as hell, I can promise you that.
- [74:09]
B
I, I believe it. I'm, I'm curious too because obviously you've got, there's a lot of, let's say, algorithmic factors that are going into this. Like, I assume that you're like trying to make the experience very curated. Is there any sort of algorithmic choice that goes into this? Can you talk at all about like, how this, you know, obviously you don't have to, you know, give a, give away everything but like, as far as, as it is relevant, how have you incorporated kind of some AI algorithmic selection into helping, you know, combining the social graph with the interest with all these, like you're pulling together all these pieces. Is there like weighting that you're using to say, okay, actually, you know, this person's noster social graph is, you know, kind of the most important factor here? Yes, they said they like these other things, but we can probably say, look, they've, you know, they've attended these events in the past with these people. We know that there's almost a certain possibility they'll want to go to this one. How do you, how do you begin to kind of weight the user stated user preference versus the, you know, kind of the user's passive social graph?
- [75:05]
A
Totally. So right now, way more basic, like what you're referring to is all the cool shit that we'll be able to do when we have more data, more users and more intelligence. Right? So right now there's, there's this thing that we built on Atlantis which is what we call an interest graph, for lack of a better term. And it's when you first, when a new person first signs up to Atlantis, they get, they go through this like four step onboarding process where they're selecting a bunch of different interests. And we went super wide with that. I don't know if I made the right decision there. Maybe we should have gone a little bit more narrow. But we wanted to, like, as I said originally, we were trying to go for this more like a content approach. Like we were trying to be a social app first with these tools embedded. But now that I've kind of inverted that paradigm, we're being more of a tool first with a social element. I think we're going to simplify those four pages and try and do it a bit more like, you know, Netflix, how they sort of ask you when you first sign up, like pick from three movies and then it kind of builds the algo for you. I think we'll go with something a little bit more like that where if you, you, for example, pick Bitcoin, Carnivore and Grounding, I'm pretty sure I know what your values are. You know what I mean? We can probably suggest certain events. We're not going to suggest to you the gathering of vegan leftists on the app. Right. So there's probably stuff that we can infer. But ultimately we built this interest graph where people can select a bunch of their interests and. And selecting the interests is akin to building your own algorithm. That's literally what it is. So what we have done then is every single time a host runs an event, a host can tag their event with certain interests. And that interests, the interests that they tag it with come from the same pool that people use when they create their account. So it's like, it's really, it's fucking 101 stuff. It's basic. So if, you know, if you've selected, you know, in your interests, like Bitcoin, meat, whatever the fuck else, and you know, there's a bit of more complexity that we've done because we've got relationships between stuff. So if you've maybe selected carnival, that might relate back to steak, for example. So if someone is doing a barbecue event, your carnival interest might relate back to that. Right, so, so, so there is a, you know, some relational stuff there, but effectively you as an event host can tag your event with up to five interests and that then helps the discoverability beyond just the social graph. So it's a mix of social and interest graph and then everything has some weighting associated to it, right? So there's a weighting based on people that are directly in your network who also have similar interests. Right? So that's the top weighting. Then there is a weighting for people who are in your social graph who either don't have the same interest or maybe have not selected interests, then there is a waiting for people who are not in your social graph but have the same interests. Then there is a waiting for people who maybe are two steps removed from your social graph with similar. So each of these things and then that kind of factors into the recommendation of which events you see and all this sort of stuff. So, you know, as you can see, this kind of stuff can get like infinitely fucking complex, which is why, you know, companies like Facebook and all this sort of stuff have like all these science data scientists and like that. We are by no means anywhere near as sophisticated as any of those guys, but the fact that those ingredients now exist means that we can move towards making this stuff really? Really. I guess I don't want to use the word intelligent here, but I like to use the word like, feel magical. Like you want to open an app and you want it to suggest something that, that, you know, is like right for you and you're like, oh, that's actually fucking cool. I would definitely go there.
- [78:55]
B
Surprised.
- [78:56]
A
Yeah, yeah, exactly. Yeah, yeah.
- [78:58]
B
Well, let me ask you too, because obviously in the earlier part of this conversation, we discussed the fact that there's these various problems when it comes to bringing folks on to Noster. Now in your case, you know, like, I don't even know if we want to talk about it as bringing them on to Noster. Like, the goal is not that per se. The goal is to give them a really good experience when it comes to events and places, et cetera. But how, how are you guys looking at this from? Let's say, obviously this is a global application, but from a geographic perspective in terms of, you know, this another chicken, the egg problem, which is you want to get a lot of event hosts on there in order to have people use an event based app. Right. How are you going about targeting that? How are you kind of trying to bring folks on? Are you focusing in a lot of markets at once? Are you targeting certain markets specifically? What's kind of that rollout looking like for you guys? Just in order to make sure, like you get sort of this, this critical mass where it becomes genuinely useful for both the hosts and for the users.
- [79:55]
A
So three pieces to this piece. Number one is we need to, obviously instead of picking a jurisdiction or a locality, what we're picking is a theme or a, or a movement or a community. And the fucking obvious one is bitcoiners. Right? Like, but, you know, every single bitcoin meetup and Bitcoin event. And I'm not asking them to jump on this now, but once we've got it fleshed out a little bit more and it's functioning a little bit better, there's no reason for them to be on Meetup.com or using Eventbrite or Luma. Fuck that shit. Like every single one of them should get off and they should jump on and be on a bitcoin centric or bitcoin native events app. So that's first of all and we done some numbers. There's something like a thousand bitcoin Communities on, on meetup.com now. Not all of them are active obviously, but there's certainly many, many that are active. There's a bunch now that have moved over to Luma. There's some that still use Eventbrite, which was really surprising. I didn't realize that. So, you know, we're going to go and outreach to all of them and start to slowly bring them across. And I don't expect everyone to, you know, all of a sudden drop everything and run, but you know, hopefully in time as more come, you know, they'll come across. And the amount of bitcoin meetup hosts that I've spoken to that have just said, look, man, if I could just have like host a meetup and just put one sat for an RSVP so that, you know, someone or even 10 sets or 100 sats just so I know that people who have said they're going to come if they have something to lose, they're more likely to press, they're more likely to turn up as opposed to just like pressing RSVP and filling up my numbers. And then all of a sudden no one turns up or like 10 people turn up, they're like, I would totally jump across and like, yeah, we could totally do that. Like you can't do that on Eventbrite. You can't do that on meetup.com you can't charge 10 sats or 100 sats. So these kind of things will be in there, which I think will just make it hyper, hyper, hyper superior for bitcoin specifically. So want to conquer that first. And I think that'll take us, you know, a good 612 months, right in parallel, we are also going to partner with all of the conferences, like whether it's Vegas, Prague, this, that, and we want to be their satellite event partner. So every satellite event that happens, we, we kind of took some inspiration here from Luma, but we built like a calendar feature so you can have A main event that creates a calendar where the calendar can then have people suggest or add events to the calendar. Now that could be co, you know, the, the main event organizer themselves, or it could be anybody from outside and they submit an event to the calendar and then the main owner of the calendar can either approve or decline the event. So let's say you're a bitcoin only event and someone submits, hey, Ethereum, gay party or whatever it is, right? You're like, yeah, no, declined. We don't do that shit here. And then someone submits like women of bitcoin or this or that, just like approve, approve, approve. And now you as a main event host, as a conference host, have a official calendar with all the events. And here's the beauty of it is when people RSVP to an event, we've made it so that the people auto follow the event, host of the side event, but also the main event. So now there's an incentive for the main event host to, to do that because it builds their Nostra profile, it starts to build out the social graph. So all of this happens just behind the scenes. No one knows or. It's not just, it's. It's sort of, it's not like the main in your face part, it's just like.
- [83:36]
B
Right.
- [83:37]
A
Part of the program, right. And so now all of a sudden you've got, we can leverage the main events to build out the number of side events and to build out the network. So now if you have previously like, and you know, most bitcoiners do this, they don't go to one Bitcoin event, they usually go to 2, 3, 4 a year. If you've been to one and you've RSVP to a side event the next time you go, you don't have to download more apps and meet up and this and that and all this sort of shit, like they're there already. One click rsvp, it's done like so, so good for hosts, good for main events, good for side events, good for attendees there. So that's sort of the second go to market piece. And then the third one, this one's a little bit more cheeky, is we have gone and basically built a whole fucking database of events that are happening around the world that are bitcoin oriented. And, and we've actually imported them into Atlantis. Now they currently link back to the other event. So it's called like an external RSVP on the app, but it creates a situation where because we can, we've scraped and we've tagged all of these events, remember, with the tagging system that we discussed before, like Bitcoin, Carnival, whatever, right. It creates a situation where the app starts to become a bit like a marketplace for events all around the world. So currently, even though I would say maybe there's 50 events actually hosted on Atlantis at the moment, I think we have something like a thousand events visible on Atlantis. So there's actually some utility in there for people who are looking for events. And as more and more people start to use it as a tool to discover events, I'm hoping that more hosts will be like, well, you know what, it makes sense for me to use it as a top of funnel. Maybe they're like, look, I'm not ready to leave meetup yet, but I will actually also list it on Atlantis. And then people can go click external rsvp. It'll open meetup and they can, you know, manage one RSVP list. So hopefully we can use that kind of strategy as a way to make it a marketplace to augment what we're doing, which is direct outreach to the meetups and partnering with the conferences. So that's kind of like the focus. And hopefully in the next six to 12 months, we can have every single bitcoin related conference, meetup and everything like that all be on there. So that'll be like step one. Then let's go to Nomads, let's go to Longevity, let's go to all this other stuff and give them the ultimate fucking events experience.
- [86:09]
B
I love it. I mean, honestly, one of the things that I was really just kind of like annoying in Vegas was just trying to, I think I was still using Luma, but trying to just see like, okay, like, what other events might be going on tonight that I just haven't heard of or whatever. And it's shockingly, really difficult to do that. Like, I know I don't want all events in all of Las Vegas. Like, but even like keyword searches, like, we're not very effective because the event might not actually have the name bitcoin in it or whatever else. And there's like, it's a shockingly kind of like bad experience for, for that kind of thing. So to have that. And I think that's a smart place to start on the bitcoin side. I'm curious too, just on the kind of like the actual, the actual business side of this. If you can talk about this, you guys make money, I assume off of just like taking a cut of fees paid or are there other elements to that as well.
- [86:56]
A
Yeah, so we'll probably, we'll probably just do like a small 1% or something like that on ticketing initially. I mean, what's crazy is that Luma is once you factor in stripe, you're paying almost 10%. I didn't realize it was that much because I ran a dinner in, in BTC Prague and like I charge 100 bucks a ticket and it wasn't to make money on the thing. It was just like I figured with the people coming, it would be about like 100 bucks ahead for the food and the drinks and everything like that. And I remember just getting 90 per person. I was like, what the. I was like, man, that's, that's like pricey. And Eventbrite is also like 8, 9, 10%. So it's, it's actually mind boggling like how much these guys charge and how much they get away with. So I figured, you know, if we can charge like 1 or 2%, like that's a, that's a win. Maybe what we can also do is like a membership version which is, I guess that's a bit more of the meetup angle. And my, my understanding is that meetup charges meetup organizers 45 bucks a month. So you know, what if we just charge like eight bucks a month, something like that, to just run unlimited meetups. So I think there's like a, you know, events is kind of like a real natural revenue stream because it's, once again, because it's a tool. You know, I think in the beginning we wanted to do, you know, memberships for like creators and all this sort of stuff, which is an approach like the blue check mark. Right. Or the orange check mark idea. But I think that's very hard to execute unless you already have like such a, like audience that it makes sense. You know, Twitter, Twitter never charged until Elon came around and started charging people eight bucks a month. Right? Yeah, I feel like that's a very hard thing to do with a network that has 250,000 people. You know, maybe when Nostra is like 25 million, maybe, you know, that's a realistic business model. So that, that's my, that's my thinking, man.
- [88:52]
B
Well, I mean, I, I, I love it. And I think honestly just the fact I was just, I had to use stripe for something the day and just like I was receiving money through it and it is just so painful to watch such a big percentage of like. And this wasn't even for event. This was like, you know, it was, it was a An integration that I have with. With Zap, right. For folks who want to, you know, pay with card. And it's like, man, it's just. It's sad to see that much of your, you know, your revenue going just to. Just to the fees on top. And it's like, well, okay, yeah, it's frustrating, you know, like. And again. So, yeah, if you guys are able to undercut that just because lightning happens to work a lot better, you know, and this. You got lower overhead there. That's fantastic. Is there. I want to be conscious of your time here because you are a new dad, and so your time is even more scarce than usual. Is there anything we didn't cover yet? I didn't know you had a. You had a note about. About crowdfunding as well on this. Do you want to cover that at all or good.
- [89:46]
A
No, I don't think we need to cover that. I mean, if people are interested and they want to sort of, like, own a piece of a native bitcoin events company, we're doing a crowdfund. So if anyone's interested in that, if they go to the website, they'll find it. I think what I actually wanted to do was ask you personally, would you. If you had a. An events app like this where it's sort of. It's, you know, bitcoin native and all that sort of stuff. And like, let's say there was. Because the other feature we do have in there is obviously like, the ability to find places and all that sort of stuff. It's kind of like BTC maps on steroids. Right. Would it feel natural for you to also have a bitcoin wallet in there where you could, you know, directly instead of paying from outside of the app for event tickets and stuff like that? Like, you had just a balance there. You had a native bitcoin wallet. You know, not saying you're holding a lot, but, you know, maybe you're holding, you know, a couple hundred dollars in there and you could easily just. You don't even have to, like, say, buy a ticket and then scan from your phone and copy a lightning address. It's like literally just like, like, click and it purchases the ticket and the event host gets their thing. Like, do you think that makes sense or do you think a wallet feels weird inside a event app?
- [91:07]
B
To me, as a bitcoiner and also being used to noster different noster clients, it doesn't feel weird. Honestly, that'd be a incredibly nice thing from a user experience perspective. Just, it's one less thing I need to do. I mean, I already don't have to like get out my credit card and put that in to put my credit card's private key into some other sense. It's already better even if you go out, go to an external wallet. But I would say, like, yeah, from my perspective, again, I'm taking this from my perspective first. Then I'll go out one level. From my perspective, that makes a ton of sense and would be incredibly smooth because that way, if I know I'm going to be going to a bunch of events over the course of, let's say, a conference weekend, I'm going to put, you know, I'm going to load in a couple hundred bucks worth of sats and I'm going to have that sitting there so that I know, okay, I don't. I'm saving myself some time during the conference weekend because I'll just go, boom, this event, this event done. From, let's say, you know, if we're talking down the road from a non bitcoiner perspective, maybe that seems confusing, but at the same time it's like, you know, you don't necessarily like, you're catering to bitcoiners first. So I think having, if you have the. Given that you're catering to bitcoiners first and that you have the ability to pay in bitcoin, are you going to have the ability to pay in fiat as well or keep it? Okay, so you're going to have both options then. So then it's not at all like, it's not like people have to load up that wallet if they don't want to. I think that's nice then. I think that's nice, especially as you're getting launched with bitcoiners, because it's just going to make the experience a lot smoother. Now, I know that adds more development time for you guys. So obviously that's a consideration as well. So the other side of that is it's not that big a deal if I have to copy an invoice and just go to, you know, one of the many wallet apps I have in my phone and do it. But boy, it sure would be convenient to have it right there in the app where it's just like, I've got this loaded up, I don't even have to worry about it. Boom, done. Like, that's slick. That's really slick.
- [93:05]
A
Because the reason I asked that is I have this other theory, and maybe we can close out here, is that the first generation of bitcoin products, services and businesses were sort of. Did you ever read the three generations theory essay that I did like a couple years ago?
- [93:27]
B
It sounds familiar, but yeah, I'm not sure, really.
- [93:31]
A
Quick summary. It was sort of. I wrote it in, what was it, 2023. And it was around the time like, you know, everyone was going like, oh, you know, we're going to hit mass adoption because bitcoin's going to be 10 million by 2025. All this sort of shit, right? Like, everyone was kind of like in bull mode. And I was like, hold on, hold on, hold on. Take a step back here. I said, this is, you know, bitcoin's not a fucking iPhone. It's not going to just follow the same adoption curve that, you know, every other technology's followed. I was like, bitcoin is a techno socioeconomic phenomenon. Like, it's much bigger. Like, you know, the downside of me being wrong about an iPhone is $1,000. The downside of me being wrong about bitcoin is my entire wealth, right? So the world isn't just going to jump onto bitcoin straight away. It's going to take a couple of generations. And that was sort of, my pitch was generation one. If we just sort of view it like, let's just do round numbers, 20 years for a generation. And let's just say bitcoin first launched in 2010, right? So generation one is 2010 to 2030, generation two, 2030 to 2050, generation three, 2050 to 2070. If we really think about it, generation one is going to be led by the people who have one foot in the old world and one foot in the new world, kind of us, right? Like we, we knew a time before bitcoin and we knew a time after Bitcoin. Generation two is people born post 2009, 2010, you know, who come of age post 2030. They, they don't know of a world before bitcoin. Like, by the time they fucking grew up, like, bitcoin was a thing. Like, it was, you know, everyone knew it. So they perceive bitcoin differently. Like we in the age of, in, in generation one, because we're at the bridge of Fiat and bitcoin, we're kind of, it's a speculative age. So the technologies and the tools and the businesses we're going to build are naturally going to have something to do with exchanging bitcoin, storing bitcoin or generating bitcoin mining, right? The businesses that will come after, like the 20 year old kids and the 25 year olds in 2030 onwards, they're going to view Bitcoin as a utility completely differently. Like it's not about exchanging to them. Like the idea of why the fuck would I exchange Bitcoin? Like, no, no, no. You like, Bitcoin is in the stack. Like it's in the app, like it's part of what you get. So generation two companies, I think will be all sorts of tools and products and services where Bitcoin is just another. In the same way as like developers today, they're like, okay, I'm going to use Typescript, you know, node JS for my backend. I'm going to use REACT native for the front end. We're going to use AWS for, you know, the hosting and infrastructure. We're going to like these different technologies. They're going to just view Bitcoin as okay. Yep. And we're going to use Bitcoin as like the payments piece and there'll be a wallet and that's it. Like it's part of it. And they'll, you know, hopefully Nostra will be the thing that they use for the social element. And it's like these are just tools that will go into a product and then generation three is, you know, something entirely different where bitcoin kind of is forgotten about and it's just part of the, the DNA of civilization. Right. So that was sort of my pitch on this, on this thing. So where I was going with that is the. What I think I'm inadvertently doing with, with Atlantis is I'm trying to maybe build an early iteration of a generation 2 bitcoin company which is where an events slash. Hopefully one day we'll add some travel, you know, utility to it. But fundamentally we're an events app that happens to use Bitcoin under the hood and happens to use Nostra under the hood. And this is where the wallet idea comes into play, is like, okay, well maybe at some stage all products should and will have, you know, just like a bitcoin wallet as part of it. Like you have a financial balance in almost everything and that's sort of where the idea is. It's like maybe for attendees there's less of a benefit there, but certainly I'm imagining hosts. Imagine you had just you create the event on the app and then you have your balance there and it loads directly into a wallet and then you can make payments, you can do everything straight fucking from there. You don't have to withdraw and all that sort of stuff.
- [97:39]
B
Well, something to add on to that, that I was just thinking of as this came along, one thing in the event space that is very natural is ticket sale referrals, right?
- [97:49]
A
And.
- [97:49]
B
And getting a cut of that. So, like, I'll just throw this one over to you is having the wallet there makes that a naturally more smooth experience to be able to say, here's your custom. Like, you're going to this event. Here's your custom code. You turn everybody into an event promoter. You give everybody the ability to be an event promoter, and they automatically, as that sale goes through, then it's just a split, right? A payment split, and it's done. Like, so just a thought, but, like, that seems like a natural way to handle that. And that gives you a huge, huge kind of leg up on some of these other platforms, these other centralized event platforms where that's really difficult or where that has to be handled out of band, you know, in a private arrangement and everything else is set up. No, no, no. Just have it all right there. And it doesn't add any friction at all from really anyone's side. That's kind of the beauty of it, right?
- [98:41]
A
Look at you, Walker. Sucking hell Walker the advisor. I love it.
- [98:47]
B
I. I happy to come on board, but no, like, it's. Because this is a. I. I had a friend actually was working on a. Basically like an event event management and promotion. They wanted to compete with StubHub and like, all of this, you know, for. For like concert ticketing for a while. And like, it's like, it's. It's a. It's a tough.
- [99:05]
A
It's a tough title.
- [99:07]
B
Like, it's a brutal space, especially once you get into ticketing for those big events because they're. I mean, there's like a lot of monopolistic practices going on there and a lot of deals that have been made that you are not a part of. And. Yeah, but for this, like, for bitcoin events especially, it's like, man, you've got a. You've got a pretty cool way to get to incentivize people to evangelize for your event. You're incentivizing them with the hardest money that's ever existed. And them getting payment for it is done frictionlessly within the same app that they are using to att, you know, to sign up for the event, to, you know, see it's all integrated with their social graph. Like, that's amazing. You can gamify that too. And then literally, like here the people who are, you know, the top, top refers for this event. I don't know if people necessarily want that public. But like, it's another angle, you know? But yeah, my two sides just.
- [99:54]
A
I. I love it. You made me just think of one more thing and then we can shut up and wrap this up. But I would love to, once we have all the bitcoin events on here, I would love to actually as. And hear me out. I would actually love to have all the shitcoin events on here. Because if all the shitcoin events run their satellite events and everything on there and they have like lightning payments on there and they can like literally experience lightning, I have a feeling like will implode their entire like sort of mental model that bitcoin can't be used for payments. Like, it'll fucking destroy them. It'll be hilarious.
- [100:30]
B
Did some. It's wild. How many of the shitcoiners still somehow believe that? Like, well, bitcoin's too slow. It's like so you're talk. You're literally talking from like eight years ago. Like. Like, this is. I don't even know what to tell you, man. Like, you just don't want to know, I think, because again, that destroys your entire, like your entire mental model for why your shitcoin even exists, you know, because it's. It's faster. It's like. No, no, no, it's. It's just a shitcoin, bro. But this was great getting you back on here. Satlantis IO is the website. Where else do you want to send folks? Maybe I'll link your Noster and everything. Now that you are not on X but anywhere else you want people to check out. Yeah, shill away.
- [101:13]
A
That's it. I would love people. Mostly the last thing I'll say on it is we are slowly actually deprecating parts of the online web desktop experience because that was originally built mainly around like city and destination experiences and stuff like that. The only thing over the coming month or so that you'll be able to still do on web is to create an event and to RSVP to an event. So really kind of like narrowing the scope there. What that means is the mobile app is going to be the place to go. So I'd love people to go and test it. Some people who are really Nostra die hard fans, they're like, oh, you know you're not open source and you know you don't support Amber. So you know, I'm not putting my insec in there. It's like, look, fine. Just the beauty of Noster is like you can create a throwaway endpub throw Insec, it's easy and just create one and just go test it out, go check it out. You'll, you'll, you'll find some value in the app. I'd love your feedback on it. And we, we now have, I mean actually only Test Flight has this but we have like multi account support so you can just have, you know, your main account, multiple accounts and all this sort of stuff. For those that are interested, we will be open sourcing the app. But as, as you can see by this conversation with Walker, it's like we're still figuring out what the fuck we are and you know, where the value is and all this sort of stuff. So it's like, you know, once we have a product that we're confident with, that's in market, that is actually doing something, we'll then move to the phase because you know, open sourcing isn't just like, oh yeah, like take your code and just dump it on GitHub. You have to like actually go, there's a MIT license. You need to figure out which one you're going to do and all this sort of stuff. There's, there's some things in play and right now, like our goal is to have a product that people find valuable in the marketplace first and then all the other nice stuff can come and follow.
- [102:58]
B
Well, I love what you guys are building and yeah, can't wait to get all these shitcoiners actually using bitcoin eventually. First we'll start with just the bitcoiners, but yeah, great catching up with you, man. Best to the wife and baby. And yeah, hopefully we can see each other in the flesh again sometime soon.
- [103:14]
A
I hope so, man. I really do.
- [103:16]
B
All right, cheers, brother.
- [103:18]
A
Thank you.
- [103:26]
B
And that's a wrap on this Bitcoin Talk episode of the Bitcoin Podcast. Remember to subscribe to this podcast wherever you're watching or listening and share it with your friends, family and strangers on the Internet. Find beyond noster@@primal.net Walker and this podcast@primal.net Titcoin on X, YouTube and Rumble. Just search at Walker America and find this podcast on X and Instagram @tcoin podcast. Head to the Show Notes to grab sponsor links. Head to substack.com walker America to get episodes emailed to you and head to bitcoin podcast.net for everything else. Bitcoin is scarce, but podcasts are abundant. So thank you for spending your scarce time listening to the Bitcoin podcast. Until next time, stay free.