Max (2:43)

They are listening. We might as well. You know, I really think that the long term evolution of, of bitcoin conferences is going to extremes. Right. Either there is no phones, no recording. You don't even mention who's there to anyone ever. Right. Unlike harshcore hardcore elimination of the community if you do. Right. And then the other extreme is just Big Brother style microphones everywhere and we have this like two day event and out of this we get like three years worth of podcasts.

Caliburn (3:16)

So honestly, honestly, I kind of like those two extremes. Like the one, what's the, what's the style of. Guys, is it Chatham House rules where it's like no, no cameras, no, no video recording, no audio recording. There may be written transcripts or not even written like written notes, but not full transcript shared afterwards. I've been to one conference like that.

Max (3:36)

Attribute anything that was said to a specific person.

Caliburn (3:38)

Right? Right.

Max (3:40)

These more private settings really foster a, a more intimate way to, to think and to express yourself on topics that you're not so sharp about yet. If you're constantly worried about being recorded and that anything you say will be used against you, that that means you will self censor to a large extent.

Caliburn (3:59)

Well, it's true. I mean, it gets back to the core idea of privacy and how it is intertwined with free speech in many ways. Because it's like you really, like there's the one thing about speaking freely publicly. Right. And being able to do that and having that speech be protected by law. There's another thing to being able to speak completely privately as freely as you want, without fear of being overheard, of being surveilled, of being recorded without your knowledge. And you kind of need that ability. Like you need both. You need both or you don't have actual free speech. I think like if Big Brother is always watching, always listening, even if you have free speech in the public arena, if you don't have that in the private side of your life because someone's always listening, it's like, are you ever truly speaking freely? I don't know.

Max (4:57)

Yeah, I started out as a freedom maximalist, I think, and then slowly that morphed into becoming a privacy maximalist. And that is because privacy is such a powerful tool towards freedom. And if we define freedom as the Absence of coercion, the absence of violence, and privacy as the ability to not reveal yourself to an attacker, then obviously privacy is something that cuts an attack at its earliest possible point and therefore increases the cost of applying violence, or in other words, removing your freedoms. And so mastering these tools of privacy will eventually result in a much freer world for those who dare to use those tools.

Caliburn (5:42)

It's so true, and it's one of the things they gave me. You were in Lugano, obviously, and I'm not sure if you were up early enough to catch my opening remarks in the second day, but it was just me up there, and they gave me, wisely or unwisely gave. Gave me the stage for like a full 10 minutes just to open up the conference. And usually it's as people are trickling in and stuff, right? And you're trying to make sure you get. Get butts and seats before the. The big heavy hitters come on. And I decided I was just gonna make the. Make the whole thing about privacy and the. Basically the subversion of the state through the reclamation of our freedoms.

Max (6:19)

Right?

Caliburn (6:19)

The idea that the state doesn't give you any freedoms. They don't, you know, they. They can only take them away. You have to take those freedoms for yourself. And we have the tools to do that. Like, that's what the cypherpunks were, were so passionate about, are still so passionate about, is creating those tools that make it possible to take the, you know, the liberties that you want, take the liberties that you need, take your freedom for yourself versus needing to be reliant on a, you know, benevolent state, which is rarely the case, to somehow give you those rights. Like they. And ironically, I didn't realize this, but. Because I didn't check the schedule at first, but then I checked the schedule and I was like, oh, right after me. And basically I'm just saying, like, you should resist the state. You know, you don't necessarily need to. Not saying you should, but you don't need to pay taxes on everything if the state doesn't know, like, not saying you should, but, you know, and then like right up next is like a, you know, bitcoin and politics panel. And it was just like, well, that's a. That's a nice little juxtaposition. So, you know, but it is, it is such an important thing. I think people, even those who are aware of the tools that are out there, often think, well, I don't really need to use those right now because, like, I don't really have anything to Hide. Like we, it's so easy to fall into that trap of like, why do you need privacy if you have nothing to hide but for yourself? Like, oh, I don't need to be that careful because I'm not saying anything that bad, or you know what I mean? Like, it's so easy to fall into that trap. But I think we have to really remain vigilant on that because it does matter. And if we don't use the tools now when they're not desperately needed, we may not be able to use them when we really do need to use them.

Max (8:00)

Yeah, exactly. And especially build them. Peace time is for building. So to say it's not really that we're quite peaceful times nowadays. It would be nice, but. So this just shows that it's really high time to build these tools and then to spread them widely and to use them ultimately and to help people protect themselves. That's, that's extremely critical because, you know, if, if there is just mass tyranny everywhere, nothing gets produced anymore, life turns to shit very, very, very quickly. If we, if we start to focus on destroying stuff rather than building stuff, it doesn't take long to completely devour what we've built across decades before. And then hopefully in such a situation, there, there is an alternative gathering of individuals to build a more sustainable and free parallel economy. And that's critical because otherwise we don't eat and that sucks. So we need to find ways now to already bootstrap these communities of production in as many places as is possible. Companies and products that rely on and are built on sound monetary principles and good ethics and good protocol designs, etc. And then we hopefully have a chance of when this fiat empire continues to collapse, that there is some glimmer of hope somewhere to go to.

Caliburn (9:31)

It's interesting, I think, that people, maybe even a lot of bitcoiners, haven't internalized the fact that parallel system is, that will eventually be the new system. Like, I don't really think that the parallel system that is being built right now, that many of us are already participating in the future, being here already, but not evenly distributed yet. I do not think that that gets subsumed by the existing fiat system. Like the existing fiat system is too broken. It does not align with this new parallel system. Right. The values, the incentives are not the same. And so really it's about, like, it's not about, I don't think those systems eventually merging. It's about the one system just completely collapsing and the other being strong enough, resilient enough, widespread enough, where that just becomes the new system. I don't, I don't know what your thoughts are on that. Maybe I'm off base, but I just, I don't see these systems ultimately merging because I think the, the values, the incentive structures are just too misaligned.

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Caliburn (11:39)

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Max (12:44)

And it's really hard to go for complete destructions, you know, thankfully humans are hard to kill and we somehow always find a way to continue to survive and thrive. And that's a good thing. And so it's more about what can, what can we preserve and still elevate in some positions. And the good thing is basically anywhere you go, you will find ways to still live freely despite a large extent of authoritarianism. Even in extreme places like North Korea or even America. Right there, there there are still pockets of freedom that, where small free interactions take place. Right. And, and of course they are far fewer in between compared to more free and liberal societies. But still they are possible and they are there. Especially with new technologies applied, those that are currently not evenly distributed yet, these become more possible. And yeah, nevertheless, if we're currently in a much freer state than we could be, it could be a lot worse. And so that's something to not take for granted and to leverage in the fact that we have more time to build and deploy at scale these technologies.

Caliburn (13:57)

What do you think is the, the freest example of a, of a nation state or of a territory that we have today? Maybe even classifying it by the nation state is not the right, the right move there. But like where, where would you say has the, the greatest potential for long term freedom? Like that would be most aligned with this parallel system that is actively being built.

Max (14:23)

Maybe the surprising answer might be the oceans on the high seas has been anarchy for centuries. There is no single global ruler of the high seas. And if you're a captain of a ship, you have a substantial amount of real autonomy. And cruise ships, for example, are dictatorships.

Caliburn (14:46)

On a boat, ultimately a dictatorship, pun intended.

Max (14:51)

Literally. Yeah. By the way, a lot of our legal concepts come from maritime law, you know, citizenship as another example. So yeah, the, the point at where a cruise ship loses its sovereignty is when it goes to port and then it has to become accustomed in the national waters and the port facilities specifically and has to sign a bunch of contracts to be allowed to get in there. But now imagine a cruise ship that never has to go back to a port. What if the cruise ship simply stays out in the high seas non stop and smaller vessels come and go and dock and bring supplies and people and whatnot. But all of a sudden you have an actual possibility of legal anarchy in the currently defined existing set of rules. So the Seasteading Institute is really fascinating to follow. And if they've made phenomenal progress over the last couple of years, there's ultimately in order to, to make this long term sustainable on a, on a holistic like pragmatic front, we ultimately need three things. We, we need to have a flag to put on the vessel because that, that means that you kind of have the, like an anchoring to a certain nationality. And that gives you in the current legal context a bunch of protections. Second is that you need to have insurance because if you cannot ensure a boat, the cost of it is way too high. So insurance incredibly useful for cost efficient risk reallocation. But in order to get insurance you need the third thing which is a classification of this type of vessel. Because a fisher boat is different from a cruise ship, is different from a oil drilling rig. Right. In the high seas. These are all different sea going vessels that have a different type of classification. And we need now to, in order to get such a classification, you basically need to have a body of engineers defining exactly what this type of vessel is. In the realm of a sea state. It would be an ocean going vessel that does not have a motor. Right. It's not self propelling, it needs to be tugged, but it can float and can be anchored for locational stability. So with, with this then yeah, we can basically, you know, get the insurances, get the flagging agency. The cool thing is the flagging agencies are private companies ultimately. Right. And there's a huge competition. Every Caribbean island, every, every country with a port, with an ocean, and even some that don't have oceans have these flagging agencies and they're very happy to compete for business. So, so that problem is already solved. And right now what the Seasteading Institute is solving is that like panel of engineers defining the classification of a cstat. And once that is done, insurance shouldn't be that hard. And yeah, there's multiple companies building these cstats already now you can buy them for not even that much. I think it's like $150,000, $200,000 for the small addition. You know, the luxurious editions go into the millions of course, but they don't have to be.

Caliburn (18:03)

Okay, that's, that's, this is a rabbit hole that I clearly need to go deeper down here. Okay. So I mean how feasible is it to be able to do that on a long term basis? Like, I mean, I guess you're, you, you need to have obviously either, you know, I guess some sort of contact with the shore in the sense that you need to provision yourselves, assuming it's not self sustaining. I don't know how many, like you can obviously grow things like you'll have plenty of good sunshine out of the open sea. Right. You know, fresh water is a difficult one. So I don't know if they have like desalination rigs on board and things like that. But like, you know, how, how sustainable is that from like a long term perspective of like if you want to completely stay out of Any jurisdiction. And like can you, can you be. I mean can these actually be classified as their own states, like their own, their own nations? Eventually. I know there were some. What's the. You'll know this. The, the one. So a guy did this, right? Like he built out his own, I think it was on an old oil rig and he built out like his own nation essentially like he was the citizen of his own nation. You do you remember? You know what I'm talking about?

Max (19:07)

Yeah. There have been a couple pioneer seasteaders, many of them killed or hunted. So unfortunately that. Well, that's always kind of in the early days. You know, the early bikaners are also all tortured, kidnapped and in jail nowadays. So we have that in common. And the, the. But yeah, this is absolutely possible in terms of self sufficiency. You need electricity to produce anything. Right. So. But for that solar and battery, totally fine. Weight is not that much of an issue. Actually. More weight is better for sea going vessels. They kind of are more stable. So the weight of batteries is totally fine. Then, then you can run a decalment desalination. Desalination plant. And there are some prototypes that have them purely running off the solar and they produce enough water for the family. So that's, that's fine food. I mean you can fish actually when you, when you put these vessels into the ocean, you can design them in such a way that it builds like this layer of mineral crust or something which basically turns your boat into a coral reef. And if you have a boat that needs to go fast through the water, you want to design to prevent that because that creates more surface area, more drag, etc. But if you're stationary, you don't care. In fact, it actually benefits you because it's a protection against corrosion so your steel in the vessel doesn't corrode away. And then yeah, with this you just get a coral reef and there will be an insane amount of fish around your habitat. So you just, you know, pick one up and there's food. Not as good as a cow.

Caliburn (20:42)

Yes.

Max (20:45)

I don't know, maybe you can get like a big like shark or something that might be equivalent to hell meat.

Caliburn (20:52)

Or you know, you know, bring a. Just. You could probably have a goat. Depending on the size of this, you could probably have a goat on board. You know, if you wanted to at least produce some, some dairy products. If you're, if you're in that, you can. Plenty of plenty of good cheese and goat's milk can come out of that.

Walker (21:05)

Yeah.

Max (21:05)

Like the president of The Seasteading Institute. His. His wife not yet convinced about living on a boat in the middle of nowhere. And so her criteria for I will go if this happens is if I can walk my dog in grass out on the seastead, then yes, I will go. But we can absolutely put soil in a seastead and, you know, grow grass on it. Should totally be fine. We can connect multiple of these parts together to form quite large structures and, and definitely, you know, have, have larger areas. Yeah, should be fine.

Caliburn (21:41)

It reminds me of a, you know, Snow Crash. Obviously the, the giant, you know, floating, floating city that they, they had there just kept, you know, tying on more and more and more vessels to it. Essentially slightly, you know, less, perhaps less cultish behavior. And for anyone that hasn't read Snow Crash, you absolutely should because it's a brilliant. It's a. Yeah, it's like that's where Metaverse came from, you know, like that's where so much, so many things came from. And the idea of like the, the future or techno futuristic, you know, kind of corporate state, I think is such a fascinating one. It's. I think that's basically what Balaji's took his network state from. Like, it's essentially a similar thing, slightly more digitized, but so. Okay, so is this something that you're actively, actively looking into doing yourself as well?

Max (22:30)

I've no, more like a curiosity hobby. It's a bit too early to, to really get to it yet. Unless you want to be an early pioneer funder, which I'm not in a position to do and so then. But I'd like to in the long term future. I always like the idea of sailing, like getting a sailboat as one of the basis. I already love living in a caravan, like a camper van. That's, that's already incredibly rewarding. So doing it on the high seas will be fun. I never really was a sailor or boat person, so it would definitely be a new skill to learn. But yeah, the seaside itself has interesting aspects to it. I definitely wouldn't mind doing it for a couple weeks of vacation. The thing is, for every dwelling place, you really don't need to be there 247 for the entire year. Usually we do travel a bit and it can be more or less for people, but if you just want to stay in a cool Airbnb for three weeks, you know, there you have like Ocean View, 365 degrees and like 00 steps till the waterfront. That's not a bad deal. And you can probably get it for much cheaper than Actual beachfront property.

Caliburn (23:47)

That's true. You can, you can create your own, I guess, waterfront property. You know, you may be a little bit deep for the beach once you're in international waters. I mean that's really what kind of, you're, you're getting. Because obviously there are territorial waters on the, you know, on coasts and like that are patrolled, that are kind of like managed, you know, by whatever the country's version of the Coast Guard is. But once you're in international waters, like for the most part, kind of all bets are off. Right. Like there, there are obviously various agreements in place to cover different international waters. But like it is kind of as close as you can get to a true anarchic system these days. Is that fair to say?

Max (24:21)

No, it 100% is. I mean there are, you know, some, some treaties, but ultimately if you're the, the captain of the boat, there is no higher authority over you that could legally prevent you from doing stuff. It's, it's quite actually an extreme, you know, setup, legally speaking. And, and it works. It has worked. It's, it's the only possible way that it could work. Right? Like how, how could you enforce a tyranny on the oceans? Like, it's, it simply doesn't work. That's why the pirates in the 1700s were so incredibly successful. Because the technology and the reality of physics and the world was strongly in the favor of their independence and protection and freedom. And when, when the, the set and setting is such, then the result is quite inevitable. And I think we, we absolutely have a chance of re sparking the same scenario in cyberspace and where the space is so vast, like imagine 256 bits. It's so mind gobblingly fucking huge. This is way bigger than the seas. This is infinitely bigger than the seas. And if we need more space, we just double the key size. It's fine. And now inside this vast space where we can perfectly hide ourselves such that no middleman can actually find us and pinpoint where we are, which is incredible, but we can still authenticate ourselves to our friends and establish secure communication channels across this vast distance to still coordinate and trade and collaborate with each other that favors the free market and prosperity to such an enormous extent that I don't really see how in the long run that it could turn out any other way.

Caliburn (26:07)

Well, it goes back to like the, I'm forgetting if it was the think it was in Timothy May's crypto Anarchist manifesto where he basically said it could have also been the cyberpunk manifesto. I'm. Now I'm getting them, the two of them, confused. But the idea that you should. Like with anonymous transaction systems, with anonymous communication systems or pseudonymous communication systems, you can engage in commerce without ever actually knowing that other person. Like, while you can also develop a web of trust in cyberspace, you can go even one step further, which is you can engage in commerce in a meaningful way without needing to know that person's real name, without needing to know where they are, without needing to know really who they are to any meaningful degree. Providing you both a, you know, anonymity or pseudonymity that is protecting you Right. From the. From things that may do you harm in the meat space, but still allowing you to gauge. In cooperative, productive commerce through cyberspace, through the, you know, the beauty of encryption. There's that. There's that other quote, I think. I mean, many people have said something to this effect, but Assange is the one that comes to mind. The idea that it's this amazing thing that the universe believes in encryption.

Max (27:16)

Right.

Caliburn (27:16)

And that it's harder to decrypt something than it is to encrypt something. And that. That is like, that is the asymmetric power that we have right now. We have that, like, the universe believes in encryption. Like, we're good. We have that capability. You can encrypt very, very trivially easily. Decrypting is order many, many, many unfathomably orders of magnitude, exponentially larger difficulty to do. And, like, that's the thing that gives us power. Right. That's the thing that allows us. And those rules apply to the state as well, for encryption and decryption. But typically, the state may want to decrypt the things that we are doing, you know, rather than. Rather than encrypt them. But I just think it's such a fascinating thing that we're at this time and whether it be physical kind of anarchic spaces or regions like the open seas, or whether it be digital anarchic regions in cyberspace, we do have ways of. Of really grabbing on to freedom.

Max (28:13)

Yeah.

Caliburn (28:13)

And holding onto it that we didn't have before. Asymmetric. We have an asymmetric defense mechanism.

Max (28:19)

Put another way, imagine building something like the lightning network with gold. So I have a piece of gold, and I give it to Walker, saying, hey, pass it on to, I don't know, GG And Gigi is supposed to pass it on to the next guy, and then finally to the person I want to pay. Cool. How long do you think it would take until the gold disappears in the middle very, very fast. So the system simply doesn't work. You would need to know exactly whom you're passing along the gold to, right. And where they are. And you would want to have checks and then probably that they do some deposit that in the case that they steal, they lose some type of money. It's like crazy more complex. And with Bitcoin we can literally do that. That's exactly how the Lightning Network works. We just send bitcoin along. But with the genius of cryptography we have it such that nobody can steal the money. And it's incredible. Like that's a system of human collaboration that ensures reliability and delivery of a good. With basically 100% uptime and no way of the money ever getting lost or misaccounted for or stolen. Like that's mind boggling that we can actually do that nowadays. And the Lightning Network is just the beginning. That's a tiny, small protocol we can do so much more with.

Caliburn (29:44)

Feels like there's been. And I haven't been around bitcoin for that long. Well, I haven't been paying attention actively to bitcoin for that long. I wish I would have paid attention the first couple times I heard about it, as does everyone. Right. It is the rare breed of human that paid attention and went deep down the rabbit hole the very first time. It was not me though. And I'm sure it's not a lot of other people. But to those who did, kudos, hats off to you. You are a more awake person than I was. But it seems that there's been just this kind of explosion in the last couple of years with I mean not only different L2s, but then if maybe you want to classify them as like L3 is like Cashew, like Fediment, these other, you know, these other scaling layers on top of bitcoin that yes, they have their trade offs. Cali will be the first to tell you that like, yes, this is, you know, there are trade offs here. You have to, you have to have some trust. You can spread that trust out. But there is trust. It's not trustless base layer, but it is amazing to see this, this explosion and it feels like it's just, I mean it's still just people hacking away, right? It's, it's not, it's not, it's still unknown to the majority of the world. Most people, most people don't own bitcoin or use bitcoin. The vast, vast 99 plus percent out of those people that even do know about bitcoin Use Bitcoin, the amount that use these other layers on top of bitcoin is even a smaller fraction of that. Like it's, it's even smaller. So it just feels like we're so incredibly early. And it makes me very hopeful about the future to think about what's it going to look like when my son is, you know, when my son is my age. Like what, what are, what is going to be available then? Like, I can't even quite fathom it. Just because the rate of development, the rate of change is so, so fast.

Max (31:21)

Yeah, yeah. And it's, it, it can be incredibly dangerous when technologies are distributed unevenly. Right. Imagine on the battlefield there is one guy in a full metal plate armor and the other guys only have like wooden clubs and stone, stone sticks. You know, that's. They simply have no chance. Right? The one guy can slaughter thousands of them. Maybe eventually he gets tired, but like there's almost nothing that can stop him given this asymmetric distribution of technology. And I guess we see this obviously in the fiat system, right? There's very, very few people who have direct access to the money printer and you're not one of them. So that puts you in a very bad position, by the way. You should do something about that. And also likewise though, with bitcoin. Bitcoin was incredibly, unequally distributed in the first four years where still nobody knew about it. Half of the money was issued to the early adopters. That's ridiculous. A couple thousand people got half of the money supply in the first four years. So that's. And you know, that sucks not just for the people who, who didn't pay attention, but also for the people who are simply not yet born. And that puts, puts people who are early in bitcoin to ultimately to a huge responsibility to, to do something meaningful with, with the capital that they acquired. Ultimately, like if they spend it on frivolous things, eventually it will be gone and redistributed to the society. So this is only an issue for a couple generations, but considering that the early adopters of bitcoiners had a high likelihood of being very ethically motivated people and very principled, like freedom lovers, ultimately that is a massive glitch in the matrix that we found that these types of people enjoyed that massive early adopter benefit rather than the continued layer class who did before. So a quite unique opportunity. And hopefully that means that we have at least a handful of people who still hold these freedom principles very strongly, but now are sitting on thousands of bitcoin. And that's interesting. So, yeah, let's see what this group of people or this cohort of people does with this extremely asymmetric distribution of monetary technology. And yeah, hopefully it goes up good.

Caliburn (34:01)

Yeah, I mean it is so fascinating because we've seen just on the topic of the, let's say the redistribution of this through organic means, right? I'm not saying through forced redistribution, but we had the, the OG whale with 80,000 bitcoin earlier this summer who sold them off, wanted to diversify into some fiat, I guess, probably mined those bitcoin or bought those bitcoin for virtually nothing, took a massive risk. Still, nonetheless, and holding it that long is truly incredible. That's, I think the real amazing part is you were able to not just be aware of it, acquire it at that time, but hold on to it because there are plenty that were aware of it, acquired it and then didn't manage to hold onto it or sold for 100x profit and said, this is amazing, I can't believe this. And you know, little did they know there was going to be tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of X profit there. But you do see that distribution happening now. I think that's one of the reasons why we're seeing, you know, bitcoin being so boring, you know, around 100,000, you know, infinitely printable US fiat, cuck bucks per coin.

Max (35:06)

The bear market. No, Yes.

Caliburn (35:09)

I mean it's, it's, it is funny that like we, we're really doing the meme right now. The, you know, bitcoin crashes to 100k. Like it's human psychology is fascinating, it really is. But like we're seeing, and I think like to your point, this distribution is a good thing. It's a good thing for the ownership to spread out. You want it to be broad and not so deep and centrally, you know, centrally controlled. And granted them having all that bitcoin doesn't mean they can change the rules of bitcoin. Right? But it is a lot of economic energy that a small cohort of people were in control of. But to your point, I am very interested to see, not even talk about the people that have. That guy had 80,000 or that gal, I don't know, had 80,000 Bitcoin. That's a wow, insane amount. Maybe he's got a couple other wallets too, I don't know. But even the people who just have, have hundreds or thousands of bitcoin, that's an incredible amount of economic energy. And if they are as, say aligned Ideologically, as it would be reasonable to think that they are. That's a very powerful economic force that has just kind of come out of nowhere and that is also very. You don't know who they are. That's. I think that's the really powerful thing. It's like you, you know, fiat billionaires, like, you know who they are. Bitcoin billionaires could just be that guy sitting on, riding the bus next to you. Like you, you, you, you really don't, like, you don't know if they've done well enough to preserve their privacy. And I think that's kind of an incredible wild card. We don't really usually have that kind of hidden economic energy that bitcoin has enabled for these really early adopters.

Max (36:48)

Yeah, yeah. And you know, often they have a huge incentive to, to keep this hidden and remain anonymous simply for personal security, obviously, and protection of the assets. So this will be really interesting on how this will develop. I mean, this could definitely turn into massive chaos. You know, if the wrong people have such an enormous amount of wealth, they can wreak havoc. I mean, look at the last hundred years. Right. That's exactly what happened. It could be worse. Yes. But I hope it's going to be much better. Right. Like, I hope we will have some. Yeah, I guess, like ethical philanthropists, not, not the Bill Gates type.

Caliburn (37:32)

Right. I mean, I like to think that. And maybe this will happen, maybe it won't, but the idea of, of patronage will come back. Patronage for artists, patronage for inventors. You know, everything Da Vinci was able to do was because he was, you know, the Medicis were his patrons. Right. He didn't have to worry about, like, am I going to be able to sell this invention? You know, am I going to be able to sell this sketch? No, it was like, I'm just, I'm good, I'm covered. I'm just going to do what I think is fascinating and clearly a very unique and singular mind in Da Vinci. But you know, how many other Da Vinci's are out there that just were crushed by the public school system and then the nine to five and whatever else, because they, we're simply trying to make ends meet. I wonder how much a culture of patronage of the arts and of technologists and inventors will come back. I'd be very interested to see.

Max (38:26)

Yeah. Like, it would be amazing if the next Da Vinci gets, you know, his patronage and can spend his time on building Freedom Tech. Freedom Tech. As beautiful as those cathedrals were, that, that would be breathtaking. So I'm really bullish on organizations like open science, etc. That just give like, really an army of Freedom Tech builders the funds to just do their thing. And the results of that are extremely promising. So there's, there's a lot more fun. The thing is, there's some, like, there's a lot of money slushing around in, in this kind of developer space. If you consider all of the companies and organizations that are paying people to work on Bitcoin, it's, it's a decent amount of money. It's not little. But even if it's like 10x more, 100,000 more, I would know where to spend that money. I could hire at least 100 times more devs and build stuff, no questions asked. I'm not running out of problems to solve or interesting tools to build. And so if we can really increase and considering the rather limited amount of funding that the space is having, the amount of stuff that we build and the quality of it is really, really good. So I hope funding for Freedom Tech will go up in the future rather than go down. And if that is the case, then spicy times ahead.

Caliburn (39:52)

Speaking of which, what are you working on right now? What's what? I know you're always, you always have your, your toes dipped in a few different ponds, but what's, what's, what's taking a lot of your attention right now?

Max (40:05)

Generally speaking, I'm just helping the Freedom Tech projects get built. I'm not a dev, so I can do all the other stuff, and that's not so much work, actually. So I can do it for more projects than just one, which I really enjoy because it's so hard to choose which project to work on because they're all so cool. So if I cannot make the choice and just say yes to everything, then I'll do that for a while until it gets too much. But so ultimately, I think one of the big problems that really calls out to me that needs to be solved is to have a private experience of Nostr. And Nostr works so beautifully well for public announcements of stuff like our podcast right now, right this livestream happening on Noster, like, that's, that's incredible. You can release software with Zap Store and you can make short posts, blogs, you can sell stuff. Really whatever you want to publicly announce, you can do with Nostr. And that's incredibly powerful. But the core architecture and the spirit of Nostr can absolutely be expressed in a private setting as well, with encrypted content that even though that ciphertext is available to anyone on public relays, we just assume that this is public. But despite that, there is no way that anyone can crack the decryption and read the actual message, and even further, know who sent the message or who's receiving this message or downloading it, etc. Once, once we have these types of security guarantees, the canvas and the toolbox of what we have with Noster just goes exponentially through the roof. A lot, a lot of human interaction requires privacy to work, at least to any reasonable extent. And if we have strong privacy guarantees rather than weak ones, then we can actually trust the building blocks and see them as solid foundations to build more stuff on top. Because if your entire secure system depends that the server administrator in the back end who's earning almost nothing, has to sweat and wake up in the midnight just to make sure the servers are still running, this grumpy guy has the power to rip everyone off and eventually he'll just take the money, you know, or he'll take a big paycheck from someone else and he will help him to take all the money or the data or the honeypot, whatever it is. Right. But that, that is a really bad situation to be in. So. So, yeah, ultimately we really have a cool opportunity to, to build a private existence on Noster. And there's a bunch of different ways that we could do it, but one fascinating encryption scheme that we found is the messaging layer security protocol. And this is basically a protocol that a group of people can come up with a shared secret that they can encrypt messages to, and then later everyone can decrypt them. But it's a smart algorithm where we rotate the keys so we don't encrypt everything to the same key all the time, but we keep switching them out. And we can add people to the group, we can remove them, and we can define who can write in a group, we can only read it, et cetera. And once we have this encryption envelope, we can put all of the Noster events, all the different kind numbers, all the different use cases that already all of the clients support, now we can drop in these events in the encrypted envelope, and we just need to decrypt them on the client side, and any existing application can interpret them and use them for whatever it needs to be used. And so that's super, super bullish. And that's the Marmot protocol.

Caliburn (43:46)

Okay, is that what White Noise is using or is that a different setup?

Max (43:52)

Yeah, exactly, that's White Noise. And so we set out almost two years ago or something to solve this group messaging problem in Noster and have went through a couple different encryption schemes and thought through of how they might work and ultimately settled on this one, a quite modern variant of the Signal protocol, so to say. And the goal always was to fix this. For existing Noster applications, I want Primal to have world class encryption for their messaging and that Primal users can write Damos users or Amethyst users, sharing the same encryption scheme, being interoperable with all of this beauty that we have in Nostr just on a private way. And so it was much more than just creating an app like White Noise that does this, because that's just another app that's not really going to change the needle. We need to fix all the apps. And so for that we need a protocol. And so ultimately we came up with this Marmot protocol that encompasses three kind of sub protocols to enable this private realm. There is the NOSTR protocol, obviously, and we create noster identities, NSECs, NPAPs, et cetera. And we use NOSTR relays to deliver the messages. Then we have Blosum. Blosum is very similar to Nostr, but Nostr is for text and Blossom is for images or PDFs or any arbitrary data. So that's how we send encrypted pictures and so on. And then we have the messaging layer, security protocol, mls and that's the whole encryption key derivation scheme. And all of this together gives us a completely decentralized, unstoppable, perfectly encrypted, fully private system where we can, you know, switch out how we deliver the messages. We can use Noster relays, we can use multiple of them at the same time, or we just use Bluetooth or USB sticks or whatever. It really doesn't matter that much because the server no longer defines the identity of the user, the user defines the identity of the user. And you sit in your bathroom, you throw some dice, you get a private key and you sign a message saying that this is my name, hello world, and voila, that's it. And with this mindset, together with the sovereign encryption, we have an infrastructure, independent message delivery, independent strong encryption scheme that can be interoperable. And for that we're building the code and the dev tooling and the libraries to make it easy for others to implement this into their existing apps.

Caliburn (46:25)

It's super cool. And I mean the obvious. One of the incredible benefits is that if AWS happens to have a big outage, this won't just unilaterally go down. Like Signal had issues recently, I Feel like that outage made a lot of people realize, oh, huh, this is still like Signal is a great tool. I use Signal every day. But it obviously has some infrastructure vulnerabilities because of the centralization of that infrastructure. And that's where the, you know, these, the utilization of Noster relays. But while some may in fact go down if they were hosted that way, like you're not going to take all of them down unilaterally at once, right? So you're still going to have a much better chance of getting a message delivered, an encrypted message delivered, even in the event of large scale, you know, outages across other centralized, you know, server clusters. Which is, which is pretty amazing and I think kind of like vital, actually.

Max (47:19)

Yeah, yeah. Signal reminds me so much of David Chaum's early Ecash projects. They had a really difficult problem. Signal is trying to make a group of people communicate privately. Super fucking hard. Chom had probably even a bit more difficult problem of let's make digital payments work. And they had tremendous issues of coordination. And in Charm's case, it was especially about time stamping. We need to prevent double spending ultimately and the creation of new tokens, right? So who can inflate the money supply? These two things are super difficult to solve. And with Signal, it's how do we establish keys, someone wants to just type in a username and get the public keys of someone. How do we do that? How do we deliver those group messages and send notifications to people? And all of these get a lot easier when you have a centralized server in the middle. Like centralized solutions to difficult problems are way easier than decentralized solutions. And so, okay, we have to use a centralized server, but then at the very least, let's reduce the amount of trust that we have to put in that server. Let's reduce the amount of power that the server has over the users. Let's make it so that at the very least messages are encrypted, in Signal's case, right? So that the server cannot read the messages of the people in the group. And in David Chom's case it was let's make the transaction private. Meaning that the server cannot say that this guy received a coin here and he's spending it now right there. And they utilize beautiful cryptography, super simple, elegant math formulas to provide these security guarantees very, very successfully. And it's a monumental breakthrough, right? Like this is fucking huge. Like Ecash was massive in the 80s, like way ahead of its time. Like incredible visionary, genius technology signal from like 2016 or something when that paper came out. Also, like, incredible app, like, amazing, Huge, huge progress. But as you say, you plug out the computer and the system dies. And that sucks for money, that sucks for speech. It sucks for both, right? If, if someone can just turn off your existence and your tools and your experience, then, sure, as long as he doesn't, it's fine. But when he does, it's critical. And just the fear that it might happen in an unopportune time is enough to keep you anxious and keep you up at night. So we need a decentralized system for timestamping and money. That's where Bitcoin comes in. But equally, we need to have a decentralized system for public speech. That's where Nostr comes in. It really works. But ultimately we need to have a decentralized system for private communication and coordination. And I hope that Marmont is the protocol that can deliver it, because it is decentralized to the very core of it.

Caliburn (50:19)

I think it's a really important point because it's easy to fall into the trap of like, well, we have Bitcoin, so we're good now, right? You know, they can't stop us from sending transactions. But what if you can't communicate in a secure and private way with the person you're trying to transact with? Like, that communication layer is necessary to enable the monetary layer. If you're transacting through cyberspace, if you're not in the meat space, okay, if you're in the meat space, you can scan a QR code, whatever, no problem. But once you are distributed, if you're trying to transact with somebody on the other side of the world and you don't have a secure communication channel to be able to exchange addresses with, you've.

Walker (50:58)

Got a big problem.

Caliburn (51:00)

And if you've got. Not only is it perhaps not secure, but if it's reliant on a third party just to keep it up and running, you've got a really big problem. Because then how can you have any sort of a guarantee that you will be able to exercise that freedom to transact without the freedom to communicate and communicate privately? In my mind, the two really go hand in hand.

Max (51:20)

Yeah, they really do. And that, yeah, that's, that's where we, we need to take all of the technologies that, that we've built and put them together in novel ways. And, you know, it's like money to some extent, is the least of our problems. Like, you know, it's, it's, it's hard to Stay alive. Like we need to get food, we need to get clothing, shelter, like physical protection and like joy, you know, beautiful things, art, nice walks in the park, et cetera. Like, there's so many problems to solve in human existence. And to a larger extent I'm looking forward to finally being done with the money and being able to finally start solving real problems. Because most people don't work on the money. Most people work for the money, sure, but they solve some other incredibly important projects in real industry and real human connections, etc. So I'm really looking forward to be able to fix or to work on these problems now knowing that the money has been solved. Because a lot of these higher order production things and services, they are so broken because the money is broken. And that's why it was incredibly good that we took the time to fix the money. It took long enough. But now that we have it, we can actually work on the other stuff with those solid foundations that we know won't break on us. And that's, that's incredible. And if we continue doing this for public speech, for private speech, for commerce, for delivering physical goods, etc. For all of these other important parts of the human existence when we have freedom tech in every single one of them, like that's, that's going to be cool.

Caliburn (53:01)

Well, and it's, it's like actually quite urgent I think, because you see this, this totalitarian temptation always just creep in. Right. It seems that even regardless of the political side that one may be on in any particular country, very few people are actually advocating to dismantle and shrink to the extreme the size of the bloated kleptocratic state. Most people are more concerned with is my side in charge of the state as it is. And if it needs to grow a little bit for my people to maintain their power, that's okay by me, as long as it's not the other guy in power. And both, you know, quote sides tend to think this, but the reality is that like what we need to be doing is, is massively shrinking the size of this state. Because you see this everywhere because of all of the incentives being broken, because of the fact that especially younger generations truly and rightly feel that they cannot get ahead. They cannot, they don't. They're not going to be able to afford the boomer's house that now costs $2 million that the boomer bought for a handful of raspberries in the 70s. It's not going to happen. So they're understandably frustrated. They're Frustrated, because they, I think the main part of the frustration comes from just the fact that they don't actually understand what the true problem is. They see the symptoms of the problem, but not the problem itself. And so you see this totalitarian creep everywhere. You see people advocating for ludicrous policies like the recent mayor elect in New York who is, I mean, just talking about freezing rents, government controlled grocery stores make, just make everything free, right? And it's like, boy, it seems like I've heard this before and it didn't work out and it ended in hundreds of millions dead. But hey, maybe it'll work out this time, right buddy? But those types of controls always tend to lead to controls in other parts of society, right? Like the totalitarianism starts out in one part, right before it becomes total. It starts out with control. Let's control the price of this. It's just the price of milk and eggs. We just need to do this, right? That ripples throughout. And then once they realize they don't actually have control of anything, that's when they have to start exerting more forceful and often violent control in other parts of people's lives to ensure that they're able to maintain control in these initial parts. You know, the food, the shelter, all of those things, transportation. But sadly, we're already at this stage where it feels like this. The fiat Panopticon, the surveillance state is so pervasive and has just been so accepted that it doesn't take much for a totalitarian state to just take it one level higher, which is absolute control. Right. Like the tools are already there for them to do that. It's now a question of do we have the necessary, the requisite tools to be able to resist that. And I think we're at least getting closer. But like, there is a great deal of work still to do.

Max (56:07)

Yeah, absolutely. And Mises wrote a really great book on this subject called the Middle of the Road Leads to Socialism. That's exactly what you're describing, right? If you start with one intervention, economic consequences are that you will not get what you want. And if you think that by more intervention you will eventually get there, then that will ultimately lead to a hardcore tyranny and the complete abolition of property and free markets. And that is collapse of society every time, for obvious reasons. So yes, we need to have tools available that makes resistance profitable. Then, then it's again just economic law, right? If, if, if thievery becomes unprofitable and, and the underground free market economy is very profitable, then every thief will Rather quickly turn around and stop stealing and, and start working and then because it's, you know, more money for him ultimately. So. And I think we can get to the state by massively increasing the cost of attack while substantially decreasing the cost of defense. And that's exactly what encryption does, literally. So by deploying this broadly and widely and together with a bunch of other security culture technologies, and if we ship this tech via the Internet to 8 billion people and everyone uses it like HTTPs is a perfect example, then that surveillance on this attack vector has simply stopped. It just doesn't exist anymore. There's a bunch of other ways that you can be and are being actively surveilled by most modern applications. But HTTPs solved so much by just basically Google hitting the on switch. Ultimately that tipped over the point, right? But now we are at that point where it's just supernatural. And that will continue to happen once we build better application that solve more important problems easier, faster, cheaper and yeah, then users will come. Ultimately again, we're not lacking problems like government is doing perfectly fine on the problem side of the marketing narrative. We don't need any any more on that. They could slow down if possible even. But yeah, telling people that the tools are available, helping them to, to understand and utilize these tools and ultimately spread the word is hard work, but worth it. And over a couple of halvings, it absolutely makes a difference. If you look back for eight years, etc. The progress is stunning. And sure, it seems like a grind when you're in it, but when you reach the peak and you look back down, you do realize that it's actually been quite right.

Caliburn (59:06)

There's something I think about a lot which is the idea of people running toward something versus running away from something, running toward Freedom Tech or running toward a superior user experience that happens to be built atop Freedom Tech, or running towards any, you know, you're running towards a positive, right? And a lot of people, you know, for instance, use Nostra as an example. A lot of people have come to Noster because of that, because they saw the potential in it. They weren't necessarily actively being censored or anything like that. In some cases, obviously yes. But in other cases it was freedom minded individuals who said, wow, this is a really cool thing. I'd like to be a part of this. I see where this can go and boy, I would really, when, you know, when a rainy day comes, I will be very glad to have this. But until then, it's a lot of fun. The user experience is getting better. A lot of us ran toward Nostr. A lot of people only get smart. My father in law says to me, he says, you know, the majority of people get smart by force, not by choice. Like you don't actually get smart until you are forced to. You don't get smart until you have a problem so pressing something you need to run away from, that you're forced to say, okay, I need to fix this. How do I fix this? I need to figure out this, the solution. I'm curious what your thought on that is as it relates to these technologies. Because the other part of this is like the sad truth is that most people just don't give a shit about a lot of this. And it's sad, but it's true. But to your point about HTTPs, which is a really good one, people don't necessarily give a shit about it, but they still use it. So it's like, how do you bridge that gap where something becomes ubiquitous, a privacy preserving freedom tech tool becomes ubiquitous, where it's just the water people are swimming in. They don't even know what HTTPs stands for, but they see it at the front of all their URLs and they're using it. How do you get to that point? And does it, does it involve people running away from something, from the totalitarian overreach because they finally just have had enough?

Walker (61:00)

Or is there a way to draw.

Caliburn (61:01)

People in and have them run towards something because they're, they're curious about it, they have a desire to check it out, they think that it might just be better. Like, how do you balance that?

Max (61:11)

Yeah, those two things are extremely important. But I think more important is that we control the, the creation of the tools. There is an phenomenal research paper by the Tor people from like 20 years ago called Anonymity Loves Company on network effects and anonymity and privacy. Something like this. And the gist of it is in order to achieve a high level of privacy, we need to increase the size of the crowd. In order to increase the size of the crowd, a large amount of people need to behave the same, look the same, be indistinguishable from another. If we leave important decisions of how to behave to the end user, he doesn't have the expertise to understand the problem or even know that there is a problem, let alone how to solve it, and there is no consensus then among users and everyone will behave slightly different. Therefore we have no crowd, therefore we're easy to spy upon. So if we do want to have a secure system, we need to have a system that by default enables privacy for the end user, right? Like if the user has to solve the problem, that's, that's the wrong level, right? If the, if the developer of the app, that is the guy who has to solve the problem is still not the right level because he's an app developer, right? He doesn't know about the details of cryptography and protocol design, right? So the layer up is like if the library developer, you know, the tooling of the app developer, if this guy could fix it, you know, that's better. But ultimately if the persons who implement the protocol itself or the cryptography, right. If they can nail down a system that is perfectly private by default, where simply by using the tool you become indistinguishable from anyone else, you don't need to do anything special, just use the tool and you're good. Then we increase the size of the crowd substantially from just this one user who has no idea, to ultimately a couple protocol designers who really thought about this, who've implemented the protocol, which later got faithfully implemented in libraries and then used in apps. And ultimately there's the end user using it. But because we were, we established proper ethics at a higher point of this production cycle, that means that a much wider net of, of protection is cast over users. And that is ultimately, I think, the way to go. Like only the defaults matter because most people just use the default. And if that is not secure, if, if the default is one of, of systematic theft and slavery, which is absolutely what we have right now, the default path of the human is go to school until you're properly indoctrinated for 25 years and then sit in a desk for the next 40, and then maybe we'll let you go.

Caliburn (64:12)

So sad.

Max (64:14)

It's horrible. And many people do this simply because, well, that's what we do. And if that is because the people who designed the protocols of the civilization we're in did not have freedom as their guiding star, right? They, they had power and control, especially control in what they optimized the system for. And the system is behaving as designed. It is very much according to specification. It's just the initial goal of the people working on this was, was truly flawed. And so by first of all re examining what should be the founding principles, the guidelines, the solid foundations that a big project should rest upon, my opinion that's individual sovereignty, freedom, property rights, privacy, etc. That is extremely important to shape the real human life of a large amount of people. And, and so by stepping up and building the tools. We have a chance of putting this better ethos at the heart of these systems and ultimately that will affect a large amount of people. It's just hard. It's really, really hard. And it takes a lot of time and effort and a lot of people and much more than just programmers. So if you're listening to this and you want to fix the status quo and you want to fix the default, then step up and build freedom tech. That's actually good.

Caliburn (65:51)

I say amen to that. It gets back to that idea that the purpose of a system is what it does, right? You want to know what the purpose. And yes, it's a little tongue in cheek almost, in many ways, but it's broadly, I think, very applicable because what it gets down to is it gets down to what you said at a protocol level, right? And if the incentives and the values of whoever designed that protocol warp it in some way, like Fiat is ultimately, you can think of it as its own sort of protocol, right? You can use protocol in a fairly liberal way here. You want to know what the purpose of Fiat is? Just look around you that, like, that's the purpose, like it's what's happening, it's what it does, it's what. What is the result. And to the point about just indoctrination, this is something I have a very vested interest in now. Just having a young son and also as somebody who was. I was homeschooled myself and I'm forever grateful, ever more grateful to my, my mother and father for doing that, a little more work on my mom's side, but grateful to both of them very much, just for being great parents and for, for homeschooling, because it's not easy, especially at that time when you don't just have, you don't have. The Internet was not then what it is now. The tools that exist then were not at all what they are now. But the modern public school system is truly a system of indoctrination. And it's based on this neo Prussian model that was then adopted by Adolf Hitler, famously with compulsory public schools, which for some reason are. It's like the one vestige of Hitler that the, you know, Germany has decided to keep is compulsory public schooling. Homeschooling's illegal. Can't imagine why they decided to keep that one bit, you know, but hey, apparently they liked that bit about it. But, but it's insane. It's like you, you want to know why things don't change, like in any meaningful level from within the system. It's because, like, the system is doing exactly what it's designed to do. What it's designed to do is continue to. To perpetuate itself. And it can only perpetuate itself if it can maintain the status quo, if it can ensure that each new generation of bright and sparkling young minds are systematically beaten into mental submission, robbed of any and all creativity, robbed of any fire that they might have to say, you know what? Fuck this, I'm done. This doesn't make any sense. I don't like this anymore. Like, I don't want to be a part of this. They it. That needs to happen. Because otherwise, if you had a. I mean, too many kids start getting homeschooled, and there's going to be far too many free thinkers. It's going to be. It's going to be a huge problem for the state. So if you're able, homeschool your kids. But I digress. But there are so many tools available now. It's amazing. Like, you can, like technology. The Internet is a magical, magical thing that enables so many people to do so much more with so much less. But I think you're spot on with the kind of call to action there about, like, you can just build things. Like, and if you can't build, I think you are such a great example of this, Max, because you said it yourself, you're not a developer, you're not a. You're not a coder, but you've been able to, You've contributed to so many different freedom tech projects over the years, like, so many. I, I don't even know if you have count, but you've been able to do that without, you know, without writing code. Because there are other ways you can contribute. There's so many other things that need to be done. Like, and you don't just have to start a podcast either. You can do so many other things. You actually, you should also start a podcast. Absolutely. 100%. Everyone should start a podcast. If you're listening to this right now, why aren't you starting a podcast? But that's what. It's a beautiful thing that we have these ways to contribute. Wait, sorry, would you say that's.

Max (69:38)

Every podcast host tells himself that it's.

Caliburn (69:40)

Like, yeah, yeah, exactly. I'm doing my part, I'm doing my part. But, but really, like, what we're dealing with at a certain point comes down to just a. A messaging game, a communication game, an information game. And the information sphere is so saturated with garbage. There's so much noise that we need more signal we need more people who have that signal within them and are capable of amplifying it to do so. Because like that, you know, it's like it's not the whole field of dreams thing. If you build it, they will come. Like it doesn't, it doesn't matter if you build freedom tech that nobody knows about and nobody uses. Like people have to know about it, people have to use it. You have to go out there and do the work. And a lot of that work, you know, the developers, you know, who build it are oftentimes not always the greatest at promoting it themselves. And that's where there's so much room for other people to step in who may not be non technical to come in and do, do that other work that you know, you can't code. The developer maybe isn't, doesn't want to do the promotion. That's a match made in heaven right there. You know that that's your, that's your Wozniak and jobs essentially.

Max (70:44)

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Like your goal as a non developer is basically that you can keep the other devs in the dev in the development cave. Like your task is to keep them in, to make sure they don't escape for like reasons like you know, getting water or something. Just bring it to them and then they can do their devving thing and you just do the other stuff that needs to be done. And you know, it's not that hard. It's actually quite, quite chill and like ultimately I just talk to people, that's basically my job and that's a pretty good job.

Caliburn (71:21)

It helps that you're good at it.

Max (71:23)

Too, you know, but that's the thing, you get good at it with practice, right? I mean, if you look at my early videos, they were shit obviously and they get hopefully a bit better by now, but it will be astonishing if not. If you really do something for a thousand hours or more, you'll no longer be shit.

Caliburn (71:45)

Yeah, I mean, yeah, if you do something for a thousand hours for more and you are still shit at it, maybe there's something wrong with how you've been doing it. You may want to reevaluate that a little bit. But I think by and large it's almost impossible to do something over and over and over and over again and not improve at it. Unless you are just truly perhaps so convinced of your own aptitude that you don't see the areas where there are needs for improvement. Perhaps. But otherwise you should be able to meaningfully improve in just about anything that you are doing. Over and over and over and over again, I hope.

Max (72:19)

And the cool thing with division of labor is that you don't have to be the best compared to others. You just have to focus on that, that you want to work on most ultimately. And that's pretty cool. Devs are crazy nerds that literally prefer staring on their computer screen for like 20 hours more than, I don't know, walking out in the park. Weird people, they exist, but, like, let them be in the cave. You know, if you need to do some calls coordinating stuff and you can take a walk in the park while doing it, you know, like, you prefer that the other guy prefers that. Like just trade and conquer.

Caliburn (73:00)

Well, it's a. Again, like, you without the devs who are willing to go in that hole and who like to go in that hole and solve problems and write the code that actually will be the underpinnings of the world that is to come, none of it exists. Right? Like, like you, you. You necessarily need that first. And then once you have that, though, it's about how do we get that in front of as many people as possible? And like, then you've got the rare breeds like Cali, you know, who are, who are capable of both writing the code and going out and promoting it very well. But, you know, Cali is a, I think a very special breed in that case.

Max (73:36)

Yeah, yeah, definitely. And that's the other thing. Like, you can, you can find a couple areas that if you specialize yourself in, in a small niche, you could actually become one of the greatest on this planet in this niche, right. If you pick it well. And maybe you can do this in two or even three areas, or probably not 50, but if, if you find a collection of really important skills that you get really, really good at and that in combination, they become very impressive. Right Then, then that's a, that's crazy powerful right there. There's a few other people, like, for example, Austrian economics and like computer science or computer engineering. Right, Those are two niches, right. They're incredibly broad rabbit holes after all. But there's, you know, there's few that have mastered any one of these, but very much fewer that have mastered both. Like, I count maybe two or three people that have actually mastered computer science and Austrian economics, by the way. One of them is Eric Vascule. He wrote Crypto Economics, the best book on Bitcoin. The other is Lucas Antivero, like, warrior at Wasabi Wallet since, since the early days, like, and that's about it. Like, they are, like, so sharp in Both of these areas and that's incredibly rare to find. And now imagine you, you have this genius, right? But I don't know, he has to waste time booking his flights and getting a hotel to come to a conference or something, right? Like he's the genius. He should be painting the, the, like the portrait on, on the ceiling. Let him do that and, and get him an assistant, you know, someone who, who's definitely not a master coder to do the administrative stuff, you know, to clean the toilets in the spaceship so that he can, you know, continue building the spaceship.

Caliburn (75:37)

It's true. And it's like again, this is where I'm so happy to see all of these different grant foundations pop up. And I know people have different thoughts on this and right now it's particularly contentious about which devs should be getting funded and which shouldn't. But it's like, I think These organizations, like OpenSats as a prime example, HRF gives out a lot of grants as well too, right? This is like, this is fantastic. Like because that genuinely just frees people up to do what they do best, which is build and there, and there is so much time that is lost in the minutia of just figuring out inconsequential shit. But that shit that needs to be done, right? But it's like, it's not what those types of people should need to focus their time on. Like we. And the fact that there are patrons out there already. Like we actually, we were talking about patronage earlier. Like will this come back? It's like in many ways that, that actually is what organizations like OpenSats are like. That is a form of, you know, a very kind of decentralized patronage where you're, you know, bringing in patrons from a lot of different areas obviously, and then having a, a group decide how to allocate that. But that, I mean that is patronage basically. And like, so I guess we're, you know, again, the future's here. It's just not evenly distributed yet.

Max (76:47)

Once again, yeah, and as you say, right, these, these funding organizations are amazing, but they do come with a risk, right, that they can rug. Pull the funding for whatever reason and potentially even threaten people with that. It's actually quite common in philanthropy and so on and that. So one of the other things a non developer can do is actually find and develop and integrate a business model, right? Like developers should be. Sorry, the users should be funding the developers. In the best case, users are the ones that get massive benefits of using the app, otherwise they wouldn't use it. So they have an incentive to chip in a little bit. You know, not too much per user, but it will sum up to a decent amount. And then that means more devs can focus more time on making the app better. So it's a nice, beautiful feedback loop. Now that we have magic Internet money, finding a business model in cyberspace has become ridiculously easy. We can literally write the code that takes the money from the user and puts it to the devs, right? Like it's, that's like two lines of code. You can vibe it by now. And so designing this business model, we have so much more opportunities now. And there are so many bitcoin projects or freedom tech projects that have amazing developers, really passionate UX designers and so on. And they just need a little bit help of actually convincing users that this is worth paying for and, and then managing this whole enterprise to make sure it scales to more developers and so on. These are incredibly important tasks where you don't need to be a specialist engineer or anything. Like, sure, help sense helps if you have some entrepreneurial experience, etc. But you can learn those easily. Like this is just a learning by doing thing. And if you really want to help, just do stuff like that. For a cool project that you're already using. Scratch your own itch, right? If you have an app, you know it's valuable because you, you're using it and you see how it could be way better than it currently is, that there's like 10 bugs that you know and 50 feature requests you would have. That's perfect. Just be annoying and start writing the developers all the time and join their public calls and their chat rooms, etc. And hang out and be helpful and ask what you can do that they don't want to do. And eventually you're part of the team and cleaning the toilets on the spaceship. It's a kind of shitty job, but at least you're on the spaceship. That's a big deal.

Caliburn (79:21)

It's true. And the other beautiful thing is just the barriers to funding developers whose work you like or find valuable. Those barriers have actually never been lower. I think NOSTR is such a great example of this. Obviously bitcoin already made it so much easier, especially if you're trying to fund a developer who's in Africa, who's in Asia, you know, and you're sitting here in the US like that's. That can be hard to do in the fiat system or impossible, depending on what specific jurisdiction. Are there sanctions to it? Like, I know. So bitcoin fixed basically all of that. But Nostr fixes that discovery layer of it as well, which I think is so beautiful. Like, if you're listening to this right now, like, go just find a dev you like and just go give him a. Go, give him a zap. Like, you can just do that. You can just go zap a dev right now. It's a beautiful thing. You can. There's also, you know, through multiple of the different Nostr clients, you can, you know, actively, I think at least I use Domus because I'm a, you know, iPhone user and I use Primal and, and on Domus, you can allocate a certain percentage. Whatever zap you send, you can like add an additional percentage on top that you say, I want, I want. For each zap I send, I want to add, you know, whatever, 10%, 20% additionally that I want to go to the dev team. Or, you know, you can pay, you can call it crazy. You know, you can, you can pay for like a premium subscription to one of these things. And maybe, maybe you don't think that that's worth it, but like, I don't know, for me it's, it's worth it to at least do a small thing to be able to, to give value for value. Like, people talk a lot about value for value, but it only works if people do it and people do it at scale. And I'm not even talking about the scale of individual contributions, but the scale of the total number of people who are engaging in that value for value model. Because I think that it can work if right now it's, you know, the, perhaps the pool is too small to draw from, but like, you know, with each zap, you make that pool a little bit bigger. That's a beautiful thing.

Max (81:16)

Exactly. One other cool trick is you can make it that the post that you write zaps actually go to someone else. So one cool thing is if you want to help out a project, make a cool post about why the app is great and how to use it and add the lightning address of the developer into the note, send it, and maybe a couple thousand sats get put together and the developer gets. Not just marketing, but it gets paid for someone else's marketing. That's, that's a, that's a good deal and that's something you can do.

Caliburn (81:51)

It is, it is really cool. Like the friction has, has decreased exponentially and, and now. And there's just so many cool things being built right now. I love to see it. I want to be conscious of your time here because I know we're running up against it a little bit of our, of our 90 minutes. It flies by every time we get to, we get to chatting. Max, it's been a treat to have you here. Is there anything you want to leave folks with or anything we didn't cover or any projects that you want to give a shout out to that people should go, should go check out like that you're particularly interested in.

Max (82:23)

There's so many cool projects and I'm trying to always to, to to shill different projects each time. So far I have not run out of ones which is good. But one that was on my mind today is, is an incredible steel engraver for your for your private keys. Called the seed Hammer. It's a open source hardware and firmware with 3D printed do it yourself standardized parts and you can engrave on like a small steel plate whatever you want. It can be your 12 words, it can be your password to your password manager. It can be a QR code to your output descriptor of your multi signature steel engraved QR codes. That sounds really interesting all of a sudden.

Caliburn (83:09)

It could actually be cool.

Max (83:11)

A Shamir secret share QR code of any arbitrary text that you want. So you need to have like three out of five steel plates in order to get to your secrets. So once the robots do our steal backups for us, we can do all types of cool things in steel. So I'm really bullish on that one.

Caliburn (83:29)

I have not heard of that one. That is really neat. I'm going to have to check that out. And you said it's totally like they open sourced it as well.

Max (83:35)

Exactly. So this all kind of started out with the seed signer where you needed a QR code of the private key. And so we were drawing them on a piece of paper by hand and I was starting to think hey, is it actually possible to do this on steel? Like would a camera read a QR code that's in steel? And some guys in Switzerland went and just did it. They created the manual hole punch for checking if it's actually possible. And turns out yes, you can absolutely scan a steel QR code. And so people started selling those hand stamps and so on to punch into steel. But it takes a lot of time. It's super easy to make a mistake, especially with a QR code. That's just not a thing humans create. That's a computer thing to do both to write and to read a QR code. So humans are really bad at doing this consistently correct and it just takes too much time and if we want to make really complex things like an output descriptor, that's like next level, even more difficult than just words. So let's the robot do it for us. And they found this on Alibaba, this like Chinese steel engraver that they could plug in the seats signer as a kind of management computer. But it's just kind of weird to buy this Alibaba machine overpriced to, to you know, manage or to back up your multi generational wealth. So ultimately they're like, yeah, we can do it from scratch. Let's just design the entire hardware, the PCB board, the mechanics, everything. And two years later they're basically done. So really cool to see that project develop and really happy that they're actually selling and shipping it now.

Caliburn (85:21)

I am stoked to go check this out. That sounds awesome. I'll link your towards towards liberty.com is your general site right for. There's a lot of your stuff and then I'll link your. Your endpub as well. Of course. But Max, it's been a, it's been a treat to have you on here, man. It was good to catch up. Any. Any final words?

Max (85:40)

Yeah. Thanks Walker, for, for the continued invite. I'm happy to be back on the show.

Caliburn (85:45)

Was.

Max (85:45)

It was good hanging in person with you and Carla. That's always nice. And their final words is just go out there and build stuff. If you're listening to this pod. I mean that's the thing with these bitcoin podcasts. It feels like we're preaching to the choir. You know, you should be working on Freedom Tech. We know that you know that you should be working on Freedom Tech and you know that we know that you know. So like all things, you should basically just be working on Freedom Tech. That's the gist of the story. You have approval. Like the official bitcoin podcast told you to work on Freedom Tech. Full endorsement. You can tell your mom it's fine. Some, some guys on the Internet said so and, and therefore just you're going to do that now and it's going to be glorious.

Caliburn (86:36)

That's a. That is a perfect note to end on. Yeah, you can just do things, especially when a podcast tells you to. That's the best time and you should start a podcast on that note. Max, great chatting to you man. Thanks to everybody who joined in on the NOSTR live stream as well. Appreciate you guys. Thank you for the zaps. You know, I will be paying them forward in 696sat increments so thank you guys. Thank you Max. It was great hanging.

Max (87:00)

See you on the next one, Walker.

Walker (87:10)

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 me on noster@primal.net walker and this podcast@primal.netcoin 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.comwalkeramerica 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.