NoSolutions

"Don't be afraid of going your own way."

Johnathan Corgan & Gigi take a walk in Madeira. Recorded during SEC-07.

Listen on sovereignengineering.io

In this dialogue:

• Why FIPS started with Arjen asking for networking that does not depend on registrars, central authorities, or yankable domain names
• Johnathan disappearing for a month after Costa Rica, then returning with a protocol design that scratched the itch
• FIPS as a self-organizing peer mesh: no privileged coordinator, only what each node can enforce locally
• Transport-agnostic networking: Ethernet, Bluetooth, UDP overlays, Tor, serial links, and whatever else can move packets
• A hilariously impractical but very useful test: tunneling FIPS over Nostr relays, with ping times measured in seconds, and it still worked
• Why robustness under ugly conditions matters more than looking elegant on the happy path
• 150 nodes already on the FIPS testnet, and what has to change to get from 150 to 1,500 to 15,000
• Friday Demo Day as the forcing function: build it, show it, let other people poke holes in it
• The next FIPS release: fewer unnecessary pieces, stronger protocol negotiation, harder internals, more battle testing
• "Try to break it" so friends can fix it before hostile actors do
• Costa Rica and SEC-07 as a return to the early Cypherpunk and early Bitcoin energy: do not reform the old system, route around it
• Why Nostr feels miraculous if you remember the world before it, even if normies still see it as half-baked
• "Rough consensus and running code": academic rigor, design review, and why code still has to survive contact with reality
• Johnathan's critique of "shower thought to ZapStore in six hours" culture: speed helps, but engineering still matters
• Claude Code wrote most of FIPS only after two months of protocol iteration and roughly 30,000 words of design docs
• Johnathan read every file and every line of code his agents produced, which is probably the only sane way to use them
• Agentic coding as a force multiplier, not a substitute for thought: bad programmers get worse, good programmers get faster, non-programmers can finally build
• Drive-by AI pull requests, effort-matching reviews, and why maintainers should not do all the thinking for you
• Advice to younger builders: dissent, trust your own judgment, stop scrolling, and start doing stuff
• "You can just do things"

People mentioned:

• Arjen (brought the original itch from Costa Rica, noDNS instincts, freedom-tech networking)
• Cobrador (TollGate, weird deployment constraints, "I didn't think this would exist for 10 more years")
• SatsAndSports

Projects & tech mentioned:

• FIPS (Free Internetworking Peering System, a transport-agnostic encrypted mesh)
• Nostr
• TollGate (connectivity sold by the packet in hostile or weird environments)
• Tor
• ZapStore

Recorded at 945,297.

"I want to optimize for hackability and customization."

Justin Moon & Gigi take a walk in Madeira. Recorded during SEC-07.

Listen on sovereignengineering.io

In this dialogue:

• Justin's new obsession: building Shadow, a hackable mobile operating system for people who want full control over the stack
• Why Android is interesting again: not because it's clean, but because it is at least open enough to fight with
• Android file chaos, and the immortal "file saved successfully" meme
• One wallet, one relay connection, one shared set of primitives at the OS level, instead of every app reinventing the same mess
• The "UNIX tools of Nostr" idea, revisited from #07: Zig Multiplatform w/ Justin
• Booting a phone with less Android, then turning Android off piece by piece once the system is running
• Early signs of life for Shadow: Kosti successfully compiled and ran it
• From 13-second button clicks to instant GPU rendering, and why that counts as real progress
• Ricing phones like Linux desktops, with the usual Typecraft explainer and awesome-ricing rabbit hole
• Why Justin chose TypeScript apps on top of a Rust core: make the parts you should not vibe-code solid, and let users vibe-code the rest
• Apps as source code, almost like DMs, instead of a permissioned app store pipeline
• How maps, notebooks, and everything else dematerialized into the computer, via this video of stuff disappearing into software
• The app store tax, DUNS numbers, LLC theater, and why Justin would rather build a parallel thing than beg Apple and Google for approval
• Permissionless alternatives at every layer: phone OS, payments, relays, networking, app distribution, and compute
• GrapheneOS as the security-maximalist trade-off, versus Shadow as the hackability-maximalist trade-off
• "I want a 3D printed gun of phones" as Justin's deliberately unhinged way of describing maximum user freedom and minimum guardrails
• "I want to optimize for shooting yourself in the foot" as the sharper version of the same trade-off: less safety theater, more user agency
• Why many Linux phones failed: server people building for phone users, without a real vision for what a phone should become
• The Nostr opportunity: a community weird enough to flash devices, test strange tools, and actually use them
• "Where do your ideas come from?" and the obligatory Norm clip
• Why the future may look like one agent per project, each with its own identity, memory, and full machine to operate
• Personal clouds, bare-metal boxes, ephemeral VMs, and feeding your agents compute instead of feeding SaaS subscriptions
• Why local-first and self-hosted agent setups matter if you want real sovereignty, durable memory, and no surprise bans
• FIPS as a path toward permissionless networking, cryptographic addressing, and small resilient parallel internets
• Nostr VPN, tailscale-like overlays, and why overlay networks beat waiting for the whole world to rewire itself
• Messaging trade-offs: Marmot, SimpleX Chat, MLS coordination pain, chat relays, double ratchets, and what actually works for small groups
• Pika, identity, signaling, and why Justin wants to stop theory-crafting and start shipping
• Sovereign Engineering as a high-bandwidth filter for crazy ideas, where most things die, a few things bloom, and that is the point
• Why Bitcoin, Nostr, and projects like FIPS feel Amish-compatible: the goal is not rejecting technology, it is rejecting dependence
• Justin's closing promise: less talking, more shipping, and yes, shipping violently

People mentioned:

• Steve Lee (early sounding board for Lightning-at-the-OS-level ideas)
• Johnathan Corgan (creator of FIPS, pulled out of retirement by the right kind of weird)
• Martti Malmi (Nostr VPN, offline-friendly networking, also on #21: Hashtree, Nostr VPN, and Iris)
• UTXO the webmaster (building Wisp, see also Citadel Dispatch #200 with UTXO)
• Kosti (successfully compiled and ran Shadow OS)
• Pablo (app-as-chat-box idea, Pika, general agentic mischief)
• Arjen (mesh instincts, noDNS lineage, helping make the weird legible, also on #17: Organic Tech)
• Dimi (running VPS and simple cloud infrastructure alongside bitcoin mining facilities)
• Cobrador (TollGate, rural and off-grid deployment instincts)
• Shadrach (parallel systems, Amish country, and practical off-grid thinking, also on #20: Archipelago Meshtadels)
• Bitstein (orange-pilling the Amish remains a live meme)
• Erik Cason (mind-blowing people without realizing it)

Projects & tech mentioned:

• Shadow (Justin's experimental mobile OS)
• GrapheneOS (security-focused Android fork)
• FIPS (Free Internetworking Peering System)
• Nostr VPN (overlay networking over Nostr)
• Pika (encrypted messaging experiments for OpenClaw)
• Marmot (MLS-based chat on Nostr)
• SimpleX Chat (private messaging reference point mentioned in the conversation, see also Citadel Dispatch #196 with Evgeny Poberezkin)
• OpenClaw (one agent per project, memory, and task execution)
• ZapStore (permission-minimized Android app distribution)
• Wisp (mobile Nostr client being built by UTXO, see also Citadel Dispatch #200 with UTXO)
• Pokey (Nostr notification aggregation for power users)
• Deno (runtime for TypeScript apps on the phone)
• Nix (reproducible builds, environments, and OS packaging)
• Magisk (rooting and system modification on Android)
• BitChat (UX-first mesh messaging reference point)
• TollGate (connectivity and payments at the edge)
• HRF (trainings, activists, and the account-creation pain of the permissioned web)

Recorded at 944,875.

"Permissionless, permissionless, permissionless."

Yo & Gigi take a walk in Madeira. Recorded during SEC-07.

Listen on sovereignengineering.io

In this dialogue:

• Gigi's AI setup: voice prompts via vibeline to brainstorm, brainstorm to implementation plan, cron job that tackles one to-do every 20 minutes, builds overnight
• One agent per project: dergigi.com/projects, each agent spins up with an nsec and gets to work
• Nihao: Gigi's skill for spinning up Nostr identities from the terminal
• Claude Code "Mythos" codewords leaked -- swearing at your models actually helps
• Planner vs developer vs tester: three distinct personas, separation of powers for AI-assisted development
• Separate sessions for questions vs implementation, like separation of powers
• "Are you human?" vs "Are you useful?" -- the only question that matters
• PoW + WoT = useful. "Sats are just difficulty-adjusted PoW."
• Dialogical development -- Vervaeke on why dialogue, not monologue, is how you actually think
• Opponent processing -- Vervaeke: competing forces sharpen each other
• DiaLogos and the importance of walking dialogue
• Opus maximalism ended yesterday: Anthropic cutting off OpenClaw, now broke, looking at cheaper models and local hardware
• Routing models: OpenRouter and Routstr now route between thinking and simple models automatically
• Yo's Sovereign Engineering journey: showed up to SEC-04 with no programming experience, three weeks' notice, on a climbing trip visa
• SEC-04 was the vibe coding big bang: Paul showed the way, Calle tried to build a Cashu client live, Paul beat him to it
• Got offered to join the team because "you are the one who would actually be crazy enough to move to Madeira"
• "Safe return doubtful": the Shackleton ad as a model for SovEng recruitment. No pay, no wages, but glory. Read Endurance by Alfred Lansing.
• High barrier to entry, no option to leave, "in it for the right reasons" -- the SovEng filter
• "Make the internet a better place." The actual mission statement.
• Demoing on Demo Day is not optional
• The Weekly Loop: Monday Movement, Tuesday Talks, Wednesday Workshops, Thursday time off, Friday Demo Day
• Nuns Valley -- where the walks happen
• SEC-06 was about identity and signers. Agentic identity: spin up an nsec, now you can talk. The problem of identity in the age of OpenClaw.
• Fabian's NIP-17 plugin for OpenClaw: Nostr DMs as a transport layer for agents
• Yo's Zig NIP-17 plugin: building the same from scratch in Zig
• MLS, Pika, and pika for OpenClaw: encrypted group messaging for agent fleets
• The "social media intern" problem: you gave the keys to someone who doesn't know what they're doing
• Social attestation vs cryptographic proof: Yo's combined approach where clients only display migration events and users decide out-of-band
• Gzuuus's identity continuation proposal: simpler, no key management, just OTS timestamps and preimage commitments. Don't migrate old notes, just continue
• Pip's Vertex demo: purely social web-of-trust metrics already handle identity migration in practice
• "Identity is a social thing" -- Vitor was right about that part
• PortalSDK & the portal team joining SEC-06: hardware signers meeting agentic identity
• Nostr, Blossom, nsites, Cashu -- everything you need without permission
• "Permissionless, permissionless, permissionless" -- we need a new Steve Ballmer
• SEC-06 was three weeks only. Learned that three weeks is not enough, just a warm-up. Minimum four, six is the sweet spot.
• But SEC-06's energy spilled into SEC-07: first week was one of the most energetic ever, hit the ground running
• "The gray beards and the big brains actually came!"
• From Tollgate to NoDNS to fuckips to FIPS: the naming history of the Free Internetworking Peering System
• FIPS parties, not LAN parties: running on ESP32 radios, TCP, UDP, VPNs, Tor
• Jonathan came out of retirement, built FIPS from November to February, and now everyone's building on top of it
• "DNS is a shitcoin" -- direct quote from Jonathan
• Martti migrating Nostr VPN onto FIPS, Thomas showed a collaborative drawing board running on FIPS + Tor
• Quake III server running on FIPS
• nsites becoming the default deployment target for demos
• Blossom, nsites, NIP-60/61 -- all came out of SovEng cohorts and are now in the wild
• BTC++ coming to Madeira after the summer cohort, first public demo day since SEC-01
• Tollgate on balloons: a gorilla Starlink, "we are all choked by the fiber optic cables"
• Rob's silent payments over Nostr getting picked up by Sparrow: prototype gist
• L402 + nginx: Paygress -- pay-per-request HTTP monetization
• "The most awesome thing is everyone has this project in the back of their head they always wanted to build. Once you're at Sovereign Engineering, there's no excuse."
• Doom deployed on an nsite
• "After not shitcoining for so long, now I'm addicted to tokens."
• "No Solutions, only trade-offs."

People mentioned:

• Pablo (TENEX, Highlighter, SEC co-founder)
• Martti Malmi (Nostr VPN, migrating to FIPS)
• Paul (showed the vibe coding way at SEC-04)
• Calle (Cashu, live coding at SEC-04)
• Justin (browser, separate sessions for questions)
• Jonathan Corgan (FIPS creator, came out of retirement)
• Gzuuus (identity continuation proposal)
• Vitor Pamplona (social-only identity migration)
• Pip (Vertex, web-of-trust identity demo)
• Arjen (Tollgate, noDNS origins)
• Pete (Pete's kid doing games on Nostr)
• Cobrador (TollGate on balloons)
• Sir Sleepy (multiple npub power user)
• Sandwich (nsites resurgence)
• Thomas (collaborative drawing board on FIPS + Tor)
• Rob (silent payments over Nostr, picked up by Sparrow)
• hodlbod (key rotation proposal)
• Ben from LNbits (hardware Nostr signer)
• Fabian (NIP-17 plugin for OpenClaw)

Projects & tech mentioned:

• FIPS (Free Internetworking Peering System)
• Sovereign Engineering (the program itself)
• OpenClaw / ZeroClaw (agent harnesses, rapid prototyping vs security trade-off)
• Codex (OpenAI's coding agent)
• Routstr (model routing with Cashu payments)
• Tollgate (mesh network toll gates, now on balloons)
• Vertex (web-of-trust tools, identity migration demo)
• Nostr VPN (migrating to FIPS)
• nsites (Nostr-based web hosting, default demo deployment)
• Blossom (content-addressed blob storage)
• Cashu (eCash on Bitcoin)
• Nihao (skill for spinning up Nostr identities)
• Pika (MLS-based encrypted messaging for OpenClaw)
• Paygress (L402 nginx, pay-per-request HTTP monetization)
• Fabian's NIP-17 plugin for OpenClaw
• NIP-17 plugin PR for nullclaw
• NIP-17 (encrypted DMs)
• NIP-29 (relay-based groups)
• NIP-60 / NIP-61 (Cashu wallets on Nostr)
• Amber (Android Nostr signer)
• Portal (hardware Nostr signer cards)
• Primal (signing abilities release)
• Sparrow (silent payments integration from Rob's work)
• BPD5 (key management proposal)
• Endurance (Shackleton's expedition, Alfred Lansing)
• BTC++ (coming to Madeira after summer cohort)

Recorded at 943,743.

"We have this window of opportunity to steer the LLMs and the future of technology into a freedom-tech direction."

Martti Malmi & Gigi take a walk in Madeira. Recorded during SEC-07.

Listen on sovereignengineering.io

In this dialogue:

• Martti's GitHub annoyance spawned Hashtree: a content-addressed file system on top of Blossom that adds directories, file chunking, and encryption. Everything encrypted by default using content hash key encryption (inspired by Freenet), so Blossom server operators have cryptographic deniability about what they host.
• git remote hashtree: set up a hashtree remote for any Git repo, push to your Blossom server. Martti uses it for all Iris development, with GitHub only as a backup mirror. The web interface at git.iris.to supports NIP-34 issues and pull requests.
• The WebRTC mesh layer complements Blossom: peers find each other via Nostr relays for the initial handshake, then communicate directly. Requests route through peers with hops-to-live (starts around 15, probabilistically varied for privacy). No domain names, TLS certs, or IP addresses needed.
• Iris Browser loads apps from Hashtree URLs, bypassing web hosting entirely. Same idea as the old Freenet concept: content addressing means links don't break when servers go down.
• Nostr VPN was born from Martti's refusal to use Tailscale's Google/GitHub login. Built in two days. WireGuard underneath, Nostr relays for peer discovery and IP negotiation. Every device gets an npub. Exit node functionality coming, with a future Cashu-incentivized exit node marketplace.
• Double Ratchet messaging on Nostr: works well for two-party sessions, complexity grows with multi-device per user and group chats. Tested at SEC-07 via chat.iris.to with QR code invites. Martti prefers Double Ratchet over MLS for Nostr because MLS has stricter consensus requirements that conflict with decentralized relay sets.
• "Coding is going to be done by AI agents pretty soon." Martti writes basically zero code by hand now, vibecoding over tradcoding. Claude Opus (late 2025) was the inflection point that enabled Hashtree. He expects fully capable local models within a year.
• The window of opportunity: if freedom tech developers stop building now, Stripe, Cloudflare, and GitHub win by default because that's all the LLMs know. Getting freedom tech into the training data matters while models are still being shaped. Gwern wrote about this dynamic years ago in Bitcoin is Worse is Better, and his Scaling Hypothesis hints at where the AI side is headed.
• AI agents will eat network effects: your agent queries ten platforms, posts to all of them. The bundled interface becomes irrelevant. Big tech's moat dissolves. "An ouroboros effect, the snake of big tech eating its own tail." As Jack Dorsey recently put it, the killer feature of Bitcoin and Nostr is that they're permissionless.
• Pre-Nostr, Martti built Iris on Gun.js as a public-key-based social network. No traction after two or three years. When Jack Dorsey joined Nostr and it gained community, Martti ported Iris over quickly.
• The Ethereum confession: social nouns NFTs, Ethereum login in early Iris. "Every saint has a past, every sinner a future." The Bitcoin community's cultural friction was an interesting experience, but Martti found the maximalists more admirable than other groups.
• Early Bitcoin: first commit around early 2010, ran bitcoin.org, built the first exchange (bitcoinmarket.com), sold over 30,000 bitcoins through it. Life happened, moved on, came back through Nostr. "Bitcoin is singularity insurance" -- the one thing machines can't make more of.
• Web of trust vs. proof of work for fighting spam: PoW won't stop spammers more than it stops normal users. Social graph is the only proper solution for most interactions. A combination of both has its place, but WoT does the heavy lifting.
• Identity is prismatic: as moot argued in his SXSW talk, you're not the same person at church, the nightclub, or work. Nostr enables multiple npubs for different contexts. But spam is the trade-off with free identity creation, and social graph is the only proper solution. Web of trust filtering in Iris means no NSFW spam, at the cost of possibly missing new users.
• Content addressing as the foundation: files live in multiple places, links don't break, peers cache data from their social graph. DNS-like caching but without the hierarchical trust. "No global" is a feature.
• Local agents as a privacy layer: if your AI agent is your interface, platforms can't fingerprint your typing patterns. Even traffic analysis becomes harder with noise-based bandwidth usage.
• FIPS is Martti's most exciting Nostr project outside his own work: public key-based network routing that replaces IP addresses. Low-level infrastructure that could underpin everything else.
• SovEng experience: "awesome", intense from morning to evening, a teenage dream of hacking with people on a beautiful island. Came on short notice after Jonathan reached out following the Nostr VPN release.
• Martti's ask: use Hashtree, default your repos to hashtree remotes, solve real problems. "Nostr VPN actually solved a real problem. Scratch your own itch."

People mentioned:

• Justin Moon (browser discussion, GitHub stars feature request)
• Jonathan Corgan (FIPS creator, invited Martti to Madeira)
• Pablo (Nostr Signer / Nsec Bunker)
• Kieran (social graph library usage in Snort/ZapStream)
• Knut Svanholm (early Bitcoin history conversation with Martti)
• Gwern (Dwarkesh interview)
• utxo the webmaster (Wisp creator)
• jb55 (Damus / Notedeck)
• Christopher Poole / moot (4chan founder)
• Vitor Pamplona (Amethyst)
• isolabellart (Nostr-native artist, isolabellart.it.com)
• Sir Sleepy (traffic analysis demo)
• Jack Dorsey

Projects & tech mentioned:

• Hashtree (content-addressed file system on top of Blossom: directories, file chunking, encryption by default)
• git remote hashtree (decentralized Git using Hashtree storage, replacing GitHub remotes)
• git.iris.to (web-based Git interface with NIP-34 support: issues, pull requests, likes)
• Iris (Nostr social client with built-in social graph filtering)
• Iris Browser (loads websites and apps from Hashtree URLs in a content-addressed way)
• Nostr VPN (WireGuard tunnels using Nostr relays for peer discovery and signaling, no accounts needed)
• Nostr Double Ratchet (Signal-style encrypted messaging on Nostr with group chat support, demo at chat.iris.to)
• Blossom (content-addressed blob storage)
• WebRTC mesh (peer-to-peer data transfer, works in browsers and servers, probabilistic routing with hops-to-live)
• FIPS (Nostr public key-based network routing, by Jonathan Corgan)
• Reticulum (low-bandwidth mesh networking stack)
• LoRa (long-range, low-power radio for mesh networking)
• MLS / White Noise (encrypted group messaging on Nostr)
• Marmot Protocol (encrypted messaging protocol for Nostr)
• Freenet (early content-addressed peer-to-peer network, inspiration for Hashtree's encryption)
• Ladybird (independent browser implementation)
• OpenClaw (open-source AI agent harness)
• Cashu (eCash on Bitcoin, future incentivized exit node payments)
• Maple (privacy-preserving AI inference)
• Trusting Trust (the problem of trust in computing)
• Routstr (Nostr-based AI routing)
• PPQ (decentralized AI inference)
• Amber (Nostr signer for Android)
• Aegis (Nostr signer for iOS)
• Plebeian Market (Nostr marketplace)
• Shopstr (Nostr marketplace)
• Amethyst (Nostr client for Android)
• Wisp (Nostr micro-client)
• Damus Notedeck (Nostr client with app shell, built on nostrdb)
• ContextVM (execution environment for Nostr)
• Vertex (web of trust tools)
• Relatr (relay-side WoT filtering on ContextVM)
• Eternal September (what happens when a subculture scales)
• Zooko's Triangle (the naming trilemma: human-meaningful, secure, decentralized)
• nsite (Nostr-based web hosting)
• Commander Keen (DOS-era classic)
• IPX/SPX (LAN party networking protocol)
• Pirate Bay (decentralized resilience patterns that Nostr echoes, Peter Sunde: "I Have Given Up", keynote)

Recorded at 943,634.

"Bitcoin doesn't need more believers. Bitcoin needs more understanders."

Shadrach & Gigi take a walk in Madeira. Recorded during SEC-07.

Listen on sovereignengineering.io

Projects & tech mentioned:

• Archipelago (sovereign home node and mesh network platform)
• Archipelago Foundation
• Archipelago promo video
• AtoB (interoperable service protocol, co-authored with Jesus)
• Angor (Bitcoin-native crowdfunding; Archipelago placed 2nd in the Angor pitch contest)
• Podcasting 2.0 (open podcast ecosystem)
• #DeMu (decentralized music on Nostr)
• Fountain (podcasting app with value-for-value)
• castr.me (Nostr-to-RSS podcast feed)
• Indie Hub (independent film distribution on Archipelago)
• Plebeian Market / Shopstr / Conduit (Nostr marketplaces)
• Zap Store (Nostr-based app store)
• White Noise / MLS / PICA (encrypted messaging on Nostr)
• Fedimint (federated eCash)
• Cashu (eCash on Bitcoin)
• Framework (modular laptop hardware)
• Meshtastic / Meshcore (mesh networking)
• Start9 / Umbrel (existing node platforms)
• SyncThing (decentralized file sync)
• GrapheneOS (privacy-focused Android)
• Rayhunter (EFF's cell-based surveillance detection)
• Tollgate (mesh network toll gates)
• Bitchat (mesh chat, bitchat.free)
• Spilman channels (unidirectional payment channels for nano-sat streaming)
• John Vervaeke (the universe is dialogical)

People mentioned:

• Sir Spencer (venue npubs, live streaming)
• Duh Laurien (#DeMu)
• Oscar Merry (Fountain)
• Fountain
• Adam Curry (Podcasting 2.0 godfather)
• Joe Martin (value-for-value musician)
• Zaza (Archipelago builder)
• Martti Malmi (Nostr VPN demo)
• Gzuuus (encrypted state machines, AtoB protocol)
• Cobrador (balloons)
• Tollgate (mesh network toll gates)
• Bugle

In this dialogue:

• The episode opens discussing the podcasting 2.0 publishing workflow: AI models can now generate the XML spec, value splits and all, from a simple instruction
• Spencer's idea: every venue gets an npub, the venue starts the live stream rather than the artist, creating a proper mapping from real-world locations to cryptographic identities
• Shadrach's #DeMu journey: tried to orange pill Austin musicians, but they were too disillusioned to believe music could be monetized directly. Pay-to-play venues, Spotify killing label revenue. No traction at all.
• Value for value as social signaling: free-to-play games make millions from cosmetic skins. We still don't do anything like that on Nostr. Adam Curry gets it -- his listeners aren't listeners, they're producers.
• Shadrach's path: punk rock DIY ethos to sysadmin, industrial Bitcoin mining in Texas (2017-18), briefly a crypto hedge fund ("That sounds terrible. That's two words."), S9 miners sold for scrap metal
• The Meshtadel: a network of citadels meshed together. Any node can be taken out and the system routes around the failure. The name means both literal mesh networks and communities connecting in a mesh topology.
• "I'm here to orange pill the Amish": Shadrach moved to Lancaster, PA for food security, rented a farmer's market stall just to talk about Bitcoin. The Amish save in dollars, didn't raise prices through COVID, are partly a gift economy. The most insulting thing you can do is give exactly the same gift back.
• Printed Cashu certificates: Shadrach's dream is physical eCash notes the Amish can trade at the market, then drive their horse and buggy to a Bitcoin bank drive-through to redeem them. Fedimint stability pools make this more feasible now.
• "Bitcoin doesn't need more believers. Bitcoin needs more understanders."
• Archipelago: a sovereign home node built on Framework laptop hardware. Plugs into your TV, runs a dashboard, companion app, modular and upgradeable. Scalable from a simple home node all the way to a community server.
• Indie Hub partnership: watch independent films on day one. Directors upload movies, set their own pricing schedule, everything distributed via paid torrents. "Make torrents great again" is a recurring theme at every SovEng cohort.
• The reversed marketplace: instead of broadcasting what you sell (which leaks privacy and enables enforcement), broadcast what you want to buy as an encrypted blob on Nostr. Agents match buyers and sellers. Your daughter looks for a lamp, gets three offers, never buys a rug she didn't need.
• "Salespeople will hate it." -- "I know."
• AtoB protocol: Shadrach co-authored it with Gzuuus to make ride-sharing apps (Ridester, Drivester, Trotter) interoperable. Two devs refactored their entire packages in a day using AI.
• Gzuuus's encrypted state machines for commerce: requests, responses, agreements, work done. Wraps up ride sharing, package delivery, online sales into one framework.
• Web of trust is Nostr's killer feature: people wrote about it in the seventies, PGP signing parties never caught on, but Nostr makes it natural because the social graph is the web of trust
• Nostr VPN: every device gets an npub, devices find each other the same way people find each other on Nostr
• Nostr clicked for Shadrach immediately after growing up with PGP. In his last job in international finance, they still used PGP for sharing sensitive information.
• SovEng experience: "the most incredible experience I've ever had in my life" and also "some of the most exhausting mentally, physically, socially"
• On retirement: moved to Lancaster thinking he'd chill out, immediately started driving to meetups and flying to check on a beef ranch in Oklahoma. "I give up."
• The universe is dialogical: podcasts as time capsules, searching for truth by speaking it out loud. Karl Popper, David Deutsch, the longest chain wins.
• "We are back again in the early days. And we just have to make it work."

Recorded at 943,357.

"I need to build something to test the thing."

Pablo & Gigi take a walk. Recorded December 2025.

Listen on sovereignengineering.io

Projects & tech mentioned:

• TENEX (multi-agent coordination on Nostr)
• Agora (Nostr client for local communities, by Pablo & Leopoldo Lopez)
• NDK Swift & NDK Kotlin (native ports of NDK)
• nostrdb (embedded Nostr database)
• NIP-60 (Cashu wallets on Nostr)
• Podcasting 2.0 (open podcast ecosystem)
• #DeMu (decentralized music on Nostr)
• Olas (rebuilt with TENEX agents)
• castr.me (Nostr-to-RSS podcast feed)
• ants (Nostr search)
• Boris (reading and highlighting)
• Pyramid (fiatjaf's invite-tree relay)
• Kevin Kelly's 1,000 True Fans

In this dialogue:

• Agents tried to fix world hunger: made a Google Doc and a React app, nothing worked, world hunger still not fixed
• "We're behaving like LLM agents: never learn"
• Everything Pablo builds is a way to test TENEX: "I need to build something to test the thing"
• Agora: a Nostr client starting from the premise that you only care about your immediate surroundings
• Invitation-based trust networks: cryptographic proof of who invited whom into a relay, similar to fiatjaf's Pyramid
• Citizen journalism use case: pseudonymous publishing where a known figure vouches for a source without revealing identity
• NIP-60 wallet baked into Agora: your key is no longer just identity, it's also money
• Social key recovery via Shamir secret sharing: select people you can reach (not necessarily trust), hidden behind follow events
• Identity migration for stolen keys vs. key loss recovery: two different problems, solvable with similar tools
• "Fiatjaf had the right ideas around community-based backup and recovery"
• Romantically shitting on paywalls: you cannot box content in, no matter how hard you try
• What you can monetize is not the content itself but the relationship, the access, the live interaction
• Twitch figured it out: everything is free, everywhere, always. People pay for something else entirely.
• Substack's unfixable problem: it's a function of size, always Pareto, 20 people making a killing out of millions
• "You're prostituting yourself for nothing because you're playing in a winner-takes-most market where there is already a winner"
• The Matthew principle: to those who have everything, more will be given
• All content types competing under the same lens: why every platform turns into TikTok
• "Scaling Nostr is hard, so it will always fragment" -- and that's the feature
• Nostr's promise: many small markets strictly superior to one big centrally planned instance
• Digital fast food: platforms serve maximally engaging slop, like lucid dreams generated on the fly
• The health food analogy: McDonald's still exists, but a whole industry grew around health-conscious people. Digital health is next.
• Young people craving real connections over influencer slop, drawn to vinyl and gramophones for the same reason
• Walking the Roman path: 3,000-year-old cart tracks still visible, "look at the UX of that thing"
• "I switched my whole online identity to Nostr because this thing has legs and will still work 30 years from now"
• Email marketers already know: own the list, everything else is a funnel
• Relays as magazines: you don't quit magazines because one magazine is bad
• Most people perceive Nostr as "the crypto app" -- we're not at the "email is a protocol" stage yet
• Special-purpose clients: a posting-only client with an empty text field, ants for search, Boris for highlights
• "I'm amazed at how well things work. Blossom every day without thinking about it."
• "We've been on this professionalizing mode for the past six to nine months. Technically, we're in very good shape."

Recorded at 929,730.

"You're yelling at someone who is lying to you."

Pablo & Gigi take a drive. Recorded December 2025.

Listen on sovereignengineering.io

Projects & tech mentioned:

• TENEX (multi-agent coordination on Nostr)
• NDK (Nostr Development Kit)
• NDK Swift & NDK Kotlin (native ports of NDK, vibe-coded)
• nostrdb (embedded Nostr database)
• Negentropy / NIP-77 (efficient event sync)
• NIP-60 (Cashu wallets on Nostr)
• Vercel AI SDK (multi-provider LLM abstraction)
• Notedeck & Nostur
• Olas (rebuilt with TENEX agents)

In this dialogue:

• Bitcoiners in cars getting coffee: recording from the sun visor, Seinfeld style
• TENEX rewritten "about a hundred times," now in TypeScript on Vercel AI SDK
• The pain of supporting every LLM provider: Gemini returns encrypted reasoning tokens, every API has different subtleties
• Removing structure to improve performance: deleting 80% of agent code makes agents work better
• Agents defining their own workflow phases instead of having phases imposed on them
• Composable workflows: the CEO agent doesn't need to know what the engineering director's workflow looks like
• The parallel to human organizations: you can't hold all the information in your own mind
• John Vervaeke and the idea that dialogue is how you solve the really hard problems
• Participatory knowing: you don't understand Bitcoin until you actually use it
• Agent wallets removed because "there was nothing for them to actually buy" -- a commune with no walls
• $700/month running Opus for everything, replacing "like fucking 30 people"
• Context windows are a non-issue when the hierarchy is deep enough: each atomic agent finishes fast
• Henry Ford's insight applied to agents: each worker does an incredibly stupid task that takes five minutes
• Agents are bad at self-correction, so they delegate competing implementations in disposable work trees, then compare notes
• Confidence scores: the delegating agent monitors every 5-10 messages, checks if the sub-agent is going off the rails
• "Once they are convinced that humans have seven legs, they will make up scientific papers to prove it to you"
• NDK ported to Swift and Kotlin without looking at a single line of code: outbox compilation, negentropy syncing, offline publishing, NIP-60 support
• Cross-platform frameworks are dead: "if you're just programming in English, React Native makes no sense"
• The developer experience right now is "as bad as it's been, at least in our lifetimes"
• "You're basically yelling at someone that is lying to you, that will take all the shortcuts"
• Vibe coding flow state: sculpting code like marble, micro-adjustments every five seconds
• "What if all I know of development is actually problematic? What if I just let go?"
• Non-developers building real apps on Nostr thanks to vibe coding
• The naming podcast: "Claude Opus, make up a name. Just put a U."
• "I'm on vacation. The agents have been running the entire time. They've done amazing work."

Recorded at 929,726.

"Nostr is organic tech. Data will flow more naturally instead of going out and fetch, going out and coming back, going out and coming back."

Arjen & Gigi take a long walk. Recorded October 2025.

Projects & tech mentioned:

• Blossom (self-healing links)
• noDNS
• Tollgate (router-to-router payments)
• Wally (Cashu wallet connect)
• innpub (positional audio, innpub.dergigi.com)
• Citrine (Android local relay)
• Amber (Android signer)
• nostr-relay-tray
• Applesauce (code snippets)
• Wingman (remote dev assistant)
• CDK (Cashu dev kit)
• NIP-03 (OpenTimestamps)
• ants (Nostr search)
• OTRTA / Routstr (pay for LLM compute with Cashu)
• Notedeck & nostrdb
• gitworkshop.dev (Nostr-native git collaboration)
• Boris (reading and highlighting)
• Spotstr & Earthly.city (maps on Nostr)

In this dialogue:

• Convincing hzrd to make Blossom more of a protocol
• Self-healing links: content addressing like Nostr but for blobs
• Blossom pacemaker: a tool that monitors your notes and blobs, rebroadcasts and re-uploads as needed
• Local first: local relays, local blossom, local cash, local signers
• "I still get shit for the audio quality"
• Verschlimmbesserung: the German word for making something worse by trying to improve it
• "We should reclaim localhost"
• Every Nostr app should work in airplane mode
• Citrine roadmap: auto-rebroadcast local events once you're online again
• Tollgate v0.2.0: router-to-router payments, released at btc++
• "Some people just hate e-cash" -- "Those people can't be helped"
• Cashu and CDK: making it easy for devs to use e-cash without managing wallets
• Wally: Cashu wallet connect, like NWC but for e-cash, runs local
• Install Wally and you're good to go with everything Nostr
• Special-purpose components that do one thing well
• Zero configuration: if there's a local relay, use it; if there's a local signer, use it
• innpub jukebox: zap the jukebox 200 sats to play a song with positional audio
• Moving away from subscription hell: attach e-cash to your requests
• noDNS deep dive: traditional DNS records published on Nostr instead of Cloudflare
• Self-signed TLS certs verified through Nostr identity
• The human approach: ask around your group of friends vs the authoritarian approach: one central authority
• Pi-hole would be perfectly fine running noDNS
• NIP-03 / OpenTimestamps: indisputable proof of profile existence over time
• "We went back to basically having mainframes and thin clients"
• The vision: everything is a relay, offline or online shouldn't matter
• Damus relay wiped multiple times, nobody cared -- that's resilience
• Data should accumulate in the right places by your pattern of usage
• The Nosterverse: every client is a different lens, there is no global
• "Nostr is organic tech"
• Vibe coding setup: Roo Code, Claude, code snippets from hzrd and Pablo
• "Claude 4.5 is very agreeable -- I could rile it up and start a revolution together"
• The dream flow: just speak voice memos into your phone, code updates 20 minutes later
• Screenless coding: the underutilized interface
• ants search: took npub.world plus nostr.band, crossbred them
• "Software evolution is crossbreeding, not merging back into the original repo"
• Maps on Nostr: the social part is what makes Google Maps useful, Nostr can provide it
• Sovereign Engineering cohort 5: "we really know what we're doing now"
• "The future is already here, we just have a lot of building to do"
• "If you want to build something, the easiest way right now is Nostr"
• We're gonna make torrents great again

Recorded at 918,425.

"You have a roaming army of servers."

The crew continues on the pirate boat. Recorded October 2025.

Projects & tech mentioned:

• Paygress (VM provisioning over Nostr)
• Error 402 (HTTP payment required)
• nostr-relay-tray
• Pyramid Relay
• castr.me
• PM Tiles (offline maps)

In this dialogue:

• The dream: press record, press save, everything auto-publishes to Nostr
• Zero post-processing, zero editing
• Error 402: endpoints that can be paid over the protocol level
• nginx 402 module: it takes lightning, it takes e-cash
• Paygress: buy a VPS just knowing an npub
• Get an IP address, a Docker container, SSH access, and a VPN
• "You have a roaming army of servers"
• Self-healing infrastructure: move your servers around like Blossom relays
• "Who will run the mints?" -- hide them behind Paygress, move them around
• We're still underutilizing payment required
• Paid relays, but also: attach e-cash when you want reliability
• Free but unreliable vs paid and reliable
• First Bitcoin client was an executable on Windows because Satoshi wanted it easy to start
• nostr-relay-tray: one of the easiest ways to run a local relay
• "We need to dockerize everything and make it really easy to run"
• Sane defaults, one click and run
• uTorrent: you just clicked it and it worked
• Enough weird people on Nostr willing to run mints, blossom servers, relays
• "It's still too hard to set up"
• The bar is higher now: demos improved thanks to vibe coding
• Vibe coding is more art than science
• "The more you do it, the more you learn"
• Maps and location data on Nostr
• Almost every data has some kind of location
• PM Tiles: offline maps you can download and use
• Local relay as the universal cache: don't build your own, just use a relay
• 48 hours left in the cohort, more demos to come

Recorded at 918,200.

"127.0.0.1 -- that's the only IP address we're gonna need."

The crew passes the mic around on a pirate boat. Recorded October 2025.

Projects & tech mentioned:

• Beacon
• noDNS
• innpub
• MOQ (Media Over QUIC)
• ContextVM
• Chrysalis (self-replicating Cashu mint)
• Paygress (VM provisioning over Nostr)
• BloVM (blossom server monitor)
• HyperNote

In this dialogue:

• "How was Sovereign Engineering for you?" -- "Inspiring. Stressful."
• Most exciting demo? Beacon has been trending
• noDNS mentioned by basically everyone
• Mapping projects: putting OpenStreetMap tiles on Nostr/Blossom
• MOQ working live in innpub, eight people hanging out yesterday
• Pete's demo day race condition: a literal race to claim e-cash
• "There is no global, but there's also kind of a global"
• Chrysalis: a self-replicating Cashu mint that pays for itself and moves
• "Who's gonna run the mints?" -- "Nobody. They're gonna run themselves."
• Andreas Antonopoulos talked about self-sustaining Bitcoin services eight years ago
• noDNS explained like I'm five and drunk: "Websites and you don't have to ask daddy"
• Instead of buying domain names, you claim yours via your npub
• Conflicts resolved with web of trust and proof of work
• Self-signed TLS certs trusted through Nostr identity
• HTTPS websites with zero certificate authority involved
• "That's also what triggered Justin into writing his own browser"
• "Most browsers like to babysit their users quite a bit"
• Dolphin sounds
• ContextVM: MCP over Nostr as a transport layer
• "MCP is not just for LLMs, it's a protocol for anything"
• "Make localhost great again" -- 127.0.0.1 is the only IP we need
• Interrupting chicken (the joke didn't land)
• "Europe who?" (Australian humor)
• Ending on a hug, as always

Recorded at 918,196.

"I want Nostr to be the perfect thing just for me."

Justin & Gigi drive to the airport. Recorded October 2025.

Projects & tech mentioned:

• Blitz (Rust HTML/CSS renderer)
• QuickJS (lightweight JavaScript engine)
• Dioxus (Rust UI framework)
• Iroh (peer-to-peer networking)
• MOQ (Media Over QUIC)
• White Noise (MLS-based private messaging on Nostr)
• Ladybird (independent browser by Andreas Kling)
• VRChat

In this dialogue:

• Driving to the airport
• "Don't say anything that could be used against you"
• The low quality of this podcast focuses the mind of the listener
• You need proper headphones
• Walking focuses you, and stops you after 90 minutes
• Justin's adoption curve: hater first, builder later
• "I'm the ascending left curve"
• Bitcoin hating, Lightning hating, Nostr hating
• Audio calling with npubs: Nostr as signaling & identity layer
• First version: Iroh for peer-to-peer, Nostr for lookup
• Calling Paul Miller's npub from a CLI
• innpub: a 2D pixel art level with rooms you can hang out in
• The killer feature of positional audio
• VRChat Bitcoin meetups during COVID, thanks to Udi
• Twitter Spaces, Clubhouse, and why one big room encourages attention seeking
• Positional audio lets you hide in a corner
• WebRTC is Google Meet shipped as a "web standard"
• Safari and Firefox just shipped Google's code
• MOQ (Media Over QUIC) as the simple alternative
• CDN-style mesh relays for binary data
• What if MOQ relays were Nostr-style, and you'd pay to relay?
• E2E encrypted group audio in the browser using White Noise / MLS compiled to WASM
• "Let's make Nostr fast"
• The web is dying: Chrome blocked ad blockers and Justin just stopped visiting websites
• No SQLite in the browser, no TypeScript in the browser
• Why do I need a domain name? Why certificate authorities?
• Building a browser in 3 days
• Blitz + QuickJS = a browser that runs a React counter app
• "This would have taken me months"
• Andreas Kling: built a browser as part of a 12-step program
• Ladybird proving that you can build a browser from scratch
• Vibe coding: 20-30 projects in six weeks
• Nerd-sniped into implementing Mosaic in Zig, then dropping it in two days
• What Nostr got right: "good enough"
• Binary transport for Nostr relays
• Getting rid of DNS: a theme every week at SovEng (noDNS)
• Claiming names via Nostr events, no .com needed
• Web of trust for conflict resolution
• Self-signed TLS certs trusted through Nostr identity
• Social handles already replaced URLs in practice
• "Build for the nerds, not the mass market"
• "I want Nostr to be the perfect thing just for me"
• Building blocks crystallizing: mesh networking, noDNS, better relays, search
• Relays in the browser
• The synergistic ecosystem
• "You're gonna miss your flight"

Recorded at 917,999.

"The identity should be outside of the computer."

hzrd149 & Gigi contemplate local relays.

Libraries & apps mentioned:

• Applesauce
• Boris
• Citrine
• nostr-relay-tray

In this dialogue:

• Automation & robot armies
• If this than that (IFTTT)
• Permissioned vs permissionless automation
• Self-hosting and the local-first people
• "The identity should be outside of the computer"
• Private vs public, local vs remote
• DRM and other nonsense
• Private means encrypted with my key
• Nostr apps should be local-first, thanks to local relays
• All nostr apps should work in flight mode, somewhat
• Outbox model, writing, and reading
• Search & NIP-50
• Ants & thisishowyougetants.com
• 6 degrees of separation & FoaF
• WoT
• Friend list curation & "circles"
• "Don't touch my follow list"
• Bootstrapping a network by saying GM a lot
• Recommendations usually suck
• Nostr can shine
• Vertex & figuring out who John is
• NIP-05 & realness
• Root-level domains & realness (e.g. @dergigi.com)
• Zaps & realness
• Nutzaps & realness
• Local-first & local algorithms
• nostrdb VS local relays
• Local data & relevancy
• noDNS, locality, local preference, and "good enough"
• Mostly online vs mostly offline
• "Servers aren't bad. Getting rugpulled is bad."
• "Information is easy to spread but hard to stifle"
• Local hubs, community hubs, global hubs
• "nostr was built for broadcasting"
• Building stuff badly & nerd-sniping people
• Gigi's ants video
• Walking in circles
• DM metadata leakage
• "It shouldn't matter where the data comes from"
• "Deleting data is a lie"
• The impossibility of proving deletion
• Bitrot & data loss
• Fighting bitrot with duplication & rebroadcasting
• Bouquet, blossom, and self-healing links
• Local-first vs local-also
• Left-side of the bellcurve CDN
• The one whale relay
• Topic-based relays
• fiatjaf's pyramid relay
• Torrents, early video content, game installers
• fiatjaf’s take on IPFS
• Why not rebuild Cloudflare?
• Censorship-resistance = 100% uptime = no rugpulls
• Getting offered weed on the streets
• Every app works in flight mode
• No developer needs an API key
• "The data accumulates where it needs to accumulate"
• Browser history as an example of local data & user interests
• WoT is kinda local
• wot.dergigi.com
• Blossom is different; blobs are heavy
• American HODL's vlogs
• "Step 1 is to build a shitty version"
• HAVEN
• Nostr Repair Kit (Nostr pacemaker)
• Shout-out to Pablo's highlighter (fucking hell)
• Open-source & scratching your own itch
• Applesauce v4
• "It's almost done" - famous last words!
• Outbox in applesauce, and how it makes everything more difficult
• Waves, routstr, Pete, Justin, Paul, Gzuuus
• Hzrd's SEC-05 highlights
• noDNS
• Wally & Cashu Wallet Connect
• Crazy idea => Consensus => Implementation
• Difference between idea & implementation
• "Domains are shitcoins"
• We've been living in a post-domain world for a while
• Independent browsers & project Ladybird
• Nostr-native browser - who will build it?
• "A different way of doing internet infrastructure"
• Is a world without APIs possible?
• Mainframe => Personal Computer => Smartphones
• Online sometimes => Offline sometimes
• Local LLMs
• Nostr allows you to build less
• Thin layers & special-purpose apps
• NIP-60 and finding spare change under the couch
• Does negentropy fix NIP-60 synchronization?
• Nostr is synergistic
• The beauty of nostr-relay-tray
• Nostr works. We've come far!
• It's all coming together
• Boris
• "You can always go back and build it right"
• Just begin again.
• Just begin again.
• Just begin again.

Recorded at 917,886.

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

Pete & Gigi try to talk to lawn mowers.

Websites & other stuff mentioned:

• Sovereign Engineering
• The Good Stuff

In this dialogue:

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

Recorded at 914,219.

What does it mean to build something "in the spirit of Bitcoin"?

Pablo & Gigi want to encourage you to apply for SEC-05.

Books & websites mentioned:

• Stackoverflow is dead by Gergely Orosz
• Sovereign Engineering by Gigi and Pablo

In this dialogue:

• Gigi's vibeline & vibeline-ui
• Pubcastr aka castr.me
• Pablo's thread about TENEX
• Alex Gleason's MKStack
• What is the essence of nostr?
• What are nostr's values, and can LLMs extract them?
• Agents and workflows living on nostr
• Agent specialization and Roo code
• “What would Jesus do?”
• What does it mean to build something "in the spirit of Bitcoin"?
• Hierarchy of agents
• Generalists vs specialists
• Top-down constraints and bottom-up emergence
• Wise architects VS efficient diff-merging LLMs
• Where does the human fit in?
• Distributed cognition: agents and humans
• Hiring agents via nostr
• "If the human has to intervene, something is catastrophically wrong."
• Confidence levels of an agent's action
• Giving agents money using mcp-money
• Offering bounties to solve problems
• Stackoverflow is dead
• Stock photography is dead
• Real vs fake photography test
• Vibe-coding vs regular coding, and how it relates to the switch from analog to digital photography
• What is economical, and what isn't?
• Dialogue and Dia-Logos with LLMs
• Specialization in a multi-agent world
• Adding a small vibe-coding widget to every app (allowing users to customize stuff)
• Multiplicity VS canonical design
• Money is singular, language is not
• Jack's original sin: the twitter Bootstrap theme
• The "other stuff" initiative
• What's missing from TENEX? Why isn't it fully working just yet?
• Rebuilding everything every 3 weeks
• Voice vs text, sentiment analysis vs tone
• The power and informational density of silence
• In-person vs online communication
• Letting agents learn lessons
• "Where do you get your ideas from?"
• Anonymity vs pseudonyms vs government ID
• Agents need identity, money, and reputation
• "I own this dude." —Pablo
• Owning agents
• Vibe-coding lessons: don't look at the code, and in the best case don't even look at the IDE
• Human-agent communication: typing vs speaking
• Why some meetings couldn't have been an email
• Clearly defined problems vs undefined problem spaces
• Why TENEX will be in perpetual alpha
• What is Sovereign Engineering?
• Why should you sign up for it?
• How come so many awesome things came out of it? Blossom, nsite, Zapstore, etc.
• Who should come, and who shouldn't?
• How did it start?
• What's the idea?
• "Fix the money, fix the internet."
• "Ship stuff that lasts."
• Keep it pure. No monetization.
• Focus on exploration and ideation
• What's the structure?
• 6 weeks, 21 participants
• Same structure every week
• Monday Mornings: Orientation
• Tuesday Talks
• Wednesday Workshops
• Thursday: No Agenda
• Friday: Demo Day
• Weekend: Hikes
• SEC-05: YOLO Mode
• Empower users
• Optimize for self-sovereignty
• Bitcoin works
• Lightning works (Gigi's post)
• Build the future you want to see
• Madeira: you can pay in bitcoin almost everywhere
• tl;dr: Listen to every single No Solutions conversation to get an idea of what Sovereign Engineering is

Recorded at 901,069.