NoSolutions

"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.

“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

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