Transcription of speeches at Nostrasia | The Future of Nostr by Ben Arc, Rockstar, Rabble, and Fiatjaf

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🌟中文版: Nostr的未来 🌟日本語: Nostrの未来 🌟Español: El futuro de Nostr

ROCKSTAR: Ever since I started coding personally, which now is, yeah, decades ago, I've been looking up to my fellow developers and hackers around the world. Look at this situation - I get to sit with them now because Ben Arc, first, what he is doing in Bitcoin and Foss is just amazing, man, telling you.

BEN ARC: Can I say, though, that one of the first conferences I went to was a lightning hack day in New York? It was about five years ago, four years ago when I first met you, and you gave me this. Do you remember this note? Oh, nice. And I keep it. I still keep it on me. It's Yugoslavian. How many series do we have on there? Oh, man, that should be like five billion, right? 10 billion, I think it is. Oh, 10 billion. Yeah. And then if you show it, like there is Nicola Tesla on the other side. So, and actually, I will say that the note has remained in amazing condition. So although they weren't good at keeping the currency, you know, liquid and solvent, they were good at producing the actual physical currency.

ROCKSTAR: Well, I mean, when you need to have a quality toilet paper, but we have our guest. Can you hear us, special guests? No.

RABBLE: Nope, he's hiding as always.

ROCKSTAR: I mean, I need to upgrade him so that he also does a mask and everything else. This is also nice because we did basically a similar session in Costa Rica, yes. And then, so it would be nice to recap what's happened over the past year, not even a year, but our special guest, can you hear us? Because we can't start this without you. Yes, there, yeah, hear me? Can you hear me here? We are. Can you hear the applause?

fiatjaf: Yes, I can hear the applause.

ROCKSTAR: Yeah, I mean, you don't need an introduction, but yeah, for those that don't know that famous voice, it's Fiatjaf. And this now calls for the introductions. Yeah, Ben Arc already introduced as a FOSS Advocate and our fellow bitcoiner, and then Rabble, you also don't need an introduction. I mean, anarchist.

RABBLE: Anarchist, hacker, troublemaker. Was around when Jack was like, I think we should make something with this dispatch system and the text messages. You guys have been hacking on, and it blew up.

ROCKSTAR: Yeah, it blew up really well. And then on the remote, we have Fiatjaf, the CEO of the Nostr, right? And that's the first question I have here is, who is actually CEO of Nostr, like Ben, is it you or Fiatjaf?

BEN ARC: I think we're all CEO of Nostr. That's the correct answer.

RABBLE: Is it like the dread pirate Roberts?

ROCKSTAR: So everyone in the audience is also CEO.

RABBLE: I guess that we are all the CEO.

ROCKSTAR: Yeah, I guess that's where D comes in.

BEN ARC: We should probably. The next conference should have name tags with the nostr. Everyone should get a name tag with nostr on it.

ROCKSTAR: We are doing that, but Ben, let's start with a question. Like, how would you describe Nostr?

BEN ARC: I think the everything app of freedom. That there's so many things you can rebuild using that paradigm of smart client DOM server, which empowers users. It can have a profound impact across multiple platforms and industries. I think that's the way because that's like the elevator pitch when people say, you know what is Nostr? It's like, how can I summarize it in a way which captures someone's attention? And I feel that that's the everything at freedom. You know, is is is a good way putting it.

ROCKSTAR: Maybe Rabble?

RABBLE: Yeah, I mean, that's a fascinating question because Nostr inverts the way apps work, just like that, you know, Bitcoin inverts the way money works in terms of instead of it being an essential authority that defines it. In Nostr, every user, because we sign our messages, gets to participate in the network, and we can build permissionless applications on top of it inverts the power of building social applications. And so Nostr is this is the thing, but it is also not the thing because it underlies it, you know, the way TCP/IP underlies the internet, the way things like RESTful web services and JSON do. Nostr is the layer in which we can build social applications.

ROCKSTAR: Yeah. And then Jaf, how would you describe Nostr?

fiatjaf: I think it's like RSS, but everybody gets a server which is theirs and a domain name which is their pub key. Maybe that's a description. I was thinking about this description today, so it was nice that you asked. Well, you wouldn't that be true someone who doesn't know what RSS is or whatnot?

ROCKSTAR: Well, I would think this audience knows about RSS, but let's then switch to a different question. Like the title of this panel is the future of Nostr and when you don't think about describing Nostr but do you think about the future of Noster, from what Ben told me, yeah, you think very clearly about it. What is the future of Nostr?

fiatjaf: I'm not sure I think very clearly. I think Nostr eliminates all the other social networks and all the other proto-social networks on the internet, and then we reign over everybody.

ROCKSTAR: Yeah, that deserves an applause. So Ben, Total Domination on Fiatjaf and Nostr, are we ready for it?

BEN ARC: Yeah, I mean if there's ever going to be something that exists which replaces the current way we do things with social networks, for example, because I think Nostr goes beyond social networks, it would have to be something where you could have that gravity of user effect and a network which these big platforms have. So it makes it very hard to move to a new platform and you have that with Nostr because you can just make a client and then you have access to x amount of users instantly. So the future's bright for Nostr. I think it's the solution when it comes to replacing some of these legacy systems.

RABBLE: I think we don't have the future assured. I think we still need to struggle for it. I think we need to build it. I think we need to evangelize. But in the early days of Twitter, Twitter didn't invent anything. All Twitter was was this API, and anyone could build an app that connected to it. And that meant that people built tons of different crazy apps. And that's what we're doing with Nostr today. So anyone who wants to build an app can just take the NDK libraries and they can put it together, and that's why we have all these different apps. What we need to do to assure Nostr's future is figure out how to get to other communities because we have one community of core users which are the bitcoiners which gives us a developer community, it gives us a user base, it gives us a financial model. But what we need to do to assure Nostr's future is figure out how to make it work for people into knitting or different language communities or different, you know, there are a hundred million ways in which people can identify and connect, and Nostr can solve all of those problems and be apps for those problems if we make space for people to find their communities and yes then do financial transactions and zaps and all that stuff. So I think we are in a very good place, and we've got a tremendous technology base for a new model of applications.

ROCKSTAR: Well, it's been six months since the last gathering. We had more than six months. What is the most exciting development that you have seen since then and that you would like to see more in the near future, Rabble?

RABBLE: What's the most exciting development? I would say the most exciting development is the maturity of things, the maturity of relays, the maturity of the apps themselves, the polish that we're getting on top of it, and the maturity of the underlying libraries. I feel like our user growth has become stable, but our work on the back end and the technical infrastructure has been really phenomenal. So to me, the exciting part is seeing that it's getting easier to build Nostr apps, that they're getting better and they're getting faster, and then we're exploring more things.

ROCKSTAR: What about you, Fiatjaf? What's been most exciting since the last time we did this type of panel?

fiatjaf: I don't know, better ask Ben first, I must think of it.

ROCKSTAR: Is okay, Ben. This is where you jump in while Fiatjaf thinks?

BEN ARC: It's that a permissionless development environment, which we're used to in Bitcoin and any open source software in general, but with Nostr, we have that blank canvas, the open protocol where anyone can develop anything, and then by having permissionless development, it means that you have this just this renaissance of clients and people experimenting with the technology, which has been really exciting to see over the past six months. And, to be honest, just the fact, like it was such a new concept and way of building a client and with relays, and the fact that it didn't really break. We had a bunch of users come in, like people built a bunch of stuff, and it's functional. It still works. It's getting better, and it's improving. So yeah, no, it's been a great six months of seeing all the new clients, which are being built, like Rabble said, and then just the momentum and the enthusiasm by the Nostr community. You go on the repo and look at NIPs, the amount of like conversations there on arriving at consensus on how NIP will take shape and form and be committed. So there's clearly just a really great community of very infused, clever, and interesting inspiring people working on Nostr stuff, which is great. That's what we want. That's where the value is. The value in the developers in the community, that's you know.

ROCKSTAR: Yeah, Community is continuing to be strong, and Jaf, anything came to your mind?

fiatjaf: Yeah, I have an answer now. I think one of the most important things, the shift towards No Global State, was the increasing realization. Like people, developers, and people involved the most are realizing that Nostr doesn't have a global State, and they're starting to work around that. They're realizing that, for example, Nostr cannot be censorship-resistant if the clients don't. Well, when we at Nostrica, all the clients, they were just mostly talking to a fixed set of relays, for example, and I thought that was very bad. And now all the clients have some way of reaching to other relays or are working on that. So for the social microblogging aspect of the client, they are much more censorship-resistant, and other experiments are being made on the realm of not assuming everything has a global State like with counts of total number of likes and stuff like that that people used to in Twitter and yeah, that kind of stuff.

ROCKSTAR: So you're saying, a general shift, yeah, go ahead, go ahead.

fiatjaf: No, I was saying that I saw a general shift in the mentality of most people, most developers.

ROCKSTAR: Yeah, just accepting that mindset of not having a global State. I am a little bit disappointed though. I mean, the Nostr and the Fiatjaf that has been a major development. I thought you were going to mention that like how did that come up, man?

fiatjaf: Well, it was just a joke, right? Or should I assume should I pretend it wasn't? But I don't know. I don't even know what these things mean. I don't know why everybody found that so funny. I don't speak English, and I don't know what that means to put that the before the words.

ROCKSTAR- Well, I mean, you merged it into NIPs. Now it's officially the Nostr, right?

fiatjaf: No, I merged it to the repo that has my old article that I wrote introducing Nostr. I have to rewrite that and put some something else there that explains it better, I think. But yeah, well, maybe if anyone wants has a suggestion, like for people that just arrive at that repo, if they can see something better than that old text, sure. I mean, yeah, I merged, but it's Derick's fault.

ROCKSTAR: Derick, Nostr developer. I don't know. I really enjoy your blog posts. Like I think every major event like that should be accompanied by a blog post just a suggestion. But on my end as well, going beyond the Nostr open SATs has been a major development, and it's great to see that Nostr contributors, Nostr developers, Nostr designers, like anyone that contributes to Nostr now has that option of being supported through open SATs. How has been that work going, Jaf, and like is it demanding on your day to day, like does it take too much of your day today? Would you want to go back to like full-time coding just how is it working with open Sats?

fiatjaf: It's not much work, no. It's basically the same things I would do already, like looking at projects. I already spent a lot of time looking at everybody what everybody's doing. Hello, yeah, that's it. What I don't know. Open SATs is like I'm not the one doing the heavy work there.

ROCKSTAR: Well, that's then a testament to how well G has organized things and the rest of the board. I don't know, Rabble, you wanted to say something on open SATs?

RABBLE: Yeah, I mean, I think one thing we have to realize is that open SATs and the very support that we've been able to get from Jack has been really critical in keeping this technology independent and keeping folks from trying to launch shitcoins to fund it all or go to VC funding or do all these things. The ability to sustain the development of many projects and many people working on it means that we can do the work to make the systems function well and as opposed to just doing quick adaptations. So I felt like at the beginning of the year, we had really quick hacks of like, oh my God, I can build a Nostr app really quickly. Now we can be like, I'm working on this, and I'm going to keep working on it, and I will have money to work on it next year, and I'm going to do it right. And so that's transformational, and we see it in the quality of all the applications in the libraries, and like Nostr design is a great site, a huge resource. And without that support, then those resources would just go to people who could have companies that could pay them.

BEN ARC: Yeah, Nostr has done a fantastic job of just freeing up all those minds. I'm always amazed in the free and open source world. I mean, I'm lucky enough to be able to work on my things full-time, but switching from like a fiat job and doing work to working on something like Bitcoin or working on something like Nostr, I think like those people are heroes, man. I don't know how they can. I mean, they enjoy what they do, and I did it for a while as well

ROCKSTAR: Yeah, it's when you look at open SATs as an organization, like it's amazing. Not only, we mentioned Fiatjaf takes time, Gigi takes time, but like everyone involved, the whole board does it in their free time, and now they're volunteers. So it's just amazing to have an organization like that that supports Nostr. But also, there is a Bitcoin part of that organization, and that's where, like BTC Pay Server is supported by open SATs. It allows what you're saying, like, hey, we can. We know that we have a year to develop something instead of focusing on, hey, something is launched, there needs to be a result right away. We mentioned daily active users. What are your thoughts on what all of us can do to like push that number up? And should that be our focus right now, or is the focus on what you said, like last six months, just the developer community? Like what are your thoughts on that, Rabble?

BEN ARC: I mean, I would say to Rabble's point before as an onboarding experience because I mean, Nostr isn't Bitcoin, okay, but because it's being built by a bunch of bitcoiners, the majority of the community is bitcoiners. And then you open up the client, and if the client has a global feed, then it's going to be Bitcoin stuff. So when I was at the Human Rights Foundation in Oslo, I was onboarding activists. And, of course, they love the idea, you know, like for the first time you have this easy-to-access freedom of speech tool which hasn't existed before, right? And then so you explain the Nostr proposition, and then you but then you get them to download a client, and then you install the client, and then there's just a bunch bunch of bitcoiners on there just talking Bitcoin stuff which we all love but normal people might not love. So having people have access to content which is relevant to them is probably like our biggest battle. That's the thing which can really onboard the most on the people. I mean, I had it literally just, you know, onboarding a coffee shop to Nostr, and the guy in the coffee shop, he downloads a client, and then it's just a bunch of Bitcoins, and he's like, and it's the content which puts him off. So yeah, Fiatjaf, I was interested in this because we were talking about this yesterday, and Rabble, I know you've been working on a similar thing. Is making more use of the relay system to deliver relevant content like, Fiatjaf, how do you think that will take shape over maybe the next six months or year?

fiatjaf: Well, there, I think it's natural, and I hope we get that soon. Relays don't have to be dumb. They can have special filtering abilities, and there can be communities that form around relays. And the clients can basically just display all the posts from on a relay that has a specific niche, and we can onboard people using that. Like we can make people install an app somehow, and they open the app, and they're already inside that relay, and that relay doesn't have anybody talking about Bitcoin. And then they can expand later, they can add more relays, follow people outside of that relay, but the first experience doesn't have to be a generic relay that will be populated only by bitcoiners. And I think I've been talking about this for a long time, but I should have built something, but it's coming. But if you look at those Mastodon activity Pub websites, they have a bunch of directories of servers, and the servers have special topics like they have servers for Education, servers for gaming, whatever. And I don't see why you can't have that; it's much more natural to have that on Nostr than on Activity Pub because in Activity Pub, your identity is tied to a server. So if you choose a server about gaming, you're basically telling everybody that your entire personality is gaming. But on Nostr, you can have your personality, and you can participate in different communities. So it's much easier to have these specialized relays.

RABBLE: Yeah, I would agree that the problem isn't that there are half a million bitcoiners using Nostr. The problem is that when someone joins and they're not a bitcoiner, they only see the bitcoiners on Nostr. And so the problem isn't the existing community; the existing community is what sustains us and what makes it real, and we can develop for it. What we need to do is through the communities, through the relays, through content discovery, through the, you know, and, you know, my talk later today, I think it, I think I've decided I'm going to call it Nostr for normies. And because it's about making it so that it's not just for bitcoiners, and if you come from a crypto experience the idea of a wallet and a key makes total sense, and the idea of logging into a web app using a browser extension makes sense. But to normal users, that's a crazy concept and it's a huge barrier. And so, you know, a bitcoiner would be like I don't want to use a non-custodial solution, I don't want someone else to hold my keys that's scary. But to a normal user, that's the normal way in which they want things to work and they understand it. And so what we need are services that let you log into all these Nostr web apps and but using oo or using a passkey where the users own their keys, they have a backup of their keys, they can move it off so they're not stuck in that service but we don't have to explain so much to them. And right now when you go to the Nostr website, it's for developers like I just did a screenshot of it like it's got the code for what a Nostr event looks like and not a description of what it feels like to you know, find community and connection and be able to have all these different kinds of apps. And so we need to start doing user experience research and start having those personas that describe how people are working on stuff and start sitting down with communities like the Oslo Freedom Forum and others and saying okay, what would it look like to start onboarding people in that community and make sure that they find their people.

BEN ARC: Yeah, we do need to be in defense. He's been bugging me for ages because for us to change the No.com website, I really like the design of it. I think it looks pretty, but yeah, you're right. You're totally right.

RABBLE: And it works for me. The problem is, and it works for us, but it doesn't work for all these other people that we know would benefit from getting on Nostr.

BEN ARC: It's a very good point. We'll do that, fix that one. I have to take the opposite view, though, with public key crypto. I'm kind of a public key crypto extremist. I think that it's an inevitable path that average people, just as they had to learn about email and whatever else, that at some point, they would just have to learn Key Management because passwords will get too hard and too long for people to remember, and captchas will get too crazy, and public key crypto fixes a lot of things. So I'm almost of the opinion that we shouldn't obfuscate the complexity of Nostr key using public keys in Nostr to a more traditional logging experience, that we should just ignore the traditional logging experience and have users just get used to Key Management because I want to see a lot more work on Key Management. So Hardware devices, delegated keys, those sorts of things. But it's a very interesting debate as we transition into a platform of Freedom where, you know, the way in which you're autonomous and you have your own data is secured by the keys in which you secure and then whether that can be done in a way where you Outsource that to some other service. Again, Fiatjaf, like what's your opinion on that, like the just the key management system and whether do we need, would you, could you like to see kind of like a login more traditional login system for managing keys?

fiatjaf: Yes, I would. I was thinking about that recently. I think there could be some services. The problem is that people think these servers will scam people, will steal their identity, but I don't think that has to be the case. Like you could have a system, and then someone goes there and logs in with their mail, and they get a confirmation mail like they like to do. And the servers like the apps, the clients can connect using NIP 46 or something or NIP 07 to these services to get the signatures, and the keys never leave the services. The current bitcoiner crowd of Nostr will probably hate this and think it's evil like they do with the Z social app that most people like to own, but I think it's working very well for a big segment of users who wouldn't care about Nostr otherwise, and they're using it, and I think we need more of that, and people shouldn't ever lose the ability to have their own keys, but it's if we want to grow, I think we need these kinds of things. Yeah, but it shouldn't be everybody focusing on that. We don't want to lose the spirit of Nostr.

ROCKSTAR: Yeah, I mean segment of users for Zeb app is like cute girls from California. Like someone needs to get to the bottom of that. Like what's happening in Zeb Fiatjaf, we'll figure it out. But one thing that I'm really missing as a user of Nostr is the ability to obsolete my private key. I mean, I'm sorry, guys, but I just love dying online, as everyone knows that follows Uncle Rockstar. What are your thoughts on this, Ben?

BEN ARC: Like you should make a NIP, like I should. I should do the death NIP where you can just kill your keys.

ROCKSTAR: But I talked about this with Fiatjaf, and Jaf, you disagree with the Key Rotation and Identity Broadcasting approach where I would just broadcast that key is obsolete and optionally point to a new key. Like, are you against that approach?

fiatjaf: No, I like it. I just don't think people should do it. Like people shouldn't think this is a correct way of doing this. There's a NIP from Pablo proposed for doing this in a way that is not that bad. It's like, it's reasonably safe. Like you can't, because if you do it the naive way, someone can steal your key and then broadcast that your new key is actually their key. So they steal all your followers and something like that. But we can do it like in a not so bad way but still like a catastrophic event. Like you wouldn't want to do this every month or like you wouldn't want to rotate your keys every month using these techniques. It's for when you lose your key and you want to say, we want to broadcast this thing that says you have a new key and then hopefully, most people will catch that event, and they will use some special client or their normal client to automatically switch from following you on the old key into the new key, and that way you won't lose 100% of your followers and your identity; you still keep some. And similarly, there could be a way to say this key is dead forever, and you broadcast that, and then everybody just stops following that key, but the key continues to exist, but everybody that got the message just stops following that and stops treating that key as if it was you. This could be done too.

ROCKSTAR: Yeah, but again, it's not guaranteed. I mean, for me, it's just the ability to do this. Like it is critical in a sense because right now everyone that opened a Nostr account is forever stuck on whatever the key is created, but whatever app they use. What are your thoughts on this, Rabble?

RABBLE: No, I think that the key rotation stuff that Pablo proposed is a great idea, and I think it's important, and I think that if we do the like Cloud hosted copy of the keys, then you can. I was talking to Matt working on NOS about how this could be a way in which you could use a cloud-hosted key. You could set up the signatures for the backup, which you keep, and then if that cloud provider that you're using for authentication and login went bad, then you have a way out. And you could say, okay, well, now I no longer trust this, or they've been hacked. And so one of the things that makes blue sky easier for people to onboard in is that there's a default app, but another way that it's easier is that it does use keys under the surface they just don't explain it to the users. And I think we don't need to make that the only way things work, but we do need key rotation. We need the ability to do that and we need the ability to do, you know, basically custodial Nostr as an option for folks, and not everyone's going to use it, and not everyone has to use it, and users have to own their keys, but I use Coinbase. I use Binance. Thankfully I don't use didn't use FTX.

ROCKSTAR: I'm waiting for the booze to start.

RABBLE: But yeah, the point is those exchanges and their custodial services that let people log in, give their ID, connect to their bank account, buy Bitcoin. That worked, you know? I use Cash App all the time, and it has keys under there, it has wallets, but I don't have to see them. I don't have to worry about them, and it lets me interact with this larger network. So we need more of that in Nostr, and we need the key rotation so that you aren't stuck forever on that.

BEN ARC: But then we need that similar thing in Bitcoin where we have that community, you know, not your keys, not your Bitcoin, not your keys, not your data, and then just some terms to remind everybody that they should probably hold their own keys and hold their own data if you're using custodial services.

ROCKSTAR: Yeah, the last big development that I want to get your thoughts on - from my side, big development was the prisms. Did you see prisms on Nostr with the ability to send certain prisms, and then sets are distributed to everyone that signed up? So, you Rabble saw it?

RABBLE: Yeah, super exciting.

ROCKSTAR: Yeah, because for me, the thought is, what if I, as someone that ideologically supports Nostr, I'm up to send SATs every day as long as there is a prism that sends that to nature photographers or the Japanese community. Like, those are my thoughts in that direction. What about yours?

RABBLE: Or, for example, if you are using Nostr to do paid content - paid newsletters, videos, photos, anything like that - then you want to be able to easily send a portion of those sets to the platform creators, to the person who's doing the curation and sharing, to the original creator. And prisms let you do that. I was looking at how to do that before prisms came along, and there's some individual wallet setting things or a push to go towards the Ethereum smart contract world because you could implement it there. So, I think the prism stuff - split payments and prisms - is super exciting and opens up possibilities. One thing I want to think about when we think about payments - we can't change Apple, we can't change their rules. But what we can do is support using Lightning when and where we can and fall back to Apple, Google, and Samsung taking their cut when they need to. So, I think that the services that sell content using Lightning, using payments, and everything else should be built with a fallback where, yep, you get 30% less. It's a shitty deal, and we should fight for that to be changed, but we shouldn't give up on the idea of paid content.

BEN ARC: Man, split payments or prisms, as you call them, is a subject dear to my heart. So, I was just about to say in LNbits - well, in LNbits, yeah. So, Fiatjaf, Draff, and Crypto Graffiti - Crypto Graffiti did a DJ set during Covid to cheer us all up. The idea was that he'd have a video stream, and then in the QR code, when you paid, when you donated, if you donated enough, you would get a link to download the track he was playing. When you donated, a portion was split between the DJ and then also the music producer themselves within the LNbits community.

That was a great extension - the live extension. And within the LNbits community, we all really got excited about this idea of just splitting payments. Suddenly, we have microtransactions, and we can split payments. That's really powerful for just the money management. So, we then created a new extension called split payments where you can just say, okay, when he hits this wallet, we want x amount to go to this wallet, this wallet, this wallet - which then eventually turned into you give LN your Payln addresses, and it would push the payments to those different addresses.

But the idea is that at the point of sale, so you could have like a group of people making coffee, and then at the point of sale, they could all decide, okay, you're going to get 30%, you're going to get 20%, you're going to get x%, and then when someone actually buys the coffee, everybody gets taxed into their wallets. Then you can extend this out to larger scale production where you buy a laptop, and then distribution gets this, manufacturing gets this, and then marketing gets x amount. And then those percentages are predefined, and within those different departments, it then gets fanned out again.

You have this like tree of payments. We have micro-payments. We have this micropayment technology now, right? So then on the factory floor, you have the guy cleaning the toilets, and you can see in his wallet the SAT dribbling in. And then all of a sudden, they start slowing down, and then it's like, well, why are they slowing down? And then it's because, oh, we decided to take x% away from marketing and put it into R&D. And then the cleaner on the shop floor - well, that sucks. I want more SATs. And it's like, well, okay, but we'll get more SATs in a month's time or a year's time when that comes to fruition.

I think it's impossible for people not to become socially conscious in a production environment when they have this access to split payments. It just makes money management within a corporation, a business, so much more efficient. So, it's great that prisms are doing this on Nostr. And yeah, Fiatjaf, like, that was such a cool extension. There was a coffee producer in Lugano, and they were selling coffee in Lugano. Then they were using LNbits. So when they did the point of sale, the payments were split, and the producers were getting the money directly. They were getting five times the amount of money they would get selling the coffee on the open market because you haven't got all those middlemen in the distribution model, particularly when you're dealing with unbanked people. So they can just get ripped off because they haven't got bank accounts, right? So now they have this access to these digital payments. You don't need to have a registered citizenship or whatever. You have access to digital payments that can also exist for Nostr and prisms. So, it's very, very exciting, very profound, and can have real benefit and impact on the world, I think. Yeah, let's use it more. Okay, that's been it for this session. Thank you, Fiatjaf, for joining. Thank you, Rabble. We've got time for Q&A here.

ROCKSTAR: Have 5 minutes, 10 minutes, how many questions? Anyone has a question, Emperor right away.

AUDIENCE 1: Actually, I have several, but maybe we don't have time, so we go short. One time we saw that, I think it was Apple, that kind of censored one app because of the... and they don't get their cuts. I think there is a way to work around that that might work. If we take it as a community, very often something is forbidden, but if you split it into two different services, both of the services can be allowed. Somehow, if you connect them, finding solutions for private key security together, it does the same picture as was originally intended. So, a typical idea I was thinking, for example, Zap - if they say, okay, no Zap in the app, okay, I cannot do that. But maybe I can. If I have my own server and I say, okay, every time you see a Zap coming from me that has this word, then you send the Zap, for example, you send a message Zap to Ben, then the server interprets that as sending money to Ben. And you have basically the same pictures that are basically Zap, but Apple cannot complain about it. And it's the same thing with... you were talking about custodian Nostr, where the custodian has the private code. Nostr, there is no law against this. Why is it not possible to give a private key so that when you send a special message, send money? Typically speaking?

ROCKSTAR: Are we up for that approach? Yes, yeah, that's the question. I mean, what's up with you, Nicholas? You're always taking on big entities, you know, like BitPay. I will make you AB. It's in my blood. Yeah, it's in your blood.

BEN ARC: I like... I mean, this is the adversarial development thinking which is certainly born out of the Bitcoin environment, or is the king of course. And we need it in Nostr because, of course, like the... we're attacking power bases, big corporations like Apple and Twitter and whatever else Facebook. They are going to, before they end up adopting and using Nostr, which they will, they are going to attack it. So this adversarial development thinking is... it comes from, you know, a large part comes from the Bitcoin development environment, which I think is a healthy thing we have.

RABBLE: Yeah, I agree. I would also say that as difficult and bad as it has been, the fights between Damos and Apple, it's been good for Damos and good for the community because it exposes the values of what we're doing in Nostr. We're not just concerned about closed social platforms on centralized servers but like closed development environments and application environments like exist with iOS. I'm an iOS developer, that's a problem. And so yeah, we should make, you know, and there are hacks to do end runs around it, and I know that Will has done tons of experiments with, like, rapid uploading like the shelf that appears so you can see the profile and send the Zap from that, which I've started using, it's great. And so and Nostr wallet connect so you don't have to put the wallet in the app. We just need to keep experimenting with that, and we can be the rebel army that just sits out there and continues to try things and figure out what works because we can try a thousand things.

ROCKSTAR: Yeah, agreed. Next question. What's that Cipher Punk quote with the censorship is damage and route around? It's like big corporations will not give us rights out of their benevolence but rather we need to fight for them. So, yeah, any more questions.

AUDIENCE 2: Let's go, this is a quick one. I get nervous every time I need to give my Nostr private key to a client. When I'm using it, are we expecting to always give the private key to the clients?

ROCKSTAR: Yeah, well, this is what we were talking about. I do like Pablo's ANC bunker and his proposals that are coming, but we kind of discussed this, right?

BEN ARC: Like we're excited; we have like some hardware stuff. So, we made, like, a hardware Nostr signing device on NSD. And I think more people will be using these Nostr signing devices. I think there's a bunch of solutions. I mean, the entire Nostr is a very good commercial opportunity for all these industries to step in and build a whole bunch of hardware and relay services and whatever else. Actually, I was interested in Fiatjaf's take on that, like the commercialization of Nostr. How do you think that's because obviously it's very much a free and open-source development environment currently, and people are running relays for altruistic reasons. There hasn't been really an experiment running relays for in a business context to be able to support the relay service. So, like Fiatjaf, how do you feel that will go? Do you think that's something we're going to see more of? And is it something you welcome?

fiatjaf: I don't see many business opportunities for relays to make a lot of money. Maybe there are, but I think it'll be very marginal. I think relays can exist forever and expand on a scale based on communities, and having a relay that is restricted or a relay that just accepts, doesn't accept spam, like it filters spam somehow, and then it's very cheap to run a relay. I don't think that's a problem. I think there will always be people running relays, and there could be free usage of relays for businesses, like businesses made around the relays that they will sell something, and they will just give the relay usage for free for people that are around their business doing something.

BEN ARC: What about things like data storage? So, for users who want everything stored forever, like who pays for that?

fiatjaf: Yeah, no, for this kind of stuff, you can pay, but it'll be very cheap, and the margin will be very low. Like Nostr.Wine already has a relay that stores everything for you and for all EPO. You can export your Twitter stuff from 2007, 2006, and all your tweets, and you put them all on this Nostr.Wine relay, and you pay a very cheap fee, and they store it for you forever. But there's not a big business to be made out of it.

ROCKSTAR: Yeah, so Fiatjaf not bullish on relays commercializing it but on other use cases maybe. And to answer your question, then come to Ben's Workshop tomorrow 1 pm, right? Do you have a hardware signing device?

BEN ARC: I've got some. No, I've got... I'll do the physical hardware workshops probably throughout the next couple of days. We're doing a Zap lamp, so this is Black Coffee BC's work. He works with LNbits, and he's created a Zap lamp. So when you get zapped, the lamp goes off. It's pretty flipping cool. So we'll be doing that and then maybe making some Nostr signing devices and then some Bitcoin points of sound and stuff, the usual hardware workshops.

ROCKSTAR: There you go. So you don't need to enter McShan. Do we have one more question? One more question here.

AUDIENCE 3: Yes, hi, guys. So on Nostr, we've seen a lot of versions of things that exist, like Twitter feeds on Nostr, blogs on Nostr. I'm curious if you have seen any or have thought of any new concepts, ideas, applications that are not versions of something that already exists but are some completely new idea or application that Nostr enables, Streamster.

BEN ARC: Dude, so like this is, again, this is a subject close to my heart because we recently did a net 107 for IoT. I have a bunch of IoT devices in my house, and I want to be able to turn them on and off without having to sign the horrible terms and conditions involved in IoT software. We're buying all these surveillance devices and installing them in our homes, and actually, I just want to send a DM and say, "Can you turn on, please? What's the temperature of my boiler?" and using Nostr for that. I don't know, maybe it's not the most efficient way of doing it, but again, BC's been working on an example, and it's dope. We have an app, like a client, and then you can just turn the light on and off, and you can tell your heater to turn up, and I can just DM those things, and then you're accessing that permissions developing environment. So for me, it's IoT. I think it's really exciting, and we also have a more public IoT system which Fiatjaf got a nit for, where you could like weather data and things could be a bit more open.

RABBLE: I would say the data Marketplace stuff is super interesting in terms of making it easy to build stuff, but I'd also say that there is nothing new under the sun. All we are doing is remixing the same human activities over and over again with different technological rules underneath it. You know, there were apps like Twitter before Twitter, and it was the same behavior of giving people updates over being able to have mobile phones. There are newspaper articles and sections called Twitter from the 1920s, which have tweet-length updates of the status of what people are doing because that is a thing that exists. So, we don't need to reinvent everything; we just need to figure out how it makes sense in this permissionless network for building social applications.

ROCKSTAR: Yeah, to me, the biggest value of Nostr is that data format, and like I think this is the data format. Fiatjaf, your thoughts, closing thoughts?

fiatjaf: Yeah, I think the DVM stuff, the way for AI to communicate, is a new thing. I think people doing the AI stuff are mostly using centralized platforms, and if you do it on the open with public data, you can have some interesting things that we haven't seen yet, like with interaction between these, and like someone doing something, and other people seeing that and expanding on that. I don't know what will happen the same way you can do that for IoT, like the way that IoT devices capture stuff and publish that stuff to the world, and someone else takes that and does something. There could be new things arising from that. I don't know, that's it. I don't have any more thoughts.

ROCKSTAR: Well, Fiatjaf, thank you for working to make sure that Nostr has a bright future. Thank you, Ben, as well. Thank you, Rabble, and thank you, Nostr, for joining us for this session.

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