“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 Related dialogues: #03: Data Ownership is a Lie w/ Pablo #04: Ecash Fixes 402 w/ Calle #20: Archipelago Meshtadels w/ Shadrach #29: State of the Mint and Mind w/ Calle Recorded at 914,219.