No Solutions

“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

"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. 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 exper

"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 Gzuuus) 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) Fedimint (federated eCash) / Cashu (eCash on Bitcoin) Framework (modular laptop hardware) Meshtastic / Meshcore (mesh networking) Start9 / Umbrel (existing node platforms) GrapheneOS (privacy-focused Android) 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 Spencer's idea: every venue gets an npub, the venue starts the live stream rather than the artist Shadrach's #DeMu journey: tried to orange pill Austin musicians, but they were too disillusioned. Pay-to-play venues, Spotify killing label revenue. Value for value as social signaling: free-to-play games make millions from cosmetic skins. 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, 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. "I'm here to orange pill the Amish": moved to Lancaster, PA for food security, rented a farmer's market stall just to talk about Bitcoin Printed Cashu certificates for the Amish, horse and buggy to the Bitcoin bank drive-through. Fedimint stability pools make this feasible. "Bitcoin doesn't need more believers. Bitcoin needs more understanders." Archipelago: sovereign home node on Framework laptop hardware, plugs into your TV, companion app, modular and upgradeable Indie Hub: independent films on day one, directors set their own pricing, distributed via paid torrents The reversed marketplace: broadcast what you want to buy as an encrypted blob on Nostr. Agents match buyers and sellers. "Salespeople will hate it." -- "I know." AtoB protocol: made ride-sharing apps (Ridester, Drivester, Trotter) interoperable. Two devs refactored in a day using AI. Web of trust is Nostr's killer feature: people wrote about it in the seventies, PGP signing parties never caught on Nostr VPN: every device gets an npub, devices find each other the same way people do on Nostr SovEng: "the most incredible experience I've ever had in my life" and "some of the most exhausting" "We are back again in the early days. And we just have to make it work."

"I need to build something to test the thing." Pablo & Gigi take a walk. Recorded December 2025. 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."

"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."