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