No Solutions

By GigiTechnology

No Solutions episodes

July 2230: Napplets w/ Sandwich
"You should be able to compose your clients."
Sandwich & Gigi take a walk.
Listen on sovereignengineering.io
Sandwich and Gigi spend the first 45 minutes or so talking through napplets: composable, sandboxed Nostr apps that can run inside a host shell while the host mediates signing, storage, relay access, uploads, permissions, and user trust. What starts as a conversation about applets quickly becomes an operating-system conversation: if Nostr is flexible enough to carry many kinds of software, clients probably need to become composable runtimes instead of monolithic apps.
Along the way they get into browser sandboxes, iframes, postMessage, malicious applets, Blossom uploads, NIP-5D, nsites, specialized relays, agent workflows, slop scanning, and why the AI subsidy era will not last forever.
In this dialogue:
why a normal Nostr client can feel too restrictive for a protocol built around maximum flexibility
how napplets grew out of earlier experiments with Naps, Nap.run, nsites, Hyprland-inspired desktops, Tauri, Thorium, and iframe hardening
why the host runtime handles keys, signing, encryption, relays, resource loading, storage, uploads, and user prompts
why napplets should get high-level helper APIs plus low-level escape hatches instead of direct access to everything
how a napplet can upload through Blossom without knowing which Blossom server the user prefers
why the shell should see plaintext over the message bus, and how that helps defend users from malicious applets
how applet-to-app communication starts to look like Android intents, MIME types, archetypes, and operating-system resource APIs
why the browser is a practical deployment target even if the napplet protocol itself is not browser-bound
what Kehto, Paja, the napplet dev tooling, and the no-dependencies approach are trying to protect
how a workshop produced a dozen napplets, including live stream views, paste-to-upload flows, and even a rough multiplayer chess app
why nsites, nsyte, Blossom, Hashtree, and specialized relays all rhyme with the same broader Nostr publishing model
why relay specialization and relay discovery might matter more than one giant general-purpose relay model
how agent workflows are starting to rebuild older software-development structures: specs, milestones, issues, review teams, and CI
why slop scanning, naming discipline, and opponent processing matter once code becomes the context future agents learn from
why local model hardware is tempting, but only if you think about it like mining: power, refresh cycles, subsidy cliffs, and cost per watt
Related dialogues:
#02: There is No Global w/ Pablo
#09: No Strudelutions w/ hzrd149
#21: Hashtree, Nostr VPN, and Iris w/ Martti Malmi
#26: Zapstore w/ Franzap
#31: Buzz, Mosaico, and Other Stuff w/ Pablo
#33: ASMap, nix, and nix-nostr w/ Julien
People mentioned:
hzrd149
fiatjaf
Pablo
Austin
Franzap
Projects & tech mentioned:
napplet.run
Napplet Workshop
NIP-5D
Kehto
nsite.run
nsyte
nsyte.run
Blossom
Hashtree
Nostr
NDK
Applesauce
Amber
zap.stream
Nostr Watch
NIP-66
NIP-78
NIP-91
notemine
Purple Pages
GSD (Get Shit Done)
GSD docs
OpenSpec
GSD and LLM Slop Scan notes
aislop
aislop-badge
antislop
slopscan.dev
ai-slop-detector
ChatGPT
RTX PRO 6000 Blackwell
NVIDIA patch
Bitcoin
Recorded at 959,164.
1 hr 38 min
June 0729: State of the Mint and Mind w/ Calle
"You cannot look at something without touching it."
Calle & Gigi take a walk.
Listen on sovereignengineering.io
Calle and Gigi start with Cashu mint internals and end in embodied cognition. Along the way they unpack sparse Merkle trees, exclusion proofs, unilateral exit, trusted execution environments, recovery paths, the move to BLS signatures, agentic coding workflows, specialist versus generalist models, world models, and why Bitcoin, Nostr, and local AI still feel like reasons for optimism.
In this dialogue:
how mint state can be compressed into a sparse Merkle tree and why exclusion proofs matter for ecash
how unilateral exit could reduce both the slow rug pull and the fast rug pull for Cashu mints
why trusted execution environments change the trust model, and why on-chain-first mint backing is the easiest place to start
how timelocks and third-party recovery paths might soften mint downtime
why Cashu is moving away from its current signature setup toward BLS signatures and what that unlocks
how Calle actually works with coding agents, from OpenRouter and OpenCode to fresh contexts and ruthless resets
why context windows are scarce, token maxing is wasteful, and one agent per project beats one giant assistant
why cognitive science still matters when talking about specialists, generalists, and what frontier labs are betting on
why world models differ from next-token predictors and why Vervaeke on AI and embodiment keeps coming back
why Thomas Nagel and The Blind Spot show up once the conversation turns to observation, physics, and experience
why high-agency builders should feel more hopeful than scared right now
why Bitcoin, Nostr, and improving local models still look like the right ingredients for a freer future
Related dialogues:
#03: Data Ownership is a Lie w/ Pablo
#04: Ecash Fixes 402 w/ Calle
#12: The Windy Lawnmower Stuff w/ Pete
#10: Walking with Jesus w/ gzuuus
#11: 10x Less Productive w/ Pablo
People mentioned:
Luke Childs
Waxwing
Peter Steinberger
Martti Malmi
Egge
Kukks
Yann LeCun
Thomas Nagel
David Chaum
David Wagner
Projects & tech mentioned:
Cashu
Cashu Dev Kit
Ark Protocol
OpenRouter
OpenCode
OpenClaw
Fabian’s NIP-17 plugin for OpenClaw
Bitcoin
Nostr
BLS signatures
Readings mentioned:
Thomas Nagel, What Is It Like to Be a Bat?
The Blind Spot
Against Intellectual Property
Calle's keynote
Recorded at 952,654.
1 hr 6 min
June 0228: Speak Human w/ MouxDesign
"We just need to speak human."
MouxDesign & Gigi take a walk.
Listen on sovereignengineering.io
Recorded in June 2026.
Mo and Gigi keep circling one question: how do you build products for people who speak plain language instead of protocol jargon? From there they get into wallet copy, fee panic, backup rituals, agentic design workflows, broken Nostr onboarding, fun-first software, and the old Bitcoin fight over purity versus adoption.
In this dialogue:
why design starts before the interface, at the app store screenshot, the first sentence, and the story a user tells a friend
Mo's current workflow: screenshots, Mobbin, a skill file, n8n, sleep, then a sober morning review
why wallet UX still stumbles on backup rituals, fee displays, and error messages that dump the cognitive load on the user
why "copy is design" and why everyday users need plain language instead of protocol vocabulary
how Nostr key loss turns people into read-only ghosts and leaves account recovery in an awkward place
why apps on Nostr still feel early, and why fun matters if you want people to come back
why Martti's work keeps coming up, from Iris to Nostr VPN, plus a callback to #21: Hashtree, Nostr VPN, and Iris w/ Martti Malmi
why Jeff G's work on White Noise still matters when the conversation turns to strange network conditions and real apps, plus a callback to #25: White Noise, MLS, and marmot w/ Jeff G
why Gigi still leans toward protocol purity when mass adoption asks for compromise
why walking and thinking out loud can still beat Slack threads, group chats, and solo brainstorming
how communities form when somebody plants a flag, names the thing, and keeps showing up, whether that is 21 World, EINUNDZWANZIG, or something else
why the simple test still matters: did you ship something that makes people happier?
Related dialogues:
#05: Prompt & Pray w/ Paul
#17: Organic Tech w/ Arjen
#21: Hashtree, Nostr VPN, and Iris w/ Martti Malmi
#25: White Noise, MLS, and marmot w/ Jeff G
#26: Zapstore w/ Franzap
#30: Napplets w/ Sandwich
People mentioned:
Jack Dorsey
Alex Gladstein
Martti Malmi (#21: Hashtree, Nostr VPN, and Iris w/ Martti Malmi)
Jeff G (#25: White Noise, MLS, and marmot w/ Jeff G)
Rabble
Josh
Christoph
Arno
Marcus
Projects & tech mentioned:
Bitcoin Design Guide
Bitcoin
Nostr
Block
Iris
White Noise
Mobbin
n8n
Nostr VPN
BTCPay Server
21 World
EINUNDZWANZIG
Recorded at 952,115.
1 hr 4 min
June 0127: Separation of Business from State w/ gsovereignty
"It’s the people who receive Bitcoin as payment for something who
decide what Bitcoin is."
gsovereignty
& Gigi
take a walk.
Listen
on sovereignengineering.io
Recorded in May 2026.
They explore what it would take to separate business from the state,
why a Bitcoin economy still depends on fiat imports, and how Nostrocket
might route human energy into Bitcoin-native production. Along the way
they get into circular economies, merchant adoption, stablecoins,
organizational design, application-specific agent harnesses, and the
trade-offs behind merit-based equity, minimal governance, and forkable
ventures.
In this dialogue:
why merchant adoption alone does not create a sovereign Bitcoin
economy
why registered businesses remain exposed to state control
how Nostrocket reframes proof of work as human coordination around
useful production
what minimal governance, merit issuance, and forkability might look
like in a Bitcoin-native venture
why open source projects, DAOs, and Bitcoin itself keep surfacing
the same authority trade-offs
why application-specific agent harnesses, formal specs, and peer
review may be the right proving ground for these ideas
People mentioned:
Saifedean Ammous
Michael Saylor
Frederic
Laloux
Vitor Pamplona
Pablo
Projects & tech mentioned:
Bitcoin
Nostr
Nostrocket
Bitcoin Jungle
Soap Miner
isolabellart
The Leathermint
Reinventing
Organizations
Holacracy
Amethyst
Bitcoin Core
Claude
stablecoins
BlackRock
Recorded at 951,874.
1 hr 6 min
May 3126: Zapstore w/ Franzap
"The user joins the community, and the community does a lot of the heavy lifting."
Franzap & Gigi take a walk in Oslo.
Listen on sovereignengineering.io
In this dialogue:
How Zapstore grew out of the first Sovereign Engineering cohort in Madeira, earlier experiments like ZapThreads, and Franzap's frustration with closed mobile app stores
Why Ninite, app stacks, and curated discovery mattered as much as the raw "permissionless app store" idea
What it means to run Zapstore as a real marketplace: breaking the chicken-and-egg problem by pre-populating supply, signing apps under the Zapstore key, and gradually moving developers toward self-publishing
Web-of-trust computation, trust providers, and why app distribution raises the stakes far beyond regular social posting
Franzap's "credible exit" framing: sometimes you dial down decentralization to improve UX, as long as users can still verify, leave, and choose another community
ZSP, the Zapstore publisher CLI, and how agents can already build and publish Android apps without the developer even owning an Android phone
Device keys, encrypted preferences, onboarding trade-offs, and why social features, comments, and zaps are a different problem from simply installing an app
Why app lists are a privacy leak, how update infrastructure can turn into a honeypot, and what it means to distribute software without building a profiling machine
The operational pain behind a living app catalog: pre-releases, key rotations, migrations, certificate mismatches, and endless edge cases
Google's tightening sideloading and KYC rules, Apple's developer-account maze, and why every new permissioned hurdle makes the permissionless route more compelling
Why Zapstore may matter most for people at the edges: controversial apps, developers outside the usual payment rails, and users who cannot or will not pass through the official gates
What's next: default communities, reviews, malware checks, privacy analysis, reproducibility, and smoother handoffs from indexed apps to self-published releases
Related dialogues:
#08: Navigating the Vibe w/ Pablo
#23: Shipping Violently w/ Justin Moon
#30: Napplets w/ Sandwich
#32: Nostrology w/ WhisperHash
#33: ASMap, nix, and nix-nostr w/ Julien
People mentioned:
fiatjaf (built an earlier Nostr-native commenting system that influenced ZapThreads)
American HODL / Viper (example of agent-built, agent-published Android apps)
DHH and PewDiePie (part of the closing Linux detour)
Projects & tech mentioned:
Zapstore
ZapThreads
ZSP (Zapstore publisher CLI)
Nostr
GrapheneOS
OpenSats
Ninite
Fossify Voice Recorder
Phoenix Wallet
Recorded at 951,851.
1 hr 8 min
May 3025: White Noise, MLS, and marmot w/ Jeff G
"What we're actually building is an unstoppable messenger."
Jeff G & Gigi take a walk in Oslo.
Listen on sovereignengineering.io
In this dialogue:
Jeff G explains how White Noise started as an attempt to build the most private messenger possible, then slowly mutated into something else: an unstoppable messenger that can survive ugly network conditions and hostile environments
Why MLS on Nostr is mostly an ordering problem: identity and delivery are the easy parts, group-state evolution is where everything breaks
Forked histories, missing commits, and the nightmare scenario where a group silently splits into incompatible realities without anybody noticing
The temptation of coordinators, sequencers, and Pablo's hilariously named Serial Killer Relay, plus the deeper question of when a relay stops being a relay and quietly becomes a server
Calle's Cashu headaches, NIP-60 and NIP-61 edge cases, and the "pocket with a hole" problem where balances seem to disappear, reappear, and generally behave like loose change under a couch
Jeff G's current bet for Marmot: a deterministic state machine, tunable convergence rules, and automatic re-init flows that make occasional desync tolerable
Why large-group privacy degrades fast, and why "perfect privacy" stops meaning much once a chat has hundreds or thousands of people in it
Why Pika felt more reliable than NIP-17 for one-to-one chats, and where simple tools still beat more ambitious systems
The White Noise v2 direction: replaceable key packages, smaller app components, and decoupling Nostr identity from the transport layer so relays become just one option among many
How FIPS pushed the design forward by making transport agility feel real: relays, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth Direct, and whatever else can move packets when the normal internet is gone
BitChat as a useful proof that narrow, situational tools matter, especially when the internet is overloaded, absent, or simply the wrong abstraction for the problem
Other experiments blooming around the edges: Tubestr as a weirdly great MLS-backed permission system, plus gaming demos, new clients, and other signs that the building blocks are escaping the original chat use case
OpenClaw, Fabian's OpenClaw NIP-17 plugin, and why cryptographic identities make one-agent-per-project workflows feel native
Jeff G's current AI workflow: multiple agents, multiple boxes, very little hand-written code, and a strong belief that the implementation middle is collapsing while architecture, taste, and judgment matter more than ever
Why "build it right" is getting harder to teach and more important to teach, because now you can vibe a terrible idea into existence in an afternoon just as easily as a good one
Apprenticeship, elders, and why people like Johnathan Corgan matter: some engineering instincts only show up after you have lived through brittle systems, bad assumptions, and real adversaries
Notification servers that should know almost nothing, the coming KYC of the internet, and the broader goal of building systems with less data to seize and fewer chokepoints to attack
The argument over easy abstractions at the edge of Nostr, from "Coinbase for Nostr" worries to the closing detour on onchain zaps and second-order effects. For more on that last part, see Gigi's rebuttal, Careful, Icarus
Related dialogues:
#09: No Strudelutions w/ hzrd149
#21: Hashtree, Nostr VPN, and Iris w/ Martti Malmi
#24: Building FIPS w/ Johnathan Corgan
#28: Speak Human w/ MouxDesign
#31: Buzz, Mosaico, and Other Stuff w/ Pablo
People mentioned:
Justin Moon (Pika, small-group messaging trade-offs, and prior White Noise conversations)
Pablo (Serial Killer Relay, naming crimes, and forcing the hard coordination question)
Calle (Cashu, event-ordering pain, NIP-60, and NIP-61)
Johnathan Corgan (FIPS, transport-agnostic networking, and wise-old-builder energy)
Lee from Bitcoin Jungle (Tubestr, MLS as permission system)
Jack (BitChat, Bluetooth-first messaging)
Fabian (built the OpenClaw NIP-17 plugin)
hzrd149, author of noStrudel & Blossom
Projects & tech mentioned:
White Noise (Jeff G's unstoppable messenger project)
Marmot (MLS-based group messaging on Nostr)
MLS (Messaging Layer Security)
Nostr (permissionless identity and event substrate)
Pika (lean encrypted messaging)
BitChat (ephemeral Bluetooth mesh messaging)
FIPS (Free Internetworking Peering System)
Tubestr (MLS-backed access control for family video sharing)
Cashu (ecash protocols with familiar ordering pain)
Serial Killer Relay (relay-enforced sequencing experiment)
OpenClaw (agentic tooling, memory, and project-scoped identities)
OpenClaw NIP-17 plugin (Nostr messaging integration for OpenClaw)
NIP-60 (wallet state and event-ordering pain in the Nostr ecosystem)
Recorded at 951,696.
1 hr 15 min
April 1624: Building FIPS w/ Johnathan Corgan
"Don't be afraid of going your own way."
Johnathan Corgan & Gigi take a walk in Madeira. Recorded during SEC-07.
Listen on sovereignengineering.io
In this dialogue:
Why FIPS started with Arjen asking for networking that does not depend on registrars, central authorities, or yankable domain names
Johnathan disappearing for a month after Costa Rica, then returning with a protocol design that scratched the itch
FIPS as a self-organizing peer mesh: no privileged coordinator, only what each node can enforce locally
Transport-agnostic networking: Ethernet, Bluetooth, UDP overlays, Tor, serial links, and whatever else can move packets
A hilariously impractical but very useful test: tunneling FIPS over Nostr relays, with ping times measured in seconds, and it still worked
Why robustness under ugly conditions matters more than looking elegant on the happy path
150 nodes already on the FIPS testnet, and what has to change to get from 150 to 1,500 to 15,000
Friday Demo Day as the forcing function: build it, show it, let other people poke holes in it
The next FIPS release: fewer unnecessary pieces, stronger protocol negotiation, harder internals, more battle testing
"Try to break it" so friends can fix it before hostile actors do
Costa Rica and SEC-07 as a return to the early Cypherpunk and early Bitcoin energy: do not reform the old system, route around it
Why Nostr feels miraculous if you remember the world before it, even if normies still see it as half-baked
"Rough consensus and running code": academic rigor, design review, and why code still has to survive contact with reality
Johnathan's critique of "shower thought to ZapStore in six hours" culture: speed helps, but engineering still matters
Claude Code wrote most of FIPS only after two months of protocol iteration and roughly 30,000 words of design docs
Johnathan read every file and every line of code his agents produced, which is probably the only sane way to use them
Agentic coding as a force multiplier, not a substitute for thought: bad programmers get worse, good programmers get faster, non-programmers can finally build
Drive-by AI pull requests, effort-matching reviews, and why maintainers should not do all the thinking for you
Advice to younger builders: dissent, trust your own judgment, stop scrolling, and start doing stuff
"You can just do things"
Related dialogues:
#20: Archipelago Meshtadels w/ Shadrach
#21: Hashtree, Nostr VPN, and Iris w/ Martti Malmi
#25: White Noise, MLS, and marmot w/ Jeff G
#31: Buzz, Mosaico, and Other Stuff w/ Pablo
#32: Nostrology w/ WhisperHash
#33: ASMap, nix, and nix-nostr w/ Julien
People mentioned:
Arjen (brought the original itch from Costa Rica, noDNS instincts, freedom-tech networking)
Cobrador (TollGate, weird deployment constraints, "I didn't think this would exist for 10 more years")
SatsAndSports
Projects & tech mentioned:
FIPS (Free Internetworking Peering System, a transport-agnostic encrypted mesh)
Nostr
TollGate (connectivity sold by the packet in hostile or weird environments)
Tor
ZapStore
Recorded at 945,297.
36 min
April 1323: Shipping Violently w/ Justin Moon
"I want to optimize for hackability and customization."
Justin Moon & Gigi take a walk in Madeira. Recorded during SEC-07.
Listen on sovereignengineering.io
In this dialogue:
Justin's new obsession: building Shadow, a hackable mobile operating system for people who want full control over the stack
Why Android is interesting again: not because it's clean, but because it is at least open enough to fight with
Android file chaos, and the immortal "file saved successfully" meme
One wallet, one relay connection, one shared set of primitives at the OS level, instead of every app reinventing the same mess
The "UNIX tools of Nostr" idea, revisited from #07: Zig Multiplatform w/ Justin
Booting a phone with less Android, then turning Android off piece by piece once the system is running
Early signs of life for Shadow: Kosti successfully compiled and ran it
From 13-second button clicks to instant GPU rendering, and why that counts as real progress
Ricing phones like Linux desktops, with the usual Typecraft explainer and awesome-ricing rabbit hole
Why Justin chose TypeScript apps on top of a Rust core: make the parts you should not vibe-code solid, and let users vibe-code the rest
Apps as source code, almost like DMs, instead of a permissioned app store pipeline
How maps, notebooks, and everything else dematerialized into the computer, via this video of stuff disappearing into software
The app store tax, DUNS numbers, LLC theater, and why Justin would rather build a parallel thing than beg Apple and Google for approval
Permissionless alternatives at every layer: phone OS, payments, relays, networking, app distribution, and compute
GrapheneOS as the security-maximalist trade-off, versus Shadow as the hackability-maximalist trade-off
"I want a 3D printed gun of phones" as Justin's deliberately unhinged way of describing maximum user freedom and minimum guardrails
"I want to optimize for shooting yourself in the foot" as the sharper version of the same trade-off: less safety theater, more user agency
Why many Linux phones failed: server people building for phone users, without a real vision for what a phone should become
The Nostr opportunity: a community weird enough to flash devices, test strange tools, and actually use them
"Where do your ideas come from?" and the obligatory Norm clip
Why the future may look like one agent per project, each with its own identity, memory, and full machine to operate
Personal clouds, bare-metal boxes, ephemeral VMs, and feeding your agents compute instead of feeding SaaS subscriptions
Why local-first and self-hosted agent setups matter if you want real sovereignty, durable memory, and no surprise bans
FIPS as a path toward permissionless networking, cryptographic addressing, and small resilient parallel internets
Nostr VPN, tailscale-like overlays, and why overlay networks beat waiting for the whole world to rewire itself
Messaging trade-offs: Marmot, SimpleX Chat, MLS coordination pain, chat relays, double ratchets, and what actually works for small groups
Pika, identity, signaling, and why Justin wants to stop theory-crafting and start shipping
Sovereign Engineering as a high-bandwidth filter for crazy ideas, where most things die, a few things bloom, and that is the point
Why Bitcoin, Nostr, and projects like FIPS feel Amish-compatible: the goal is not rejecting technology, it is rejecting dependence
Justin's closing promise: less talking, more shipping, and yes, shipping violently
Related dialogues:
#01: Start Ugly w/ Pablo
#14: Building Browsers w/ Justin
#18: Rewriting TENEX w/ Pablo
#26: Zapstore w/ Franzap
#30: Napplets w/ Sandwich
#32: Nostrology w/ WhisperHash
People mentioned:
Steve Lee (early sounding board for Lightning-at-the-OS-level ideas)
Johnathan Corgan (creator of FIPS, pulled out of retirement by the right kind of weird)
Martti Malmi (Nostr VPN, offline-friendly networking, also on #21: Hashtree, Nostr VPN, and Iris)
UTXO the webmaster (building Wisp, see also Citadel Dispatch #200 with UTXO)
Kosti (successfully compiled and ran Shadow OS)
Pablo (app-as-chat-box idea, Pika, general agentic mischief)
Arjen (mesh instincts, noDNS lineage, helping make the weird legible, also on #17: Organic Tech)
Dimi (running VPS and simple cloud infrastructure alongside bitcoin mining facilities)
Cobrador (TollGate, rural and off-grid deployment instincts)
Shadrach (parallel systems, Amish country, and practical off-grid thinking, also on #20: Archipelago Meshtadels)
Bitstein (orange-pilling the Amish remains a live meme)
Erik Cason (mind-blowing people without realizing it)
Projects & tech mentioned:
Shadow (Justin's experimental mobile OS)
GrapheneOS (security-focused Android fork)
FIPS (Free Internetworking Peering System)
Nostr VPN (overlay networking over Nostr)
Pika (encrypted messaging experiments for OpenClaw)
Marmot (MLS-based chat on Nostr)
SimpleX Chat (private messaging reference point mentioned in the conversation, see also Citadel Dispatch #196 with Evgeny Poberezkin)
OpenClaw (one agent per project, memory, and task execution)
ZapStore (permission-minimized Android app distribution)
Wisp (mobile Nostr client being built by UTXO, see also Citadel Dispatch #200 with UTXO)
Pokey (Nostr notification aggregation for power users)
Deno (runtime for TypeScript apps on the phone)
Nix (reproducible builds, environments, and OS packaging)
Magisk (rooting and system modification on Android)
BitChat (UX-first mesh messaging reference point)
TollGate (connectivity and payments at the edge)
HRF (trainings, activists, and the account-creation pain of the permissioned web)
Recorded at 944,875.
1 hr 41 min
April 0522: Sovereign Engineering w/ Yo
“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 build day, 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 (browser, separate sessions for questions)

Jonathan Corgan (FIPS creator, came out of retirement)

Gzuuus (identity continuation proposal)

Vitor Pamplona (social-only identity migration)

Pip (Vertex, web-of-trust identity demo)

Arjen (Tollgate, noDNS origins)

Pete (Pete’s kid doing games on Nostr)

Cobrador (TollGate on balloons)

Sir Sleepy (multiple npub power user)

Sandwich (nsites resurgence)

Thomas (collaborative drawing board on FIPS + Tor)

Rob (silent payments over Nostr, picked up by Sparrow)

hodlbod (key rotation proposal)

Ben from LNbits (hardware Nostr signer)

Fabian (NIP-17 plugin for OpenClaw)

Projects & tech mentioned:

FIPS (Free Internetworking Peering System)

Sovereign Engineering (the program itself)

OpenClaw / ZeroClaw (agent harnesses, rapid prototyping vs security trade-off)

Codex (OpenAI’s coding agent)

Routstr (model routing with Cashu payments)

Tollgate (mesh network toll gates, now on balloons)

Vertex (web-of-trust tools, identity migration demo)

Nostr VPN (migrating to FIPS)

nsites (Nostr-based web hosting, default demo deployment)

Blossom (content-addressed blob storage)

Cashu (eCash on Bitcoin)

Nihao (skill for spinning up Nostr identities)

Pika (MLS-based encrypted messaging for OpenClaw)

Paygress (L402 nginx, pay-per-request HTTP monetization)

Fabian’s NIP-17 plugin for OpenClaw

NIP-17 plugin PR for nullclaw

NIP-17 (encrypted DMs)

NIP-29 (relay-based groups)

NIP-60 / NIP-61 (Cashu wallets on Nostr)

Amber (Android Nostr signer)

Portal (hardware Nostr signer cards)

Primal (signing abilities release)

Sparrow (silent payments integration from Rob’s work)

BPD5 (key management proposal)

Endurance (Shackleton’s expedition, Alfred Lansing)

BTC++ (coming to Madeira after summer cohort)

Recorded at 943,743.
1 hr 8 min
April 0421: Hashtree, Nostr VPN, and Iris w/ Martti Malmi
"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.
SovEng experience: "awesome", intense from morning to evening, a teenage dream of hacking with people on a beautiful island. Came on short notice after Jonathan reached out following the Nostr VPN release.
Martti's ask: use Hashtree, default your repos to hashtree remotes, solve real problems. "Nostr VPN actually solved a real problem. Scratch your own itch."
Related dialogues:
#02: There is No Global w/ Pablo
#09: No Strudelutions w/ hzrd149
#20: Archipelago Meshtadels w/ Shadrach
#24: Building FIPS w/ Johnathan Corgan
#28: Speak Human w/ MouxDesign
#30: Napplets w/ Sandwich
#33: ASMap, nix, and nix-nostr w/ Julien
People mentioned:
Justin Moon (browser discussion, GitHub stars feature request)
Jonathan Corgan (FIPS creator, invited Martti to Madeira)
Pablo (Nostr Signer / Nsec Bunker)
Kieran (social graph library usage in Snort/ZapStream)
Knut Svanholm (early Bitcoin history conversation with Martti)
Gwern (Dwarkesh interview)
utxo the webmaster (Wisp creator)
jb55 (Damus / Notedeck)
Christopher Poole / moot (4chan founder)
Vitor Pamplona (Amethyst)
isolabellart (Nostr-native artist, isolabellart.it.com)
Sir Sleepy (traffic analysis demo)
Jack Dorsey
Projects & tech mentioned:
Hashtree (content-addressed file system on top of Blossom: directories, file chunking, encryption by default)
git remote hashtree (decentralized Git using Hashtree storage, replacing GitHub remotes)
git.iris.to (web-based Git interface with NIP-34 support: issues, pull requests, likes)
Iris (Nostr social client with built-in social graph filtering)
Iris Browser (loads websites and apps from Hashtree URLs in a content-addressed way)
Nostr VPN (WireGuard tunnels using Nostr relays for peer discovery and signaling, no accounts needed)
Nostr Double Ratchet (Signal-style encrypted messaging on Nostr with group chat support, demo at chat.iris.to)
Blossom (content-addressed blob storage)
WebRTC mesh (peer-to-peer data transfer, works in browsers and servers, probabilistic routing with hops-to-live)
FIPS (Nostr public key-based network routing, by Jonathan Corgan)
Reticulum (low-bandwidth mesh networking stack)
LoRa (long-range, low-power radio for mesh networking)
MLS / White Noise (encrypted group messaging on Nostr)
Marmot Protocol (encrypted messaging protocol for Nostr)
Freenet (early content-addressed peer-to-peer network, inspiration for Hashtree's encryption)
Ladybird (independent browser implementation)
OpenClaw (open-source AI agent harness)
Cashu (eCash on Bitcoin, future incentivized exit node payments)
Maple (privacy-preserving AI inference)
Trusting Trust (the problem of trust in computing)
Routstr (Nostr-based AI routing)
PPQ (decentralized AI inference)
Amber (Nostr signer for Android)
Aegis (Nostr signer for iOS)
Plebeian Market (Nostr marketplace)
Shopstr (Nostr marketplace)
Amethyst (Nostr client for Android)
Wisp (Nostr micro-client)
Damus Notedeck (Nostr client with app shell, built on nostrdb)
ContextVM (execution environment for Nostr)
Vertex (web of trust tools)
Relatr (relay-side WoT filtering on ContextVM)
Eternal September (what happens when a subculture scales)
Zooko's Triangle (the naming trilemma: human-meaningful, secure, decentralized)
nsite (Nostr-based web hosting)
Commander Keen (DOS-era classic)
IPX/SPX (LAN party networking protocol)
Pirate Bay (decentralized resilience patterns that Nostr echoes, Peter Sunde: "I Have Given Up", keynote)
Recorded at 943,634.
1 hr 18 min

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No solutions; only trade-offs. Walking towards a better internet.

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