Protocol vs Platform: Nostr’s Utility Beyond Social Media | Bitcoin 2026

All of Noster is here with us right now. I love it. Good morning in Pervita Noster uh Las Vegas. Uh it's time to talk about protocols uh versus platforms. Um just in case, you know, there's some new nostrils out here that don't know everybody on the panel with me. Uh let's get down the line here. Start with Jeff. Just do a real quick 30 seconds introduction. uh tell us who you are, where you come from, what you're working on. >> Sure. So, my name is Jeff. Uh I've been working in Noster a little over three years at this point, I think. Um and worked on a lot of different projects, but over the last two years have been entirely focused on doing secure private messaging over Noster, which uh as a completely public network uh is a little bit of a tricky problem. So, it's it's taking a while. >> Will. Hey, I'm Will. Uh, I made the first Nostra mobile client called DOM and I also worked on a lot of different specs on the Nostra protocol such as Zaps, uh, reactions, repost, and all that fun stuff that makes Nostra, you know, fun protocol that it is today. Um, but yeah, these days I'm just working on new other stuff on Nostra such as >> Perfect. Talk about it. >> Yeah, we're going to talk about Yeah. Yeah, we're going to talk about the other stuff of Noster. David, what are you what have you been up to? >> Uh, well, so my my name is David. I'm um one of the co-founders of Nosf Fabrica and we are working on a suite of products called brainstorm and our goal is to bring web of trust to Nostra so that um you can identify your community can identify who's the most trustworthy to ident to help you curate information. >> Thank you. So over the last three years, I'm sure many of you have heard me say as well as my other panelists here that the most interesting stuff on Noster wasn't its most current use, right? Like we all have Twitter clones, Twitter alternatives such as Domus that that we use every day dayto-day, but that might not be Noster's best, most exciting, most interesting use case. A lot of that is the other stuff of Noster. So, we're going to try to talk about some of this other stuff that exists on Noster and and why it's important. And I want to start with Will here because I want to pick on Will for a second, but since Will did build the first Twitter alternative called Domus, I'm sure everyone here is familiar with Domus, but Will's been doing some really exciting stuff with AI over Noster. And uh I think that's completely unique and Noster can be the part of the agentic future part of that conversation part of that ecosystem. Can you tell us a little bit about how you're leveraging Noster with AI? >> Yeah, I mean even before I get into that, you know, since we're on the open source stage, something that's actually very relevant as of right now is like GitHub is like tends to keep on go it keeps going down. like you know GitHub has a really notoriously bad uptime. It's like people are saying it's like down every day. It's actually interrupting a lot of work a lot of open source work. Even even yesterday I went to open up look at my some of the PRs on some of my repos and they weren't even loading. Um so this idea of like moving more of the data that you would it would typically be on GitHub like issues and pull requests. >> Um so would be really useful if we had it on a decentralized network that can't really go down. That's something that's really nice about um the the Twitter clones that we built is that when Twitter goes down like people just go to Noster to complain that to like h Twitter's down because it actually this when you distribute the notes across multiple servers. >> We know who you are too, right? When you show up only to tell us that >> Noster doesn't go down. Twitter's down right now, you know, like once every three or four months or six months. So, we know who you are. We don't see you post unless Twitter's down. But that's the beautiful thing about protocols is that, you know, once you have a enough relay, it's like it can't really go down unless you like take down half the internet or something. >> Will one time nuked his entire relay and didn't tell anybody for like maybe what like a day or so and Noster just kept working. >> I'm like, "Oh yeah, by the way guys, like I deleted the entire relay." They're like, "What?" >> Because because if that actually had an effect on people's experience, then it means it's not censorship resistant. Sure. that mean that means I could just delete everything and then people would lose their stuff but that's not how the protocol works. Um anyway so just I wanted to mention that just to start which is this idea of like moving more of our our open source work into into Noster it could actually be really good to kind of get around these issues that we're having with GitHub right now. Um but yeah maybe that's just I thought I'd start with that. >> Sure. Okay. So let's uh get back to the AI portion of that. So there's decentralized git that exists on on Noster. Are you using any of the AI tools like with Noster decentralized git? Yeah. So like that's the reason I mentioned the issues thing because you know if we have our these agents that are working with our GitHub issues and it can't do its work because it can't fetch them. Um the first thing that came to mind is like why don't we move a lot of the issues into Noster um so that the agents can just pull the issues from Noster and so it can continue working on them and it can't really go down because you could actually be having a running a a local relay on your computer that has that synced all the issues down and you then you'll have zero issues with uh reliability. So sure >> that's just one example and yeah so I'm building something called domas Aentium um and it was really just my attempt to explore the agent coding you know this is kind of like hot and popular right now um so obviously there's cloud code there's codecs but one issue I immediately ran into is like I wanted to be able to start a cloud code session on on my computer and not just one but like lots like multiple like 10 of them and I want to be able to step away from my computer and go on like my my Damas device on my on Android and actually continue working for my Android device. I'm like, well, Noster is kind of perfect for this. What if we replicate the cloud code messages over Noster encrypted and so that I can like just remote control. I know cloud code has cloud code remote control now, but you know, doing the stuff over overst. It kind of adds that level of reliability and you don't re rely on centralized platforms. Um, so yeah, so we have a working prototype and that's actually how I build most of the DOM um tools these days. It just, you know, syncing cloud code sessions over an oster and it works really well because it's like a real-time protocol. That's that's >> awesome. Awesome. That's just one example of, you know, people think of social media. It's like, no, there's actually so many potential use cases. It's just if you're just broadcasting data and receiving it on multiple devices, like that's such a general idea, right? >> Absolutely. Who here uses uh like WhatsApp or Telegram or Signal. So, so you gave KYC, phone numbers, all sorts of information to some centralized company just so you could message your friends and family. It's crazy. I mean, we've all done it. There probably is a better way there. There should be a better way. There should be a more more private way. Jeff is is building that right now with the Marmet protocol and their reference application. Is that uh how I should >> Yeah, that's a good way to frame it. Uh white noise. >> Can you tell us why you decided to take on this massive insanely hard engineering task? Well, had I known how hard it was from the beginning, I don't know that I would have waited into this, but uh I mean it was a problem we all knew in Noster that needed to be solved, we did not have a good way of doing private messages. Um there were a few prior specs about how to do encrypted messages, but the very first one was very naively conceived and kind of leaked all the metadata about who was talking to who and when. Um the second kind of version of it definitely was a big step up in that. It hides the metadata. It has a couple of other little tricks and flaws to it. Um, and most of uh like kind of the most important one is that there is no forward secrecy or post compromise security. So if your noster key leaks, the attacker then has all the communications that you ever had with everybody you ever talked to. Um, so I started out just kind of looking into this going, okay, someone else should be doing this, but no one is, so let me just start to have a look. And I first started by looking at, you know, what came before the off therecord protocol, the signal protocol. Um and you know the original concept of what we were going to do with messaging was going to be based on the signal protocol. In the end there are also some drawbacks about signal. You know signal was I guess created almost 13 years ago something like that. So it's actually a fairly old protocol. Um it's not very efficient when you get to large group sizes and there's a few other things that make it not very well suited to a very distributed environment like Noster. So I ended up using a protocol called MLS, message layer security, which is now an internet task force standard. Um, it's a very very big document, but it gives us a really interesting platform to work off of because MLS is all about the cryptographic state of a group, but they don't care about uh who the identity provider is or how you deliver the messages. And that's exactly what Nostra is really really good at, right? It gives us identity based on cryptographic keys um and signatures and then it gives us this relay network that we can deliver messages across. So that's where we started and it's been a journey over the last two years trying to get to the point where we've got a messenger that's as reliable as signal. You know, you can use it uh to send messages or images, videos, those are encrypted as well. Um there's still a ton of stuff to build and a ton of stuff to add to it, but the goal is effectively to build an unstoppable messenger. you know, it's private, it's encrypted, but also it can't go down like Will was saying, like there's no central server to fall over in the middle. There's also no central entity that's controlling that server that if they went out of business or ran out of money, um, you know, that that whole service would just disappear. >> What does success for white noise look like to you? >> I mean, it would be amazing if everybody would stop using Twitter uh or Twitter uh Telegram first because Telegram is like fully >> just plain text. Like everybody's like, "Oh, it's it's encrypted." No, Telegram is not encrypted at all unless you jump through about five flaming hoops. And no one does that. So, um, stop using Telegram first off. Um, honestly, I love Signal. I think it's a great product, but, uh, winning for white noise would would look like lots and lots of people moving away from things like Signal and obviously Telegram and WhatsApp, uh, and moving on to, you know, white noise and Noster. >> I know somebody that uses, uh, Telegram. >> He does use Telegram kind of a lot. Yeah. >> Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Um, yeah. GM fiat Jeff by the way. So, in a decentralized protocol, whenever you tell friends, family members about Noster, because we've all tried to purple pill our friends and family, right? They say, "Well, what do we do about, you know, moderation and content we don't want to see and impersonation and all the all these other things?" And for the longest time, I don't think we had a really good answer. to that. But personally, I'm a real big fan of what we call Web of Trust and and David's company, Nos Fabrica, is is working on that. Can you tell us a little bit about what you're building, why you're building it, and why this cannot be done on a centralized platform? >> Um, yeah. So, you know, it's it's the web of trust is it's a hard concept to wrap your head around. Um yes I >> when I tell people they they they first say well I don't like social credit scores >> exactly >> and it's not that >> this is the opposite if if we are unable to create if to make decentralized web of trust then social credit scores is exactly what we're going to end up with and and so yeah so this is decentralized web of trust it's it's like some people it's like the difference between fiat and bitcoin coin. You know, some people will say money is evil. Um, but you know, our view is that centralized money is evil. It's decentralized money that is that is that is that is better. And it's the same thing with with credit scores. It's, you know, the whole dystopian um, you know, black mirror thing. That's bad because there's someone there's there's a centralized entity that's in control. We don't know what you know what al how how their algorithms work. >> Sure. >> And and we can't run our own. So the so the the answer is for you know we have to be able to curate information. It's not like we can't we we can't just not have algorithms. You know I if I go on Nostra I don't want to see a bunch of spam and you know with with agents I'm I'm going to want to know which um which accounts are are worthy of my attention. >> Sure. And algorithms don't have to be bad, right? I mean, they can be good and they can be bad. If users have a choice to choose, build and/or create their own algorithm, I I think that that fits the ethos of Noster. >> Yeah, exactly. There have to be algorithms, but the the solution is for the algorithms to serve not the you know the big tech companies or or who knows whom but to serve us as individuals which means and the way for that to to happen is that we have to be ultimately in control of the algorithms >> and and so you know just following the thought process well then it's like oh well that's really hard I don't want to nobody wants to have to build an algorithm obviously and and so how do put you in control but also make it easy. And and and the way that I envision that is that you know that there the tough decisions I can I can farm out to people who I trust like maybe um maybe Will made a great algorithm to I you know to to sort through content and I I'll just delegate that decision to Will and then if at some point if I want to take over I can I can look under the hood and I can change change it if I want, but for lots of hard decisions, I'm just gonna I want my community to help me, my trusted community to help me with big decisions, little decisions, and and everywhere in between. >> So, it's essentially giving communities tools to moderate themselves. >> It's Yes. It's it's putting you in control of your life, which includes the ability for you to delegate control to to people you trust. Okay? >> And the ability to take that back if you want, >> right? So, I'd like to Will, I like to think of you as a Noster maximalist where you are a big huge bull when it comes to decentralization and local first. What are your thoughts on Web of Trust? What would make you want to implement something like that or do you not do you not like that? Because >> do you feel there's any type of centralization there? >> I mean, I don't even think we really define what web of trust is. Like, you know, there's lots of ways you can do it. You know, when I think of web of trust, it's really just, you know, you can think of your contact list as a form as as a as the simplest form of web of trust. >> Everyone's familiar with like their contact app within their within their iPhone or something. Sure. These are all the people that you know and are associated with and you probably want to see their let's say there if you load up a social network. Um maybe the first thing you would do is look through your contact list and find all the posts from those people. Like that's a that's a simplest possible algorithm. It's kind of you already have it's like a contact list. Um so but if we're if we're talking about you know you know leveraging that list to do moderation on your behalf I feel like that gets a little bit I I think that's everyone should have that option if they want to do that. like um actually we we had this experience really early on in the network where some women were getting attacked. Um and they just said I don't want to see anything from that's that's not in my friend network because I'm I'm really just posting here with my friends, my girlfriends and and I just want to chat with them and I want to see their post and I don't want some like random unhinged, you know, nostr Bitcoin maximalist saying how I'm stupid cuz I'm not using Bitcoin or something. They just want to chat with their friends. So this is a good example where if there should be an option where you can click a button like I only want to see posts >> from your network >> in my network right and we actually do have an option in in domosis in in the top right in the notifications where you can click that button um >> and that's essentially the most basic version of web of trust right >> yeah um so obviously people you can get more advanced let's say okay instead of just like your your one hop you can say okay I want my friends and their friends I want to include them in my web of trust >> um and then maybe so that'll expand the amount of notes you see I think it's like kind of too early in Nostra right now. I mean, that's not I shouldn't even say that, but you know, the network's so small that if you if you turn that on, you basically can't see anything for new people. >> Sure. >> And it's hard for it's hard to like build network effect if you have this on by default. But I think it's nice to have as if if a lot of spam's coming in, you have a button you turn on web of trust. Like yeah, it's just that's probably and this is really the only way to do it on decentralized network. You can't rely on centralized moderators to say what is right and what is wrong. It just doesn't really make sense. I think the interesting thing about web of trust is that it much more mimics just how humans operate in the world and how we've evolved to operate with each other. >> Um, too many people come along and they're like, we're going to make a really complicated system where you can build your own algorithm and you've got to label all the posts and like there's all this complicated stuff and people don't do that. Like they're never going to do that. And so using just your own social graph as the way of sort of softly filtering or softly like helping people navigate these things >> I think just works because it's just the way we're built. >> Well, I I think humans we we do this though, right? like what matters to me in the real world, my web of trust with with you. Maybe I I think you're the the expert on maybe I think you're you're you're super smart, you're very intelligent, and I will listen to you talk about development, but I think you're an idiot when it comes to >> uh I don't music, food, sure, you know, and immediately. But but I know that Will is the the expert when it comes to food. So Will would rank higher. So, I would go to Will and talk to Will about food, but maybe I would go and I would talk to you about FIPS or something. >> And I think this is the point you're making is like that's that's hard to model. That's like a really hard thing to model unless you're going to spend hours and hours going through and like ranking all of your friends on every topic. >> But I think you can do that though with with uh with brainstorm. >> You can so you you delegate as much of that as you want to people who you trust. And and I mean I agree with with everything both of you said. You know, it is a hard problem. And if if I had to state what web of trust is the then the the purpose of of it is to identify who is the most trustworthy >> in your well just in the world to help in any given context to help you to curate your content facts and information. And the and and part of the challenge is you know how do you find them if they're not one only one or two hops away. You know, we want to be able to find people who are an unlimited any number of hops away >> and and we that is so we know that can be done because of the fact that Google exists. Yeah, >> Google uses social proof and web of trust is just social proof just um you know on Noster um using people instead of social proof for websites and it can you know it's unreasonably effective at it just page rank. I'm just thinking about when I first got on Google and you know late 1990s it was like magic. It's like how does this work? I had no idea. I just knew it was it you could find anything anywhere in the world and and almost all the spam was gone. >> So goo Google for Noster uh but uh with with Nostraster cues. >> Yeah. Yeah. Because Google has like one global view of like objectively what's the best result for result but um we're we're just talking something called personalized page rank where that that depends on your social graph who you trust. So this is why when you go we're talking about you know u it's not a social credit score because it's like a personalized credit score for what you think is who is trustworthy. That's the the biggest difference. >> So let's get back to some of the some of the other stuff. Uh breaking news as of a few hours ago a an app that I'm really excited for just uh officially publicly launched on the Noster ecosystem. Divine. It's a it's a reboot of Vine built on Noster. And I think that's a very very unique use case where one of one of our friends, one of our co-developers here in the ecosystem decided he was just going to do something and and and he just did it. What are your anyone have any thoughts on like why this is unique and could only happen in in Nostra? Like could he could Rabbel have done this elsewhere? >> I don't think so. I mean, I think it's one, it's really cool that Rabbel was able to find all these old Vine videos, but I mean, if anybody was going to be able to do that, Rabbel was. Um, yeah, actually, let's rewind here real quick. I think half a million Vine videos he was able to find from the internet archive, you know, the depths and and back the servers of the internet and restore these to Noster. So, all the viral videos that people watched, you know, a decade ago, they're back and you can watch them all. And this app uses Noster >> and and I think it's cool as well that you know people started immediately sending him like the Vines that they had downloaded off of Vine when it was shutting down to like re-upload. They're like here here's the zip file like can you just re-upload all these for me? >> Sure. Sure. >> People are really into it. >> Yeah. I think I think it focuses on nostalgia and doing things unique because most of what Noster has been over the past couple years has been trying to I'll say reinvent the wheel but say, "Hey, but this wheel exists on Noster." Yeah. >> And I don't know if that's going to work. I I I think we need unique new cases and maybe this new fun whimsical nostalgia angle is how we get new users. So >> I mean there's a ton of people who are using Divine that have no idea what Nostra is. They beautiful no clue because he's set it up in a way that you don't sign in directly with a key. You actually just sign in and it's kind of an oath style flow. So there's a key in the background and those people can obviously take the key and go if they want. But um so many of the new users on Divine right now have no clue they're using Noster. They just love the fact that it's >> that's how it should be. Video sharing app. >> Noster I I personally feel >> the Noster should fade into the background. I don't send somebody an email and ask if they're using IMAP or PO POP SMTP or POP 3 SMTP. Like I don't talk about protocols. I just say, "Hey, hey Barry, what's your email address?" You know? >> Exactly. Well, I've I've I've always said this in the sense that Noster is the best fighting chance against these siloed like legacy corporate social media because basically every one of these new uh use cases, you know, we're building this mass of like, you know, we we have the existing users within the pub keys and things like that. Um, and yeah, so just like we have the chance of like just building the network effect just from the not from the protocol and like how else you beat that if if you just built a standalone website that had its own user accounts, you would you wouldn't have access to the network effects from Noster. So as long as we keep adding these use keep adding these app use cases and it all become it's all compatible, then I don't like I don't can't think of a better way to fight the uh the corporate social media, right? What is our largest hurdle because we are a protocol that we need to overcome? >> Yeah, I mean key management I guess I don't know. >> I mean key management is hard but honestly I think the biggest hurdle is that we're still talking about it like it's the thing like we're doing noster like let's build another app and like I think people >> we need polish >> we need polish yeah maybe but I think it's like there are products out there with really really great UX you know um like do is super slick. Primal is amazingly uh you know built like it's I don't think it's so much that it's that we need to build experiences that are unique and fun and that people want to come and you know use or that they get some utilitarian value out of >> but not push like the Nostra angle on it. It just is like this is a new thing you hear about it from your friend the way you hear about anything else from your friend and you're going to use it because of that. And then slowly they see that compounding of oh I just used the same thing over here in this other app and like everybody's already here. That's cool. >> Yeah. the technology should fade into the background. People should talk about the fun new exciting thing that they're using, not the not the nerdy technical stuff that they're using. Most people don't care about that. We do, but most people don't. >> And and and also, you know, we one of the mistakes that I think a lot of people make in the freedom technology space, which is Nostra, but also in Bitcoin, is trying to sell an ideology. And and nobody wants to is going to use your product because you're a great cheerleader for an ideology. And and so we need to a lot of that is a mindset. You know, when we talk about our products, it shouldn't be rah freedom tech. You know, when when when I used Google, it wasn't because free and open internet rah freedom tech. It was because it worked. >> And and so we need to build products that simply work. And and and I we should have in our minds people who disagree with our ideology and and and ask ourselves why would they use what we're building? >> Absolutely. Thank you guys for coming. We're out of time. Thank you all for coming. We appreciate it. >> Yes. Thank you. Thanks. >> Every year this community comes together to celebrate, to debate, to build what comes next. And every year the stage gets bigger. Sound money center stage. So where do you go to celebrate the next chapter in Bitcoin history? You come home. Nashville. July 2027.