David King - 00:00:00:
Imagine if you had to, you wanted to make Zaps work at Twitter. You you'd have to first go get a job at Twitter, and then you'd have to, like, convince so many people. It's just, like, such a mess. Whereas if you're like, oh, I'm I'm going to build Domas and I'm going to do Zaps, and I'm going to build Snort, so I'm going to do Zaps, and we'll just make it work because we think it should exist. I like to think of it as almost like gravity wells or like, you know, where is water flow? Where is value probably going to accrue? Or where will there be some centralization aspects just because the structure of the system is going to cause them to exist. Capital is a tool that helps people assemble and build things that are more future thinking, instead of always being just like, I need to get the bread for today. But I think it's going to be challenging for a relay who is operating at small scale to capture much margin unless they provide something that's very unique and differentiated. Nostr without Bitcoin would probably have to remain just a small hobbyist project forever. Nostr with Bitcoin, I think, can really change the shape of how publishing works on the Internet writ large.
Kevin Rooke - 00:01:11:
David King has been an early Google product manager, an Angel investor for more than a decade, and is now also a creator exploring the convergence of Nostr, Bitcoin, and Startups. In our conversation, we explored the parallels between Google's early days and Nostr's early days. We discussed how the Lightning Network and Nostr may or may not work together. And we discussed how the open Internet may change the fundraising landscape and early stage investment opportunities for angel investors. David has also been added to today's show splits. So if you enjoy this episode and if you learn something new, the best way that you can show your support for myself and David is by sending in sats over the Lightning Network. You can use any Podcasting 2.0 app. There are dozens of them, but my favorite to use is Fountain. Before we get into today's show, just a quick message from our sponsors. Today's show is sponsored by Voltage. Voltage is the premier provider of Bitcoin and Lightning Node infrastructure. Today's show is also sponsored by Stakwork, and Stakwork is a Lightning powered transcription tool that takes the best of AIs and humans to create better, faster, and less expensive transcripts. We'll have more from Voltage and Stakwork later in the show. David, welcome to the show. I am so excited to talk about Lightning, about Nostr, about your career in tech. There's a lot of stuff to cover today, but before we get into it, why don't we step back and have you tell listeners a little bit about your career in tech. You've worked at Google, you've been an Angel investor. You're now involved in Lightning and Nostr. Tons of stuff to cover why don't you give everyone the high level background and how you discover bitcoin?
David King - 00:03:04:
Sure. Well, thanks for inviting me to the show. I've been a big fan for a long time and know your name in the space, so it's exciting. I'm a little bit early in my career as a creator in the space, but it's exciting to sort of be on one of the shows that I had a lot of respect for, kind of to cover my career. I sort of grew up on the internet. I'd say got involved in the internet in 80’s or 90’s when I had, like my dad had a computer at home and we had a dial up modem, and I've just sort of been obsessed with it my whole life. And so anything new that you can do with the internet has always just sort of been a threat in my life. And so I grew up programming on the internet a lot, study computer science and engineering, and I was fortunate to come out to the valley right after the .com crash and was very involved in startups here in silicon valley for the last 23 years or so now. It's been and I was fortunate to join Google early on, back when it was only a search engine. So before it was kind of everything on the internet, it used to just be a great search engine. There was no maps and gmail and android and YouTube and all that, but that came about while I was there. So I sort of got to see from the inside what hypergrowth looks like and sort of what a platform that started as kind of a feature of a web portal and then it kind of grew to become like the everything information source on the internet for both the goods and the bads that come with it. I left Google in 2007 because I thought that Google was not very effective at creating spaces on the internet. And I thought there was, like, a lot of the stuff that I recall from my childhood, playing on BBS’s and playing on early internet stuff was all about the people you gather with and how you bump into new people. And Google has lots of great utilities, but didn't have anything around how people gather. And that was a problem that I thought was really interesting. And I think we've seen it play out in many ways. We've seen it, you know, within Facebook and Twitter and all kinds of other, you know, social connectivity tools. So I worked on, you know, that kind of stuff. I actually ended up starting one of the first gaming companies. When Facebook launched their platform, three to 45 million users sold it now part of Walt Disney, and I've just been really interested in kind of how people gather online for a long time. And you asked about bitcoin. So I first connected to the idea of bitcoin via a gentleman named Wences Casares, who kind of brought the bitcoin story to Silicon Valley back, I don't know, about ten plus years ago. And he founded a company called Xapo, which was one of the early kind of bitcoin kind of custodians and banks and I think they have some exchange services, too. But, yeah, he sort of told the story. Everybody kind of got excited, but I didn't really see what could be built on bitcoin. It felt more like, oh, that's cool. Curiosity, it's a toy, it's interesting, but I don't know that it necessarily appeals to like the kind of builder investor, startup side of me. So I kind of was aware but not super active. And then it sort of followed the path that I think a lot of people felt like, oh, well, maybe there's these other things where you can actually do more building. And so was sort of attracted to the craze of learning about all the other potential currencies out there and what else could be done and our smart contract is a thing and what else could be built. And I think sort of quickly figured out, probably money is good enough. If we can just make money work well, that'll be an exciting future and there's a lot of problems to solve in that. I've sort of been, I'd say, still more just spectator helper from time to time, interested individual, but I don't have any actual full time job in the bitcoin ecosystem, let's say. But I have been interested in this problem of how people gather online for so long and I bumped into Nostr about a year or so ago and thought it was like cool and important, but I was like, I don't see like a reference implementation. We need some reference implementation if we're going to be able to actually see if this is a good place to gather and how that works. And so sort of year went on, kept dabbling in other things. And then I think when Jack Dorsey made the deployment of the 14 bitcoin and kind of made some noise about it, it actually created enough social consensus that enough people were gathered, and it kind of became a real gathering point, and more people became curious about it. So I sort of feel like I've had a prepared mind on this thing for like 15 years and now that it's actually happening, early days still, but it's happening. So I've just kind of been spending all of my time. Now I basically just want to meet everybody working on it, meet everybody, building on it, figure out how I can be helpful. I've been making videos with people and making a podcasts just to sort of create more connectivity and get more of the messages out. So I call myself a Nostr student and a Nostr storyteller, but I'm just here to kind of learn and meet people and want to figure out how I can pitch in and be helpful.
Kevin Rooke - 00:08:20:
Very cool. Well, this is exactly what I'd like to do today, is learn about you, learn from you about Nostr, and think about how you've gone through so many of these hyper growth phases that you talked about with Google and you've seen technology develop over the last 20 years. I'd love to learn first. Maybe we can dive into how does the hyper growth that you saw at Google compare to what you're starting to see happen on Nostr now, where there is real excitement? It may be at a smaller scale, but there's genuine excitement. And there's a lot of metrics that look like rocket ships right now. All the Nostr user numbers and zap numbers, they've really picked up in the last month or two, and it's sustained over the last month or two. It hasn't just been a flash in the pan. Like, one day everyone's on and the next day everyone's off. I'd love to get your perspective on your time at Google there, especially in the earliest days, 2003, when coming out of the .com crash, there weren't many believers, and this was a little bit too early for me to experience this. I was a little too young to really understand what was going on at the time. But are there any interesting stories or moments that you learned at Google? Any particular inflection points where you went, wow, Google is really onto something special here?
David King - 00:09:50:
Yeah, it's a common pattern, I'd say, across technology, that the things that are really impactful start and kind of have a lot of they galvanize a lot of interest from a very specific set of people early on. And it may not be it may feel like it doesn't look very broad based. I remember a lot of people early at Google were like Linux hackers and playing around with Linux, and that was like, not really a big I mean, it was big enough that people were aware of it, but it wasn't like a really big thing. And to be clear, at the time I joined Google, it was already definitely really working and it really was a rocket ship, but there was no Twitter, there wasn't a lot of media coverage, and they purposely kept it quiet. So it wasn't until after I joined and I saw the numbers internally and I was like, whoa, this is actually a thing. I thought it was just like a cool thing to work on. And I remember telling my parents that I was getting a job at Google and they were like, oh, well, isn't that just a website? Doesn't it already work? It felt more niche and weird in that way, but internally it was definitely working. It was definitely a vertical wall, but I think it appealed to a certain type of person who liked the internet, liked kind of hacking, liked this information freedom that the Internet was producing. In a way, we don't think of Google as that today because we think of it as like the big one, but it used to be the underdog. It used to be the thing, used to be the thing that was like helping enable Library of Alexandria, or you sort of have the ability to connect people to all kinds of information, basically for free. And that was a really exciting time. But I think both at Google and then as well other projects companies have been involved with and invested in from the early days. When something is working, it usually has this aspect that we're seeing in Nostr today, which is it really deeply appeals to a very niche interest group, but it really galvanizes that. So I think if you look at Nostr today, the usage is just oxygen for more good luck to happen to the thing. The problem with technologies is when you build a technology that doesn't have that kind of galvanizing ability, even with a niche group, it doesn't kind of get the oxygen to discover what it should be. And when you start with a tight knit group that really wants to be there despite nobody really getting it or a lot of outsiders thinking this is nonsense or crazy or not worth spending your time on the fact that there's a focus group that really, really loves. It means we all show up on Nostr every day and we write notes and we throw sats at each other and we joke around in Chakas and hearts and stuff. That gives it oxygen. That means that someday Jack Dorsey shows up, and then someday Edward Snowden shows up, and then someday it hits the App Store. And each one of these events is like an exogenous positive impact on the ability of Nostr to grow because it lives long enough to have these somewhat random events occur that help it grow. And that's the same thing. We saw those kinds of events happen at Google and at YouTube, and we saw watching Twitter as an outsider spectator, but we saw that happen at Twitter. I was an early user of Twitter and saw that happen at Twitter. And so I think it has a lot of the right characteristics that it's just enough people care about it and keep using it, and then it has enough of the right abstracts that it's public domain, it's not controlled by anybody. There's definitely people who have more influence than others, but there's no central point of control. And I think the people who do have more influence actually want to have less influence, which is like a really good characteristic. So it gives me a lot of optimism that this will follow some of the similar patterns of kind of growth and usage that we've seen in other technologies which have turned out to be successful.
Kevin Rooke - 00:13:57:
That's really interesting. Now, when you look back at your time at Google, I guess starting at the earliest stage in 2003, were there any factors or themes outside of the fact that Google's kind of monopolized search. Any particular threads that you noticed that really made Google so successful? Anything that stuck out to you as like, just maybe the way the organization operated or the types of people it attracted? Anything else outside of the actual search that really made Google a success?
David King - 00:14:36:
Yeah, I think one thing is, because it was led by engineers, it was attractive to engineers. So the best engineers want to work with other great engineers. And so once you get the ball rolling on that, it's kind of a self fulfilling prophecy. Like more great people want to be around people that they respect. And by getting that right in the early days, that sort of continued for a long time. I think at the scale it is today, there's still plenty of great people, but I don't think it has sort of that same probably hundreds of thousands of people work there. I don't know, but probably sort of a different field, doesn't have that kind of somewhat more club like field that it used to have, but I think there's that and then I think also they really hit on a thing that was really important and they executed it well. But I think it was just so important that it almost kind of was kind of running away in a way that you couldn't really control. So you just wanted to guide it to be the best version of what it was trying to be, instead of you could have guided it in ways that you would really screw it up. And I think the leadership there was really cognizant about what service they were, how you would make a decision to make sure that you're making the right kinds of things that are in service of the long term. So I think Google's very long term thinking. Like, back in the day, it used to be very common to do what was called paid inclusion, where you kind of have something that looks like an organic result, but it's actually a really paid result. And Larry Page was very adamant about keeping organic and ads separate and being clear that earning trust from users was like the Holy Grail. If you ever lose trust, if you ever do anything that compromises trust, that the whole thing falls apart and unravels. So I think there were a lot of really good principles that were established, both from having engineering leadership and attracting great engineers and great people around that, and then just being in the middle of this. It was a little bit of like a tornado of new information coming online, which compounds more search queries, which means more places to go, and there's all these compounding flywheels to that which couldn't be stopped. But it did need to be ushered and guided in a way that was in respect of users needs and of kind of the long term, and not trying to do kind of short term, maybe higher monetization, but kind of more short term tactical things. It was very, very long term, very strategic thinking.
Kevin Rooke - 00:17:20:
I see. Now, can these elements of you talked about the engineering leadership and the fact that great engineers are attracted to other great engineers, can that idea be replicated on an open protocol like Nostr, where you're not necessarily all at the same company, right? You're not all working together next to each other every day it's a different environment. But does that same principle still apply? Do you think that these great engineers will eventually migrate to a protocol in the same way that they migrate to the same company?
David King - 00:17:55:
Yeah, I think we already see this kind of stuff. I think a great example would be Linux, right? Like, kind of grew up early in the 90’s and it was just like a hacker project and it attracted lots of other hackers who were really talented and wanted to see that vision of the world succeed. And I think ultimately that vision of the world did succeed. And Linux is used in billions of computing experiences every day, but it didn't succeed in the way we expected. It sort of took a different path, but the abstracts, the principles were correct, but the implementation and kind of the path that it took was maybe different than what people predicted. But yeah, I think people do, even though it's open source, I don't think that means it can't attract the right people. I think it will attract the right people. It does have the challenge that without sort of an obvious kind of capital monetization motive, it's harder, I think, to assemble human teams to accomplish great things together. Not that it can't be done. We see lots of evidence of how it does get done, but it's just slower when you don't have that. So obviously capital is a tool that helps people assemble and build things that are more future thinking, instead of always being just like, I need to get the bread for today. So I do think it can still work even though it's outside of a centralized company like Google. And it may in fact work better because there's always more people outside any given company than are inside that company, even great people, great thinkers, people who want to contribute and are motivated either as hobbyists or eventually have potential to become full time contributors. So I think it has the potential to attract even more people to get brains thinking about it, get work being done on it than any given centralized company can digest. So I would say I'm optimistic that that pattern at a high level can be repeated and may even be more strongly repeated, but just in a very different looking way.
Kevin Rooke - 00:20:15:
Interesting. Now, I want to hear about your transition now from Google to what you've been doing for the last decade or so as an Angel investor. What was it that made you go, I'm going to leave Google and I'm going to start investing. Why investing? Why was capital so important in Silicon Valley at the time? And what kind of drew you into the investing ecosystem and investing at the earliest stage too?
David King - 00:20:45:
Yeah, so I would say that I don't even identify really, as an investor as like, my main endeavor for the last ten years. I have done a lot of it, but it's kind of always been a bit more of when the opportunities present themselves, I see them and I do them, but I don't otherwise create a profession out of it, if that makes sense. So I wouldn't sort of say that I do a lot of different things. I try to help startups in a lot of different ways and kind of technology builders. But back, I guess, when I was starting, it was probably in the range of like ten to 13 years ago, I think, somewhere in that range. And I just had a lot of friends who I knew from either Google or the startup ecosystem that I had been playing in since I left Google. At that point, it had been at least four or five years. And so I just was really connected to the startup ecosystem here in San Francisco. And I knew a lot of people starting companies. A lot of my friends were starting companies. And so I wasn't saying, oh, I'm going to go be an investor. I was saying, oh, my friends starting a company. Oh, I should invest. I like hanging out with them. I like learning about what they're working on. I think I can help in some ways. I'm probably connected to a bunch of people that they are not connected to that could help accelerate their business, get them off the ground faster. So I would say more like it just happens when it happens. It can be great like that, but I don't find sort of it as a very structured process. At least I haven't done a very structured approach to it, maybe the way many people who would do kind of investing as a profession would do.
Kevin Rooke - 00:22:34:
Right, so are there any particular themes that you noticed among some of these friends that you helped, some of these friends that you invested in their companies? Any particular trends you noticed about the ones that succeeded, the ones that failed, and how to identify where your time and money was best spent?
David King - 00:22:57:
Yeah, man. The thing about the investing at this early stage is that there's so many everything is special in its own way. And I think for me, a lot of it is just like, if it's two people in a garage, they have an idea, but there's no real product or traction or anything to share. It's like, what can you do? But to say, I believe these people, I believe that these people are both determined enough to keep pushing forward, but they're also flexible enough to figure out when what they're doing isn't working and figure out how to navigate that path. And then also they're surrounded by enough other people who can also help. And so a big part of it is, like, are people surrounding themselves with networks that are geared up to help them? Right? It's like people say you're sort of the average of the five people you spend all your time with. Are you spending your time with people who are optimistic and ambitious and themselves well networked, so that when you need one half away, you can pull that resource relationship help in. I think all the ones that have worked have ultimately been like highly networked, meaning people who have somehow found their way to get in the middle of all of the interesting people that have relationships. And then a lot of experimentation. A lot of times people have been starting with a hypothesis and then figuring out along the way which aspects of it do work and which aspects don't work. But then being both that determination with that flexibility is kind of a tough pairing. But I think those are the types of things that I would say what the great things look like at the very earliest stage.
Kevin Rooke - 00:24:48:
Right. Now, I was just looking up your background prior to this call, and I noticed you had done investments in things like Clubhouse and Quora, Opendoor, Mercury Bank, many others very successful names. When you first started doing this angel investing and just chatting with friends that were starting companies, did you expect that the upside could be as high as, you know, billions of dollars, as we see in the market cap of some of these companies? Or was this all sort of still a little unprecedented in Silicon Valley? Like, there were a couple of examples of Google and maybe Facebook at the time started to see it really big, but it wasn't really widely known that this could be a valuable kind of endeavor.
David King - 00:25:36:
Yeah, I mean, it's a little bit in the water here where when things are happening and trends are shaping, you start to notice them and everybody's kind of talking about them at dinners and hikes and stuff. So word gets out. Maybe it wasn't so much on Twitter in the same way, but among kind of people networks. I think a major trend that I think was not so obvious to the world back then, it was obvious to anybody around here paying attention is that credit, you know, Paul Graham credit Y Combinator. But they made the observation that the cloud compute that was being built out with Amazon and GCP was enabling a whole new class of an entrepreneur who's often more technical, more experimental, and can push something out quickly to try things. And that idea resonated with a lot of people. And so I was going to the Y combinator demo days and seeing lots of examples of people who were building new things, many of which didn't work, but some of which worked a little bit. And then you kind of got a sense, like, oh, if you squint, if you see dozens of things and you see a few of them, that kind of work. Okay. And then you can kind of see the passion and energy that these people are bringing to this endeavor. You can kind of squint and say, I think there are really big things that could emerge from this petri dish of activity, but it's never about like, oh, I think the world needs a new search engine, or I think the world needs a new social network. It's like there's just entrepreneurial energy working to solve problems that people have recognized themselves or build products that they've been excited about. And if that energy is palpable and then it spreads through the networks and you learn about these things. So I would say it was not so obvious that these could all be like billion dollar companies back in kind of that earlier stage. But there was definitely enough signal among kind of people networks. And I would credit Y Combinator as being one of the community hubs that a lot of people gathered around, but that built a lot of relationships. And then also outside of Y Combinator, there was plenty of stuff that was also interesting, kind of on those same trends of, like, lower the cost to start a startup and you get more experimentation and innovation. And I think that actually has a lot in common with what gets me excited about Nostr is that you've sort of lowered the barrier for what it takes to let's just say, even from the Twitter clones, which I think Nostr is a lot more than Twitter clones. But even just among the Twitter clones, I think what you've done is you've lowered the barrier for what it takes to build a feature on a Twitter like experience. You used to have to go apply for a job at Twitter and then write a proposal or get some product manager to agree that your feature makes sense and then get prioritized with the thousands of other features that other people want to launch. You've lowered the barrier for that. Now you can just build a feature, and if people like it, they'll use it, and then everybody will adopt it. It's like what we saw happen with Zaps, right? We're kind of seeing that real time where imagine if you wanted to make Zaps work at Twitter, you'd have to first go get a job at Twitter, and then you'd have to convince so many people it's just like, such a mess. Whereas if you're like, oh, I'm going to build Domas, and I'm going to do Zaps, and I'm going to build Snort stores, I'm going to do Zaps, and we'll just make it work because we think it should exist. So I think what's exciting about it is that you are enabling more innovation, more shots on goal, more people. Who are inspired or who have ideas to try them out, which is I think very in common with what we saw kind of in the Y Combinator era of the sort of making technology building accessible to more people.
Kevin Rooke - 00:29:27:
So now if you expand the number of people that can innovate, right, as you said happened at Y Combinator and is now happening even more on Nostr and you open the doors, you democratize access to being able to build, does that also then in turn increase the potential for capturing value as a business? Do you expect to see that we saw Y Combinator kind of open the floodgates for all these tech startups that went on to become unicorns? Will we see the same or more of that on Nostr now where anyone can innovate and they don't have to ask Twitter for permission?
David King - 00:30:12:
Yeah, this is the trillion dollar question and I would say I think through these things and I debate it with people real time every day, but I wouldn't say I'm convinced one way or the other. I do think that it is going to be a net positive for technology and the wealth of humanity. Not in monetary terms necessarily, but I think for the access to information, the customized client experiences, just better technology, more open source technology in more people's hands that serve more people's specific needs, I think it's just going to massively increase kind of the wealth of the world now. How much of that will be sort of dispersed and not capturable? My guess is it's a tremendous amount. Will there be some small fraction of that? So can you 10x or 100x the amount of wealth in the world but non monetary wealth, but just like value that humanity has? I think that's absolutely, I mean, I'd say 99% convinced that's just going to happen with this kind of system and kind of the incentives. Is there opportunity to capture value? Who's going to capture it? What do the value capture points look like? I'd say it's like I'd say like a big shrug. I don't know. Like it it may be that it's just 100x bigger and you can capture 10x less value, but that's still like a huge win compared to where we are today. So I would say it's like a real time thing worth discussing, but I think it's not going to look the same as it did back then. So it's probably not going to be like buy equity in a US based startup that's selling shares and they're going to hire all the people to build an open source client. That doesn't seem credible because when you decouple the client in the data store, I think you also really shift the game for how value could be captured. So instead of trying to capture value in ways that the system doesn't make sense, I think you have to try to identify the gravity wells in the system, like, where is value probably going to accrue? Or where will there be some centralization aspects just because the structure of the system is going to cause them to exist. And if you can do those or find those, I think there could be some value capture, kind of both, kind of monetary value capture through ownership, minority ownership of such a thing. So I think that's what a good investment opportunity may look like, but I wouldn't say that it's like guaranteed exactly how that's going to play out. Now, I do think probably the best way to invest in Nostr today is just to play with it and spend your time figuring out what you like and forming a taste and opinion about where all of the value will accrue and how people will navigate this ecosystem so that you have a prepared mind for if and when there is an opportunity to make investments. But besides spending your time, the other thing that seems obvious to me is like, I think that Nostr represents the first really unique, great use case for Bitcoin and Lightning. Like, I think we have lots of hypotheses and examples of cool things happening in the world, but I think the sort of loose affiliation between relay operators who incur real costs and client developers and users are all fairly loosely affiliated and have lots of interchangeability of those relationships, but there is real value transferred. I think that's like, used case number one for why Bitcoin and Lightning is needed to help facilitate those relationships. So I think if one way to invest in this ecosystem is by bitcoin, but that might not be satisfying because probably people already are excited about that.
Kevin Rooke - 00:34:26:
I hope you're enjoying the show so far. Just a quick message from our sponsor, Voltage. Voltage empowers engineers to integrate Bitcoin and Lightning Network payments into their business stack with an enterprise grade experience. The team at Voltage is building the complete tool set so that you can do more than simply spin up nodes, but also understand and interpret your nodes data. Their new product, Surge, gives engineers the capability to quickly solve problems and optimize operations. With node insights and visibility through time series data, you get dynamic and complex insights never available before. You can get complete control with insanely fast onboarding, advanced client side encryption and zero management infrastructure, making backups, networking and upgrades simple. Get a free seven day trial today @voltage.cloud. I want to touch on the point you made about value creation on Nostr. So not necessarily value capture, but you mentioned that we could see a 10x or 100x in the wealth of the world in terms of like, access to information. That's a mind blowing figure to me. I can't quite wrap my head around how that all works. Can you elaborate on where you see this value creation, how you quantify it, and how this all might unfold?
David King - 00:35:46:
Yeah, I mean, it's I think. I'm not going to give you a chart in a mathematical formula that gets to the hundred X, right? It's more fair enough, it's more a point that the fundamental structure, the abstracts that we're working with here are just really new. And so the architecture of publishing is really new and it really blows open the way our historical monopolies worked on the internet. So anytime there was a monopoly, you now have the opportunity to sort of serve some of the main purposes of those monopolies, but do so with this new publishing architecture that can now be customized in literally infinite ways. But you probably will see thousands of great examples of what a you know what, what should a Twitter like feature, Twitter like service look like? I think we're going to see thousands of examples and lots of innovation there. And so if we have thousands of people banging on that problem, I think we're going to discover things that we never knew existed and some of them will surprise us and they'll end up being worth way more than we could have imagined. But I think you just need sort of a healthy petri dish to experiment. So I'd say sort of the net good of having open source software that everybody who wants can try things is one way to create lots of value similar to Y combinator. Like most early Y combinator companies, most Y companies today still fail, but it enables some really, really big successes that probably wouldn't have been possible with the old investing ecosystem, where you had to have a Harvard MBA and you had to go up and down Sand Hill Road to get your 1st $5 million to try out an idea. That old model gave way to a new model. And I think similarly centralized providers have shown us some of the fundamentals of how value gets created on the internet. But now we have a new architecture that lets us reexamine those fundamentals in ways that let thousands of new ideas get experimented with around each of those fundamentals that works. So Twitter as a service works and is useful in a public town square water cooler for the world, but we don't know how many other thousands of features, I think, about this feature. Do you know this community notes feature that Twitter has? Have you ever seen that? Yes. That is, I think, such a great example of the type of thing we should have had ten years ago. And if Twitter were open-source and you didn't have to first get a job at Twitter and then get your product prioritized within some big long list of a centralized organization, I think somebody would have built that ten years ago. So now that's one of the success cases. But it took us too long to get there. We should have had that a long time ago. Now, what if you could have thousands of people building their own community notes features or some other feature that they think is cool, maybe it only serves 100,000 people. If there's a really valuable feature that only served 100,000 people, obviously Twitter would say, we're not going to bother, it's not worth our time. But in open-source you can actually spend the time and do that. So I think like a big part of the new value kind of why it could be an order of magnitude more value is just like more experimentation. And kind of this new architecture enables that. So I think that's how you create a lot of new wealth. It's just enable more people to run more experimentation. And out of that, some outliers surprise us to the upside with how impactful and valuable they are.
Kevin Rooke - 00:39:21:
Right, and then I guess over time, Twitter just becomes a Nostr client and it becomes one of many. And it's kind of all Twitter forks. We have a thousand different Twitter versions run by 1000 different people and they can all try 1000 different ideas. And now, although I do see two sides of this argument. One being like, Twitter is incentivized to try and find the best version, although they only have one company through which they can do it, and they have this long set of processes in place and they may be slow to innovate, they do have obviously an incentive to come up with the best version. I wonder where you think in a world where we have 1000 Twitters and Twitter, the current version of it is one client on Nostr, where do you think it lands in terms of value creation? Is it the most popular of the thousand? Do you think it will be in the top 10%? I'd love to hear what are the odds that by increasing the grounds for experimentation, someone actually comes along and does what Twitter was intending to do better than Twitter, or on a bigger scale than Twitter?
David King - 00:40:42:
Yeah, I love more experimentation in the world. I think the new architecture that we're considering here with Nostr means that there's a whole new set of incentives. And I think incentives really matter for driving individual behavior and organizational behavior. And so Twitter may be responding to its own incentives and there's like the near term incentives of like, are we going to make enough revenue and profit this quarter to pay the debt service? is like a really important question. And how do you do that? Well, you have to run Ads to do that and you have to increase page views. And that idea has been prosecuted and discussed many times, but that's still true. I don't think that has gone away just because Nostr exists. So is there a good way to adapt that business? Like, what are the core features of that business that are adaptable to this new architecture where that business gets additional leverage by being part of this architecture? And I suspect there are real opportunities for Twitter to become a Nostr client and to be more successful at something, but I don't know that it makes it more successful at the, like, ad-driven business model that it currently employs. And I'm not sure how you thread the needle on kind of rebuilding the airplane at scale while you're kind of heading towards the ground quickly. Not that it can't be done, but I think it's very easy to say. You could either bet on that happening, or you could bet on some random person on some corner of the internet who has connectivity to GitHub figuring out something interesting. And that feels like an easy bet to me that somebody who has an idea will show the world that idea, and it will be very powerful.
Kevin Rooke - 00:42:41:
Fair enough. I am with you on the experimentation side too. I do think that is a net value. I have to have more people experimenting on this stuff. I had an interesting conversation last week with Dhruv Bansal, and we were talking about the incentives on Nostr, the financial incentives. And one of drew's points was that right now, Nostr doesn't really tap into the economic incentives of bitcoin and Lightning. And he was worried about that. That was something he said that might not be. If Nostr cannot do that, maybe that leads to a protocol that doesn't succeed. I'd love to hear your thoughts on how important you think it is for bitcoin and Lightning, either as funding mechanisms or as economic incentives to be embedded in the Nostr ecosystem. And that could be at the relay level, client level, the user level, sending sats back and forth. How important is it that there is money flowing through this ecosystem?
David King - 00:43:46:
Yeah, I would say it's very important because there's real costs that are flowing through the ecosystem, and somebody has to pay those costs. And the people who are getting value are not always the people incurring the cost. So I think to put a specific point on that, a relay operator has bandwidth, compute, and storage costs. They have to pay that today at small enough scale that hobbyists and volunteers just do it for fun. And there's some experimentation with paid relays, and I think that's pretty productive experimentation. I think the world should pay these relay operators for the value they're creating, and so that probably should come from the users who demand those services. So I wouldn't say necessarily that I wouldn't be an advocate of racing toward somehow forcing bitcoin and Lightning and nostalgia to all be integrated. But I do think it's great to have the experimentation that we have today with things like Zaps, which let us see, what does it feel like to just send value across the Internet just for fun? It's kind of tricky. I mean, I love it and I do it every day, but it's also kind of like a little awkward to have to know, oh, set up Domis, then set up wallet of satoshi and then when you want to tap the zap, it has this little hiccup while it waits to launch the wallet of satoshi. And then sometimes the invoice is in. There is a lot of hiccups, but you can kind of squint and see how that could be ironed out. That doesn't feel like impossible. There's a lot of challenges, but it seems very credible that it can be done. So I think that's exciting. But I think when you have real value flowing through the internet and flowing through these relationships, you need to have the ability to transact that value. I think Nostr without bitcoin would probably have to remain just a small hobbyist project forever. Nostr with bitcoin, I think can really change the shape of how publishing works on the internet writ large. And I do think the incentives of having digital scarcity coupled with information and communication means that you get tons of new signal on the quality of information. The quality of the nodes emitting that information, meaning the people who is a real person. What is a bot that's actually more easily solvable when you have digital scarcity integrated into that experience? But I would not agree that it all needs to be figured out today or we can conclude, go home, it doesn't work. I would say, like, any new technology needs to start out very simple and focused and broken in a million ways. Step one of any technology is not, hey, we've come down from on high and we've dropped a perfect functioning everything, and it has no problems. It's more like if it's good, it has a million problems. You look at how great the introduction of bitcoin is, but a peer to peer electronic cash system that settles every ten minutes, like, no way, millions of problems, but there's smart people who are working on fixing those problems, right? So I think, similarly, we don't have to say, oh, well, Nostr is going to fail because it doesn't have the incentives worked out. I think we should say, well, Nostr is good enough. It makes a lot of compromises from the other versions of the world. So we're experimenting with like a new design space here, but it's good enough that it works for small hobbyists. And we have digital scarcity, we have internet native money that's neutral and that can now be used to help these parties, relay operators, clients, users, maybe others that get invented to be able to transact and share that value and sort of create the ledger of who should pay for what types of services. But we don't have that all sorted out. We're just like we're on the starting line still. So I wouldn't agree that it needs to all be figured out today. I think it needs to be good enough that people use it today and that now there's energy being put in, human energy ingenuity that's being put in to figure out how to make it better.
Kevin Rooke - 00:48:05:
Yeah, and then we kind of solve those problems as we scale and over time we iron them out and figure out the best path forward. But one thing I find interesting when I've seen a couple of discussions about how money might be integrated into Nostr and whether that's paid relay or whether that's charging people to use a client or taking maybe a cut of Zaps, if that's possible at some point, maybe on the client side. All these are basically every pitch or every idea is using bitcoin and Lightning. There's no pitch that's like, let's do this with fiat money. And that to me, is kind of amazing. We've really come so far in the Lightning space to now the point where we have this exploding network of hundreds of thousands of users. Maybe, who knows, maybe we're close to millions at this point. And there's now people that are so set on Lightning payments that it's like, why would we even think of anything else? Of course it's in the Internet protocol. We're going to use Internet payments, of course. So I just think that's very cool to see that there's so much enthusiasm for Lightning and it's just like it's become like the obvious choice. Whereas I think two years ago it was not the obvious choice. It was like there's really not that many people building on Lightning. There's not that many Lightning wallet, there's not that many users. If Nostr came around a few years ago, I don't know, do you think we would have seen the same? Would we be using Lightning? Or would this be like an open question of what money do we use to help this protocol succeed?
David King - 00:49:48:
Yeah, I think if we didn't have bitcoin, it would be hard. I think without Lightning, we would, I think, just see this play out in slow motion. Like, relay operators would be more hesitant to run as light experiments as they do, and the settlement times take longer and the tooling was not as easy for payments. So I think Lightning, in a sense, accelerates our ability to do lighter weight experiments faster. These relays, it's like, here, put in your end pub and then pay 5000 sats to this address and then you're enabled for a paid relay. And that kind of thing would be tougher and slower in the bitcoin world, but it could still be done. So I think I'm, like, optimistic that Lightning will accelerate what would have otherwise been slow motion. I think the whole thing would probably remain kind of a hobbyist endeavor forever until we have an Internet native money. So if we didn't have Lightning and we didn't have bitcoin, it would be really hard to make this thing work. If everybody's like, exchanging bank details and using the Swift network to settle payments in US dollars between clients and servers and relays, I think that it would remain hobbyist forever until an Internet native money were invented. But fortunately, the Internet money was invented before and now Lightning makes it very easy to use. And now Nostr just turbocharges it because the stakes are so low. Communication tool versus a payment or money tool. The stakes are so low, like by orders of magnitude. And that makes it so easy for people to experiment. And like, you can do stuff. You do stuff and you lose your private keys and you don't sweat it. It's fine. It's no big deal. Start over. I know it's frustrating to some extent, but it's also like very low stakes. You don't have to sign up on an exchange in KYC and it doesn't have all of the heft and weight that there is when you're talking about money. So I think Lightning is a great accelerant to Nostr, but it does feel like when there's value flowing and if it's going to get to some scale, we need to do a lot of experimentation and figure out what are the right incentives? Who should be paid what? And what are all the competing services and what are they going to charge? And what are the terms of payment? Think about it. The way paid relays work today, it's basically put in an end pub and pay and then I don't know, does the relay carry your content forever? It doesn't seem like a reasonable alignment of value creation and kind of value kind of sync or demand, but it's like good enough. I'm sure smart people can experiment all like, what would a monthly paid relay look like? What would a pay per post relay look like? What would paid or read relays look like? There's all kinds of experimentation. We're just at the starting line on all of this. We haven't really begun these experiments in any real scale or earnest yet.
Kevin Rooke - 00:52:58:
Yeah, well, let's squint a little bit here and let's think through some potential ideas because I hear a few different business models when I hear you talk about this. Like, there's the one time payment, which I guess pre-Internet, if you were to buy anything, this is how you bought it just one time. You buy it upfront and you own it and that's it like shrink wrap up. So there's that model. Yeah, exactly. And then we've migrated on the internet to a subscription. And that's like a monthly, like a SaaS model. And then there's another model which is taking a cut, more like a bank taking, like a 2 or 3% spread on something. Maybe like a stripe business model or something, where if Zaps are flowing through and you're sending a lot of Zaps, maybe the client or someone else or maybe a relay decides, hey, we're going to take a percentage of whatever money flows through our system.
David King - 00:53:58:
Right?
Kevin Rooke - 00:53:59:
What do you think of as the most likely or most interesting kind of experiments that are happening today when it comes to monetization on Nostr?
David King - 00:54:08:
Yeah, I think there's so much interesting stuff going on, but I think we're at the very earliest stages and I think the stuff we see today I would almost conjecture that nothing we see today is actually the right answer but it's a bunch of good experiments that may help us discover the right answer. So I mean the obvious ones I think paid relays are a great example of like there's value sync in the compute, storage and bandwidth at a relay and so paying for that is very reasonable. Ask from a relay operator and there's additional signal you get on information quality as a user if you use a paid relay. So you can have a much lower spam risk because there's an actual cost to participating in that relay. But relays as they are, are they going to work long term as just like mom and pop businesses maybe? That wouldn't surprise me if there's some version of that like either a personal hosted relay or maybe a community hosted relay or a topic centric one or a geographic centric one or a jurisdictional centric one and they might have different levels of service, different pricing. But I think it's going to be challenging for a relay who is operating at small scale to capture much margin unless they provide something that's very unique and differentiated. Because if you can just switch to the next relay over, which is kind of always the case, then there's not going to be a lot of margin in operating that relay. And so that's again more definitely wealth of humanity goes up because now you have censorship resistance and you have all kinds of different people trying different relay ideas but you don't necessarily have a good ability as an operator to capture a lot of value. You may capture a little bit of value but you're always kind of just right at the edge of what everybody else is doing. And so in a sense it's very different. But I've related it to kind of like bitcoin mining which is like bitcoin mining seeks the lowest cost of energy and relays kind of seek the highest performance of compute. I think the mental model is sometimes like a data store or a database but it may be closer to a router, like just a dumb router on the internet that doesn't really capture any excess value. They're priced in very competitive ways. So I think that's kind of the model for relays and so maybe it's more Cisco like but who's going to deploy and operate those is a little more Amazon AWS like. And so I think it's great that we'll see probably thousands, hundreds of thousands of relay operators and I think many of them will have businesses that they can run. But I think there's also going to be some really at scale relay operation that has to happen just because people will naturally say oh, better bandwidth, better peering agreements, cheaper access to power and cooling and all the stuff that makes a data center work. Well, if in fact the information routing model of a relay is the right way to think about it, then probably something like a data center is the way to think about an at scale relay operator. And probably somebody will put together the capital and team and go after it and over invest early and then be able to provide a better service that attracts more people in the ecosystem who want to use it. So I think there probably are going to be opportunities to serve people's needs and then to capture some value around that. But I think it's tricky from I don't think one of these is just going to be like the next Google or the next AWS or the next Cisco or whatever. Because the open-source nature of it is the thing that makes me confident that this is going to create a lot more marginal value for humanity. But then from an investment perspective, I still kind of shrug, I don't know everybody who's interested in this. Let's talk about it and try to figure out what that looks like.
Kevin Rooke - 00:58:25:
Yeah, that's a very interesting spectrum of possible outcomes. Right? On the one hand, I look at something like bitcoin mining and I say, this is very thin margins, very competitive. There's very few advantages. There may be some scale advantages, but even that is not enough to deter competition. Whereas then on the other side, I think AWS, things like that, that's a very valuable business for Amazon, and you know this better than me, but what are the scale advantages that AWS has? Why can no one compete with AWS? Or at least why can a smaller operator not compete with AWS today?
David King - 00:59:07:
Right? Well, so if you sort of look at the history, there were a lot of very small kind of web hosting operators 20 30 years ago. That was a real business. And I think when Amazon came in, they applied a lot of capital to the problem. And capital is useful for getting further out into the future than we can see just in the present. So I think if you're a small mom and pop web hosting service and call it 1995 or something, you wouldn't necessarily predict that Amazon AWS is going to eat your lunch someday. But you also are ultimately in competition with everybody else on the Internet who does this. And so if anybody is willing to invest for a day further than you, or a week further than you, or a month or a year, then people are going to choose the service which has invested further forward in providing, bringing that service to the world better and faster. And so there's obvious things like AWS is incredibly expensive to run, super profitable, tons of margin there. But it's not cheap to run, right? So you need to have data centers everywhere. You need to have cheap access to power, not quite as competitive as bitcoin mining is very brutally competitive in a good way. But in data centers, you need cheap access to power and you need wind and cooling. You need some way to keep the servers cool. You need a lot of people who have a lot of expertise to be able to swap machines in and out when they die. And you need to have layers of software written to make those things run efficiently. There's capex to owning all that equipment. There's the real estate, there's the development. I mean, running AWS is a monumental achievement. And the two person web host from the 90s just was not investing for that. But they didn't become that sort of platform for the world. So I think some people might come in and just build the relay. That takes a bunch of compromises on money today in exchange for creating value that the rest of everybody will catch up to six months from now. And that feels like that becomes a little bit of a centralizing force when you start accruing more capital to build more features. More users will select those that have made that investment and there might be some centralizing factor there. And it doesn't mean that it has to be as dominant as AWS. And even AWS is in steep competition with Azure and GCP, so it's not really a winner take all, but that has much more of like a sales process to it, whereas just swapping out a relay on a client is actually relatively easy and that's sort of by design. So I think it'll be interesting to watch. But the AWS analogy only really partially applies. But I think the idea of investing further ahead than what you can do today is a pattern that seems likely to emerge.
Kevin Rooke - 01:02:08:
Now, I want to highlight a blog post that was written by Max Webster and it was explaining why he was betting big on Nostr. And he outlined in it four different layers and business models that could emerge. And we talked about the first one being relays and resources. The next one he outlined was Identity, the next one was Clients, and the next one was Search. And I think the the conclusion he came to was that Search would be where all the biggest winners or some of the biggest winners could emerge in. What's your perspective on, A, that structure? Do you think that's the appropriate lens to look at Nostr through those four layers and then B, maybe you're a bit biased as well because you're coming from Google and you've seen how powerful search can be. Where do you think those biggest opportunities lie for developers building on Nostr?
David King - 01:03:07:
Right, full disclosure, I think I don't know if he had me in the bylaw, but Max and I talked about that concept a lot. So definitely I'm oriented towards these ideas already, but I like to think of it as almost like gravity wells or where is water flow? And you want to just like let things go to the place where they naturally will go based on the structure of the system. And so, like I think to say, oh, we're going to build like the one and only client that's going to get distributed to a billion people and we're just going to monopolize the user experience. That seems unlikely to me. Like maybe something like that could occur, but I kind of doubt there's going to be a Google like monopoly around clients. But a user experience, a touch point with the user experience I think is where most of the value gets created on the Internet. And so if you do control a client, that gives you a lot of influence in what relays get used. And if you have a lot of influence on what relays get used, you can swap them in and out. You could run your own, you could run other types of middleware that help with people discovery. You could run a search engine and you could direct all the traffic to your search engine. So running a client I think is incredibly strategic, but I think it's going to feel a little bit more like web browsers than it does like social networks. And so I don't know if you're familiar, and I probably will misquote the dollar amount, but I think Google pays Apple like definitely tens of billions of dollars. I think I want to call it $20 billion a year maybe or a quarter, I'll have to actually look, but a very substantial amount to be the default search engine on Safari and on iPhone. And that's just like a really privileged position that Apple has earned by building this depends on your opinions, but great operating system, great user experience, great devices that are demanded by a lot of people around the world. And so when you own that user experience, you earn the right to have influence in other parts of the ecosystem. But I would say it's like far from certain that where exactly value will accrue. I think the fact that clients are easily swappable to other clients suggests that I think it's probably going to be hard for one client to kind of own all of the usage the way Google owns roughly all of the usage. And search, I think that's like a good thing for the world. I think relay operators I mentioned I think also have a lot of different functions to serve. So it might be community based, it might be paid with different paid models. They may have jurisdictional or geographical choices that they've made that don't make them like the one and only choice. But when it comes to search, search is kind of a thing that requires understanding of global state. And so that has a very natural centralization aspect to it. And it doesn't mean we have to see a centralized company like Google emerge from this. But almost everything in this ecosystem, from clients to relays to people discovery work really well in very interchangeable swappable, partial view way, which is, I think, one of the beautiful things about Nostr that is I don't see it spoken out loud a lot. But I think what's interesting is everybody's been talking about, oh, can you decentralize social media and do you need a blockchain? Now that we have Nostr, to many of us it was obviously a bad idea for a long time, but now we have Nostr, it's obvious what a good version of that is, which is blockchain is invented. If you actually need to see global state, you need to have an understanding that, you know, there's no double spend happening. The only way to do that is if you have some sort of mathematical visibility into the global state of the system and in people discover you don't need global state in sending messages, you don't need global state. There's some person halfway around the world sending a message to somebody that's only read by other people halfway around the world. That doesn't need to be part of my experience, doesn't need to cost any of the compute or storage or bandwidth that I would demand. So that sort of simplifies the problem in an interesting way. But when you go to search, you do require that global state similar to the way a blockchain, the bitcoin blockchain, needs to see the global state of the system to enforce the rules and ensure that there's no double spending in search. If I come up with a query in my mind, you need to have seen all of the nodes in the world that could match that query and need to have understanding of the relationships between the following what is the following graph look like there and what kinds of zaps have been transacted by which parties? What are the edges, what are the weights on those edges, between those relationships? You need to see all of that probably a little bit our priority in order to index and be able to serve that query at that time. So I think it has like very centralizing properties to it. Doesn't mean it needs to be another Google like Monopoly. Maybe there's half a dozen or a dozen different ones. But I think the necessity to serve global state to me seems like the biggest reason that search is going to be a centralizing function and likely a way for somebody who builds a really great search to differentiate.
Kevin Rooke - 01:08:38:
That's really interesting. Do you worry about the effects of centralization on Nostr?
David King - 01:08:46:
Yeah, worry may be one way to put it. What I like about Nostr is that it's not controlled by anybody and that it is public domain. And so I appreciate that characteristic about it and that's why I like to spend my time on it. If it were just another company that were successful, I would say like, okay, fine, enough, good luck, they can go on their way. But that's not what gets me passionate about it. What gets me passionate about it is the, you know, the 10x to 100x wealth for humanity. And that works with an open system like Nostr. So I believe within that open system, there's likely to be some centralizing forces. And I think that's just kind of like I think it's actually good in certain ways, but I just think that the centralizing forces, ideally don't. Become so dominant that they monopolize the space and just kind of recentralized. ID of new boss, same as the old boss decentralized around something like search, where the whole ecosystem has to align around it in a way that kind of centralizes the whole ecosystem. I don't think that's super likely, but we have a new set of primitives, we have a green field to explore over the next decade or two. I mean, I don't think this is going to play out in the next six months. This is like a long term exploration, but I think given the new primitives we're going to get to see and that's what I'm excited about and I don't really worry too much. I think things will happen as they happen and it's very voluntary and I think the people who do have the voices in the system and kind of the more the leadership of ideas I think today are built around this ethos of kind of volunteerism and decentralization. So I would say I think we're off to a good start. Not that it couldn't be corrupted, but I think we have a good foundation to start.
Kevin Rooke - 01:10:54:
I hope you're enjoying the show so far. Just a quick message from our sponsor, Stakwork. Stakwork is a Lightning powered platform for generating high quality transcripts of all your audio or video content. They combine AI engines and hundreds of human workers all over the world who are paid over the Lightning Network to assemble these transcripts. And that's what let Stakwork create better, faster and less expensive transcripts. To see the results for yourself, you can check out my personal website where I host transcripts for all my podcast episodes. If you want to learn more about Stakwork, visit stakwork.com. That is stakwork.com. Now, when you think about building on Nostr, integrating Lightning payments over the next decade, this is a long road. We're at the earliest stages, as you said earlier. What are the most interesting unexplored areas of Nostr and Lightning that you'd love to see builders focus on, but that no one's really taking a stab at yet?
David King - 01:12:00:
Well, yeah, so there's a few, I'd say, sort of high level concepts. One is any of those centralizing functions, we don't really know how to deal with them yet. People discovery is a real problem and it's a real centralizing function. So most of the ethos says, I don't want to touch people discovery. That's going to cause the problems of the past. But it also limits ability of a new user to adopt I was just recording a video with a friend of mine where I was explaining Nostr to him the other day and he just tweeted about an hour ago, he just tweeted like, hey, how do I find people to follow? So I sent him a note that I had written with a bunch of nPubs and I was like, here's a starter pack, right? But it's not so easy to get started, right? So I think some people I'd love to see more people exploring things that while they do have a whiff of centralization to them, they also can improve the user experience to help more people get it, but where people aren't beholden to those centralizing points. So I think that's one area that I'd say, given the ideology, we haven't seen as much experimentation in. And I think we've seen things like some of the stuff like Nostr.directory explores this and I think my understanding is like hive.one did this kind of thing for Twitter and is excited about doing something like that in the Nostr ecosystem. So I think we're starting to see some people explore that. But that's one that's underdone. And then another thing I think that's underdone is anything that's not a Twitter clone. So we haven't seen a tremendous amount of experimentation around what else outside of kind of cloning Twitter features. And so I think maybe Zaps is a feature that's tightly coupled to a Twitter clone, which I think is really exciting. But what could you do with Zaps? So I've been rattling, banging the drum about this idea of like, I want to see Zapper News, I call it. It's kind of like hacker news or Stacker News. But show me all the Zaps in a kind of community like curated feed. Just show me the top things from my network that have gotten the most Zaps in the last day so that I kind of can see what's going on. So it's like another view of the information flowing through kind of the global chat room that is Nostr, but it's kind of like a new experience around that. So kind of things that are outside of the direct purview of a Twitter clone. I saw this one is it called Habla, I think, which is kind of like a medium clone built on Nostr. So stuff like that. I'm excited to see people now starting to explore outside. I don't know if you saw the stuff that Wallet Scrutiny did. So Wallet Scrutiny is a project where they have a website and they basically review Wallets, but they integrated a comments board or they're integrating a comments board where you can use your Nostr nPub to write comments. So it's almost like the old I don't know if you ever saw that service called Discuss from a long time back. It was kind of like a pluggable blog comment widget that you could drop into your blogs that anybody could comment, but it connected to their other identities. I think that's a really exciting idea that you're starting to see people experiment with. And then I think Marketplaces is a big one where we haven't seen much yet. So like is there a simple way to do, say, to buy and sell bitcoin locally via almost like an order book for replacing some of the needs of something like a local Bitcoin, which just recently I think terminated their future? So could you do that kind of thing over Nostr and give bids and asks in different locations and build the Marketplace infrastructure to enable that kind of exchange or something like the function that Facebook Marketplace serves in the world? I think that kind of thing could be done in a more open way, kind of a marketplace for goods and there's probably other services that could be listed. So I would say I'm generally a little bit more biased towards pure information services for now because I think there's just like once you start touching the real world, it gets a lot messier and slower cycles to innovate. So if you try to do maybe like an Uber like dispatch network taxi like dispatch network on Nostr, love it. If somebody's innovating, they're great. But to me that feels like a more challenging thing to experiment with today versus start with a Twitter, add payments, do blogging, do a Reddit like experience, do messaging. I think messaging and email actually. I think Jack also did a bounty for a GitHub like service. So could you do a GitHub like service on Nostr? I think that's a really interesting and exciting one. But the more that is pure information, the more you can just experiment really quickly, get really quick adoption when you do find something that's useful. I think messaging and email could get reinvented. I know the DMs are a little fraught with some privacy problems today, but I think my understanding is there's nothing that limits it from being able to be fixed. But that's not really the design of what Nostr is built for, I think. How do we do DMs and messaging in the future? Could we have a fully global interoperable messaging service? I think that will exist and I don't think we have it today. And I don't think it's going to be like started from an app you download from the App Store and log in with a phone number. I think it's just going to be more public, private, key pair based. So yeah, just ideas like that. But I would say anything in information communication, like pure digital world that doesn't touch physical world, sort of look at any service and imagine how could you reinvent those? They're just a lot of running room.
Kevin Rooke - 01:18:09:
Yeah, for sure. That last point you made about place where you can get all your messages, like a global message hub, I saw that there's one app, I can't remember the name of it, it's trying to do that with Imessage and Facebook and Twitter and all your kind of like web two messaging. I can't remember the name of it now, but text and beta text or.
David King - 01:18:31:
Something, it would be really cool.
Kevin Rooke - 01:18:33:
Yeah, that might be it. And it just kind of like compiles everything into one inbox for you. And you get all your messages there that would be really cool on Nostr. And then you could also take it to the next level and bring money in that same experience. So, like, all your messages and all the zaps and all the tips and boosts and money you get from your podcasting or your content creation on stacker news on, all of it flows into one spot. Beautiful. I would be the first to sign up for something like that.
David King - 01:19:04:
Another one is crowdfunding. We haven't seen Crowdfunding yet really work in this environment. I think that's another one. I think the Canadian truckers situation from what was a year ago or so, I think that sort of showed demand and interest in such a thing. But the centralized providers showed the cracks in that approach. But I think crowdfunding for both kind of the Canadian trucker freedom issue, but then also crowdfunding for artists and creatives and music. Like, instead of just paying me for what I do, can you pay me for a future share in the thing we all want to make together?
Kevin Rooke - 01:19:42:
And crowdfunding ties a little bit into this next point that I want to make about funding Nostr development in general. This is something that I think is still a bit of an open question. What is the best way to accomplish this? Right, we saw Jack came in with about 14 bitcoin. He's kind of like, ceded the Nostr’s ecosystem a little bit. I think the Human Rights Foundation just gave 50,000 I believe it was $50,000 to Damus developer William Casarin. So we're starting to see some grants and bounties emerge. But there's this big question I think that still exists about what is the right funding mechanism for Nostr? Is it bounties? You come from the traditional venture capital side. You've seen that, the success that can come there. What are your thoughts on the pros and cons and that spectrum of, like, on one end, piece by piece, bounties for solving individual problems, and on the other end, large venture capital checks for establishing multiple years of runway for a company? Where do you think this all unfolds when we think about Nostr development?
David King - 01:20:54:
Yeah, these are great questions. And this is all, I think, what we're trying to figure out. Real time, the bounty ecosystem is super exciting because you can post very specific contained ideas or even somewhat open-ended, but you have fairly constrained time frames on which they can be delivered, and then you have somebody who can adjudicate. Yes, this worked as we hoped, and yes, this didn't. And this served the need that I had in mind when I originally wrote The Bounty. So I think that's like a newly emergent ecosystem, but I think it's a great application for certain types of problems, but it's not like the one tool for all future development. I think it's like a very useful new tool, but it doesn't, I think, do everything. And so I'd say the abstracts that it misses. It's harder to do long term projects where the beneficiaries of such projects are very diffuse and where there's a lot of uncertainty because ultimately a bounty is expecting the developer to burden the full risk of whether they can get it done or not, which I think shortens time frames on average. And so if you can find ways to pool that risk among builders and among potentially capital pools that want to see that thing exist and where there's a potential to have some sort of value capture, that starts to feel more like the way sort of maybe the angel ecosystem and venture capital work. But I would suspect that it doesn't play out quite the same if not everything is just some SEACORP based in US. SEACORP based in Delaware with 100 points of equity on a cap table. It might be that venture capital is not the right model, but I think something that shares the risks of the people who are good at developing and who want to invest in they want to invest their sweat equity, their own time in building something. I don't think they should be limited just because they shouldn't be limited or required to take all of that risk. They should be able to share that risk. And I think we don't have the models yet for how that risk should be shared. And I think if you go to the very extreme, the extreme outside of venture capital where it's like extreme long time frames, extremely diffuse beneficiaries, you see kind of how basic science research works, which is mostly US government funded. Basic science is sort of the way you achieve that. And that's how you do things like discover mRNA or CRISPR or you historically would send rockets to the moon and stuff. So I think it really depends on a lot of time frames and needs. But I think we do need new models. Now, I don't know exactly what those models look like because the kind of US SEACORP thing has sort of been, well, adjudicated. We've run through adversarial environments where the SEACORP is not quite the people operating it, are not behaving properly. And so we have a judicial system which keeps that in check. And I suspect that same pattern doesn't play out exactly the same here. But unless we've tested things in kind of these adversarial environments, we don't really know if the ideas work or we don't know how they break. And so I think the naive us, we sort of can naively go and say, hey, wouldn't it be great if we just had everything was decentralized and everybody gets a vote or something on the direction of this project? Or was the bounty achieved and at a high level? Those are exciting ideas, but until they're tested in adversarial adversarial environments, we don't actually know where they break down. We can predict some, but we won't really see how it plays out. So if you sort of want to have capital partners pool their resources with sweat equity, or build partners and try to make something that a lot of people want in the world, but where they want to share that risk, how do they capture the upside and who gets what votes? Or how do you sort of even structure that thing? It's probably not a traditional board or minority investor with maybe some additional investment rights for preferred shareholders. You just don't have those structures. And I'm not suggesting we should reapply those or use those. In all cases. I think they work well enough in today's world to accomplish some of these things, but they also have deep flaws. So we probably need to invent something new. But I don't know what that new thing is yet. I think in order to know if we've got the right one, it can't just be that the sound bite works well. It has to be that we can test it in an adversarial environment, hopefully with low stakes, and we can see where it breaks and how it breaks, and we can try to patch it and make it better.
Kevin Rooke - 01:25:47:
Yeah, that's a good point. I think there is a growing need for new models, fundraising, not only in Nostr, but also in the Lightning ecosystem and even the crypto ecosystem more broadly. I think about the issue of, like, setting up a US corporation. There's a lot of companies that don't even want to be in the US. Don't want anything to do with the US. Right? There's a lot of companies that are run by anonymous developers that don't want their name known for privacy concerns. There's a load of concerns that seem to be piling up with traditional funding mechanisms, and maybe we're right for a new one. Now, I know we're running out of time here. I have a ton more questions for you, but maybe we'll have to say that for another time. Let's jump into the Lightning round real quick. Got a few rapid fire questions to finish off this episode. All right, first one what is one book that has meaningfully changed your view of the world?
David King - 01:26:42:
One book that has meaningfully changed my view? Picking one. I was surprised when I first read the Sovereign Individual. It's probably a bit trite within this ecosystem and audience to say that, but I think that's pretty foundational to some really new ideas that are kind of being played out and explored real time. Another trite, one that's relevant to our conversation, of course, is the Bitcoin standard. I think it really re examines a bunch of assumptions and helps us understand kind of some core principles, but those are a little too obvious. If I tell you about the science no, that's those are great ones.
Kevin Rooke - 01:27:38:
I mean, I've read them both. I thought both were great. So yeah, that's a good choice. In five years, how many people do you think will be on Nostr?
David King - 01:27:48:
Five years is a long time. It sounds short, but that's long in technology.
Kevin Rooke - 01:27:54:
Guess, how many people will be on Nostr. And we’re talking about profiles with Bios. How many human beings?
David King - 01:28:06:
I think if it's succeeding as an experiment, which I think it will, I would guess we're past 100 million, probably well past that.
Kevin Rooke - 01:28:21:
That's awesome. I was going to guess 50 million. So you're even more optimistic.
David King - 01:28:28:
Same ballpark. Yeah.
Kevin Rooke - 01:28:30:
And then when exponentials grow so quickly, it's like you can miss by a lot by just being one or two years off. That makes a lot of sense.
David King - 01:28:40:
We're really good at predicting linearly, but we just have a hard time sort of imagining exponential as well.
Kevin Rooke - 01:28:46:
Yeah, 100%. If you could only hold one asset for the next decade and it could not be bitcoin, what asset would it be?
David King - 01:28:55:
Shares in Google.
Kevin Rooke - 01:28:57:
Fair enough. If you could only invest in one Nostr company or founder builder, the terms are kind of fluid today because most most of the Nostr projects are run by just one or two people. If you could only invest in one Nostr project today, which would it be?
David King - 01:29:15:
I've been really impressed with the pace of work that JB 55 has done with Damus. It's incredible how much that one individual has accomplished. I think that has enough breakout and enough optionality for where it could go in the future. And I have enough just appreciation. Watching it from the sidelines. It's kind of an enthusiastic user, but not a direct contributor to me, what I see out there today. I'd say that looks to me like the most interesting thing.
Kevin Rooke - 01:29:50:
Nice. And then finally, who is one person that you'd like to give a shout out to for doing great work in either the bitcoin, Lightning or Nostr ecosystem?
David King - 01:30:00:
Only one person. Oh, my. Well, I'd have to shout out Steve Lee because he's the lead at Spiral, but I think he's a good friend of mine from back at Google. We overlapped, and so we've sort of prosecute the world together in whatever our beliefs are at the time. And he's just like an incredibly rigorous thinker, almost to the point of a frustratingly rigorous thinker, I'd call it. But he's really kind of gave up a really comfortable job and began a voluntary work that crafted what's now a really impactful role in helping usher this new technology forward. So, yeah, I would shout out Steve Lee moneyball.
Kevin Rooke - 01:30:54:
Love it. And then finally, before you go, where can listeners go to learn more about you and your work?
David King - 01:31:00:
Yeah. So I have a. Website at curiousdk.com. That's curious D as in David, K as in King, and that's a blog. It has a link to this Nostr Talks podcast that I just launched this week. It has a link to my YouTube where I post a lot of videos for conversations that I have with people building in the ecosystem.
Kevin Rooke - 01:31:20:
Amazing. Thank you so much for taking the time today and I hope we can do it again soon.
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