I sit down with LNbits founder Ben Arc for a wide ranging and fascinating conversation about political philosophy, Nostr, and the future of FOSS/AI. Check out the notes below for more details on our discussion. This was a treat to record and I hope you enjoy!
Ben’s left libertarian / anarchist lens on Bitcoin - the ultimate goal is liberty
Stateless socialism, Marx, and Adam Smith
Open protocols like Bitcoin / Nostr and public key cryptography replacing functions of the state
Pierre-Joseph Proudhon: “Property is theft, property is liberty”
Soulful vs. soul-less capital
“The Adam Smith Invisible Bitch Slap” - Ben’s synthesis of left anarchism and Austrian/ancap thought. Open protocols, public key cryptography, FOSS create new more efficient commons in which private capital can participate. But if capital tries to co-opt the commons, it gets the Adam Smith invisible hand bitch slap (see the big blockers from Segwit2x). This creates the playing field for an actual free market
Collaboration vs extraction - key is aligning incentives so both parties win and grow the pie
“Value waterfalls and the remix economy”- Max’s idea of how BTC and open source protocols will evolve - similar to Stemstr. Both parties win when they collaborate are incentivized to share the same stream of files which get remixed and create thicker value waterfalls or a bigger pie for all
Peter Kropotkin and Mutual Aid - rereading Darwin for mutual aid as a driving factor in evolution
Karma and evolution: 1) nothing is permanent; everything is in flow; everything is relative - one order lower of complexity sees only itself + information 2) karma may be the ultimate driver/law of evolution - a system evolves in its totality toward more mutual aid and complexity
Hegel and the Master-Slave Dialectic - exploitation requires dehumanization making both parties less in touch with reality and happy; in order for them to both be free they need to become peers. The ultimate goal is more liberation/liberty
P2P peer relationships are the best healthiest relationships: what we see in Bitcoin and open networks
John Nash: non oppressive mind space is healthiest - Mind on Strike: giving more people mind space allows their minds to explore and explode open; libertarianism comes from liberation and the need for some equality for this to happen.
Is John Nash Satoshi?
Ben’s entry to bitcoin: dorky Uk news correspondents, his students using dark markets, a hatred of banks, and Wikileaks
The mindseed for nostr: Ben’s Diagon Alley
Pirate Bay and p2p markets
Building the first twitter clone on nostr; apologies for NIP-04
Reverting a fiatjaf hard commit led to Branle
Securing nostr.com for 1 BTC
First talk on Nostr at Paralelni Polis
Finding the alpha with the productive nyms; spear fishing for projects; hanging out on edge of internet; if you’re sending a deck it’s generally too late for me
Nostr and free / open / non Orwellian / non evil IoT
what all can we build with relays, web sockets, and public key crypto
Building a new web with Nostr (e.g. see Nostr Wallet Connect and early IoT)
Protocol stack; the old web is compromised and drowning in AI spam; dead internet theory is here; Nostr (public key crypto) for signing notes is our best defense
Nostr.com is selling dope NIP-05 verifiers
LNbits released a Nostr signing device for identity management
Nostr is best of both worlds online - create smaller forum like communities while still riding on a global network effect
“A better Internet is possible” - we’re not at the end of history
FOSS, nostr, and bitcoin are viruses which infect the system: Just like the major financial institutions with Bitcoin, eventually Twitter will plug into Nostr
Monopoly of the commons is the future; FOSS eventually swallows all (see Switzerland recently requiring the government to use FOSS)
AI brings the age of disposable software at least at the level of building extensions
The need for more Bitcoin and Nostr tooling in Python for the AI community so they can easily bring identity and payments / value transfer to the agents
Max’s thesis: evolution of digital life forms : open source models will evolve into swarms of agents with value - see hivemind.vc/ai
The importance of reputation in Nostr: Web of Trust as a theoretical solution; open timestamps with payment to go higher up a merkle tree; AI agent as dvm for calculating trust
Ben is more wary of AI long term and thinks it will be more monolithic than swarm-like; perhaps it becomes a benign dictator that could kill us or just give us what we need to be happy; could be capitalism as we know it eating itself and requiring a new system?
How the Light Gets In: philosophy festival (part of haybook festival): open AI guy calling the god AI Super Gaia
Max’s idea on AI: there will be always trade-offs resulting in different forms of intelligence
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