Polycarp Nakamoto | Plan For Decentralisation

Timothy Allen: Actually well I’d quite like to start talking about anonymity actually I’ve only ever had one other person on this pod who didn’t want to be who didn’t want to be known and I did I asked them the same question it’s kind of like because in this day and age I think anonymity I would say it’s probably impossible you know someone somewhere can work out who you are so what’s the idea behind not being visible and not not people not putting a face to a voice yeah part of it is anonymity that’s that’s.

Polycarp Nakamoto: A big part I like going to restaurants and not being harassed I like going to conferences and not having everybody know who I am. So in that sense, the mask helps with that. But ultimately, the real reason that I wear the mask is because it doesn’t matter who I am. Anybody can be doing what we’re doing thanks to Bitcoin and the Bitcoin node network. I mean, anyone can run a node. The U.S.. government is running a node. And so while the mask helps with my privacy, ultimately if someone wants to know who I am, they can figure that out pretty easily. But the message that the idea of free speech in a worldwide mesh network, that is something that does not depend upon any single person’s identity. Everyone is building the mesh network.

Timothy Allen: Fair enough. better set the scene for people that I mean like like I’ve come in here not really understanding I’m I’m literally making this up as I go along so bear with me I’m not going to give too much away.

Polycarp Nakamoto: But am I allowed to say which which which town we’re in oh absolutely yeah yeah we’re in Austin.

Timothy Allen: And we have a mutual friend who’s who’s who works with you and he said look you should talk to these guys what they doing is quite incredible And that a green flag for me I love interesting unusual things And now I met you at this incredible location It like a it a beautiful rural house with which is basically set up for a community. I think that’s the best way to put it. It’s, it’s got all the ingredients for a good community. And I understand you’ve got a network of these places. Tell me what, tell me what’s.

Polycarp Nakamoto: Going on here please sure yeah so we want to build a worldwide mesh network with no single point of failure and I realized very early on that the only way to do that was with a community it can’t just be one man it can’t be one woman it can’t be just a small group of people in order to change the world, we would need many hands coming together as one. And so what we’ve done here is we’ve created a governance board that is decentralized. There’s no ownership, there’s only a responsibility. And then we have a private membership association that is a research laboratory for the technology that’s building the next web and we have 12 startups in the lab as we call it Lab 484 and these startups are all individually building different parts of the new internet that we’re working on and as those startups grow up and get bigger and get more mature and profitable they move out into their own spaces and so that’s what this is this is the Archipelago headquarters where that we’re developing the Archipelago software marketing it and building a community.

Timothy Allen: Around the mesh network and can you can you you better describe better give me a proper definition of mesh network then yeah because I think I know but tell me what you think it is.

Polycarp Nakamoto: Yeah, absolutely. So a mesh network is an internet that has many different points of connection. If you think of your cell phone, your cell phone is the best example of a mesh network. You walk around downtown Austin and you don’t think about it, but your phone is always connected. The problem is, is that that mesh network is proprietary and you can be censored. If you don’t pay your bill, you’re no longer attached to the mesh network.

Timothy Allen: I see. All right. So what’s the manifestation of it in terms of what I’d understand then? I mean, are you talking about decentralized protocols?

Polycarp Nakamoto: Yeah. And so most people aren’t aware of the differences between open-source software and proprietary software. and really all you need to know is that when you are using open-source software you are in full control and nobody can shut you out because you’re sovereign when you are interacting with proprietary software it requires a contract and a user agreement and that makes a contractual agreement between you and the third-party that you’re assigning the user agreement with and that makes a lot of liability for you and your data and so the only the only way to build an internet with no single point of failure is to have it be open-source where you own the hardware the software and the data with no third parties or contracts between you and another company.

Timothy Allen: Do you know what’s interesting total side note or here but talking to you now I’ve realized how much emphasis I put on on visual on expressions when I’m speaking I don’t know what you’re thinking I don’t know it’s a very interesting experience interviewing you actually because I’ve never I’ve never I’ve never done it before the last guy I interviewed who was anonymous I just didn’t show the video if you see what I mean I didn’t record him but gosh I I use visual facial cues so much I’ve just realized but I’ll adapt don’t worry I’m just always smiling so okay right Lab 484 then and can I can I ask a quick question of course it’s so you you it’s all basically tech startups is it software hardware or what is it yeah all of the above in order to fix the internet you can’t just fix it with a new website or a new app or something of that nature it needs to be a fundamental refactoring of the internet as we know it and in order to do that it’s going to take a lot of moving parts and a lot of different technologies coming online at the exact same time and there I take it they’re all decentralized they’re all you know Nostr yeah nodes Hardware and this kind of stuff. Oh yeah, yeah.

There is a wave of Web5 technology coming, of sovereign technology. Hold on a minute, Web5, there’s a new term. What’s Web5? I thought we were Web 2. Just a quick recap. In the first web, Web 1, it was banks and data centers and universities compiling data and using that to synthesize information. In Web 2, we were given an identity on the internet. Before, you could only read information, but now in Web 2, you could actually write information. this would be Google, Uber, Facebook, anything we’ve used that requires a login or a sign up right the problem is is we don’t own our email address or our phone number that we use to access these platforms and then they get all of our data in Web 3 we now have the ability to actually own something on the web before there was no ownership on the web in Web 2 in Web 3 we have private keys and only you have those private keys no one else has that and so now we can actually build reputation in a sovereign way where we’re not being tracked but we actually own our digital.

Polycarp Nakamoto: Footprint Web 4 is mesh networks and iot there’s a mesh network that amazon is building and it’s called Amazon Sidewalk and it’s a proprietary mesh network and if the internet were to go down you could still access Amazon services but again it’s.

Timothy Allen: Permissioned can you sorry in there can you explain that what it what is an.

Polycarp Nakamoto: Amazon Sidewalk I’ve never heard that so yeah so all of the Ring cameras all talk to each other and it creates a mesh network that sidesteps the internet and there’s extra devices that they’re going to be selling to people and giving to people to put on their windows and on the outside of their house and it creates its own network for Amazon.

Timothy Allen: But how is it transmitted? How does the network, if it doesn’t use internet rails, what’s it using? Radio, peer-to-peer, Wi-Fi and Bluetooth. Yep, there’s one house, you know, every couple of feet. And all of those Ring doorbells can communicate directly with each other. Which is essentially the same as, say, Bitchat, right?

Polycarp Nakamoto: That’s right, exactly.

Timothy Allen: Okay, same theory. So Bitchat is the open-source version.

Polycarp Nakamoto: Amazon Sidewalk is the proprietary version in one you have the freedom to go anywhere and communicate with anyone and the other you can only do what Amazon will let you do.

Timothy Allen: I better mention what Bitchat is because I think it’s awesome Bitchat is essentially a peer-to-peer messaging service which uses whatever route it can. So if I want to send you a message instead of beaming up onto the Internet and then coming back down to you.

Polycarp Nakamoto: We are directly connected through Wi-Fi, through Bluetooth, through whatever. And I can speak to someone in Australia, essentially, by hopping between people. It may take a trip up to a satellite at some point, but it tries not to.

Timothy Allen: Is that roughly speaking what it is?

Polycarp Nakamoto: Yeah, exactly. It’s peer-to-peer communication without a third-party involved.

Timothy Allen: So they can’t see your messages. They can’t censor you. It’s the ultimate free speech tool. And it’s really only just started. And I’ve tried it. I’ve never actually managed to find anyone who I could speak to, even at some conferences I’ve been to. I switch the app on and there’s just no one using it. So it’s obviously a struggle to get that kind of stuff going.

Polycarp Nakamoto: Yeah. Decentralization is hard in every way, whether it’s governance, whether it’s technology, whether it’s building a mesh network. In order to make something like a mesh network work, you ultimately have to have collaboration, communication, and coordination with the people that are your neighbors. It increases the fabric of society, whereas if you have a company that provides you the service, then you don’t need to interact with your neighbors. You’ve got this contract with the company. The systems replace relationships. so okay just to reaffirm mesh networks are essentially peer-to-peer networks is a loose term for any peer-to-peer network is that right it the main function is that you have connectivity wherever you are because there’s always a node to connect to ah so it could be it could still use the internet rails yes yeah but would it would it be safe to say that it.

Timothy Allen: Would prefer to use decentralized routes that’s that’s the only way that we’re going to have the internet in the future because of AI quantum and the way things are changing everything has to go open-source peer-to-peer and decentralized we’ll have to come back to AI and quantum because that’s a massive topic but I want to I want to go back to Web 4 Web5 yeah you were on Web 4 which is.

Polycarp Nakamoto: Internet of things mesh networks and the proprietary version Amazon Sidewalk. Yeah. What’s Web5? Web5 is when you are running a Bitcoin node server in your house and that not mining It actually keeping a record of all of the transactions of Bitcoin And Bitcoin itself is a mesh network on the internet of today And what it needs is the ability to connect node-to-node, peer-to-peer, with no third parties involved. Right. Now, so I have a Bitcoin node. I’ve been running a node. I built it myself many, many years ago.

Timothy Allen: I’ve been running it at home and I understand that side of it, that it’s a network. The Bitcoin network is a separate network to your internet rails. What I don’t understand is how that becomes the internet. Does it, I mean, is there software already written that makes it possible to use the Bitcoin network as an internet, say?

Polycarp Nakamoto: Yes, it’s not complete. It’s about 80% complete. Bitcoin already gives us the routing and the identity of the node so that the nodes can connect to each other and communicate. And ultimately what we need is the ability to host websites on your Bitcoin node and have a replacement for the domain name service, the domain name system, the DNS. And so if we replace the DNS, which is the great bottleneck of the internet, then you have sovereign websites hosted on Bitcoin nodes that can never be turned off, never be censored, and always be available.

Timothy Allen: Wait a minute, I’ve just had a thought. My node at home uses the internet to connect to other nodes, though. Yeah. So what happens if, what does that use? Amazon AWS or something? I’ve never really thought about it before.

Polycarp Nakamoto: Yeah, yeah. So let’s explore that because this is a really interesting thing. When I understood what a Bitcoin node was, not just what it is, but what it could be, that’s what opened my mind up to how we could fix the internet. and bitcoin gives us the solution the bitcoin protocol gives us everything that we need to be.

Timothy Allen: Able to secure internet networks and it’s just untapped underutilized but how does it work in in the sense that it’s it’s not using the same rails as the internet like people often say.

Polycarp Nakamoto: Amazon, most stuff happens on Amazon, Amazon Web Services. And if they go down, you can’t do much. We lose everything. Right. So how do you, are you talking about having Bitcoin nodes joined together in a mesh network? That’s right. Right. Okay.

Timothy Allen: I see what you mean. peer-to-peer, just like Bitcoin.

Polycarp Nakamoto: Bitcoin itself gives us the formula or the foundation to build upon. It’s open-source. It’s fully decentralized. and the greatest threat to Bitcoin is the internet. If the internet goes down, your node won’t sink. You can’t spend your Bitcoin. It basically is relying on this broken internet that we currently have. But if all of the nodes could communicate to each other and route traffic peer-to-peer without using the DNS, without using the ISP internet service providers, then we have a sovereign money and a sovereign internet wow that’s a very big idea when I think about it and trying to implement that seems like an absolutely herculean task not not sorry but not least because everyone needs to do it so so you’re talking about you need bitcoin nodes on on all phones and things like that really but what’s the incentive for phone companies to do that though that’s the thing well that’s the thing there is no incentive to give us more sovereignty from those companies right though those companies do not have a reason to create a decentralized internet because everyone is happily paying 75 a month for internet access right they’re not laying any new cables they’re just charging people for access and what we what we want is an internet for the people by the people what if the internet wasn’t owned by anybody but it worked for everybody would you be happy.

If it was only a small number of people that used that.

Timothy Allen: Would you I mean it strikes me that there’d probably be a two-tier system I think it’s I think it’s a great a great something to aim for it’s a great it’s a super in that sense but when I think about most people like you say they don’t really care yeah but in a way also the the achilles heel of of that idea is that you need a lot of people involved.

Polycarp Nakamoto: For it to work especially if you want it to be a real mesh network because you need close almost proximity with people and things like that well I would like to challenge that I don’t think we need mass adoption we need more nodes but we don need everybody to run a node ultimately if we look at history some of the biggest changes in our history were caused by a very small group of people agreeing with each other on something The Declaration of Independence only had 55 signatures. They didn’t need to get everybody to sign that document. It just needed to start. And so the Web5 Internet, the Internet built on top of Bitcoin, we already have 25,000 nodes around the world. It is the largest open-source nodal network on the planet. Tor, the onion routing service, that only has 6,000 nodes around the world.

Timothy Allen: So Bitcoin without the Internet is already three times bigger than Tor. when we add internet protocols and connectivity to bitcoin making a Web5 internet the incentives will take care of themselves wow I keep thinking about where I live and how I would even connect I.

Polycarp Nakamoto: Live on a very remote farm it’d be difficult for me to create a mesh network there it would definitely involve the internet from my where’s your nearest neighbor quite a long way away it’s how many miles oh not that not miles probably a quarter of a two half a mile if you have a mesh network internet antenna that is on the side of your house you can get one gigabyte speeds for five miles what did you call that a mesh network antenna that’s right what what are.

Timothy Allen: They can you buy those just on amazon you can yeah what are they called so the popular brand is Ubiquiti and you can just buy those from amazon you can go to best buy and get them they’re widely available for large ranches music festivals stuff of that nature and you can have 150 connections per antenna at one gigabyte speeds over five miles so it’s for transmitting not receiving both both yeah wow yeah everything is a lot more at hand than people think so you mentioned Bitchat earlier already the protocols exist for everything we need Nostr exists but it’s all underutilized it’s not coordinated and it doesn’t have a community that’s producing it until now talking to the community how important is the physical side of this you’ve obviously part of your plan here is a network of physical places as well. And what’s the theory behind that? Is that just bringing people together or is that about creating the mesh networks or whatever?

Polycarp Nakamoto: In order for us to fully be sovereign, we need a way to live entirely off of Bitcoin without depending on any third parties. And so while the mesh network requires servers and hardware and software the people that will be using the network require food housing resources that are not digital right and so we need the developers to be able to build the software and they need to be taken care of for them to be able to do a good job what’s your opinion then on things like governance like is there any is it an important part of how this thing works or and also like I I’ve just by sort of meeting you and meeting a few people that are here in this big place we’re here now I call it a compound that’s actually quite a good way to describe it I get the sense that you are what we would call an intentional community in that sense you’re not looking for any kind of independence or anything like that it’s a kind of parallel network of it’s a parallel network basically but it doesn’t seek to to do anything except ignore the other network and just exist if you see what I mean is that right yeah we’re trying to live on a bitcoin standard and most people are living in a fiat standard and when you come into these spaces you can.

Tell there’s something different most people can’t put their finger on it but it’s the bitcoin mindset that makes the difference and the bitcoin communities that are building with the principles that bitcoin gives us they are decentralized they are growing they are moving into places that fiat used to control and the unsustainability of fiat is opening more and more doors for the Bitcoin standard to grow. Can you describe that network? Because from what you know,.

Timothy Allen: Not just your own here, but the whole network, what is, I mean, I have, you know, I’m an old.

Polycarp Nakamoto: Bitcoiner myself. So I know a lot of communities and a lot of people trying this out and various, some more public than others But what your view of the landscape of that kind of self individual living Well just if we look at Bitcoin as a whole Bitcoin is decentralized which means a lot of people that don like each other collaborating cooperating to make something happen. And if you’re using Bitcoin as money, then you’re telling the world that you’re willing to receive money from anybody that respects the Bitcoin protocol,.

Timothy Allen: Right? As long as you’re not attacking the protocol, I’m willing to trade with you. And so that basis, that spirit that’s found in Bitcoin, when you apply that to a community, what you get is a lot of diversity. You get a lot of different cross disciplines and skills. You get a lot of talent.

Polycarp Nakamoto: You get people who have their own reasons for building the product, for building what we’re building. and that’s really what we want because it’s easy to have a centralized form of governance where one guy one team makes all the decisions it’s really hard to have decentralized governance and that was the focus that we had from the beginning I didn’t feel like we could build this mesh network without figuring out governance for ourselves because everything reproduces after its own kind talking that I was just chatting to one of your one of the other ladies here and about decentralized governance and I told her like I’ll tell you now and you’re not going to like this but I’ve I’ve lived in various different scenarios I’m 54 I’ve lived in communes I’ve lived in single houses I’ve traveled extensively and lived I’ve lived in all lots of different scenarios and The sad thing is, is what I realized, the one that really works is when someone owns, someone at the top owns the physical place and has the vision and creates a set of rules and everyone else follows them. That’s right. Yeah, but that’s not decentralized, right? No, it’s not.

Timothy Allen: Right. But that’s the one that I’ve had the most luck with, the most life, the most opportunities. So what do you think about that? Well, let’s look at Bitcoin as a community, right? Because that would be the most successful decentralized community in the world. And it’s democracy without a leader.

Polycarp Nakamoto: And so when we set out to build the Mesh Network, the first thing that we did was get together all of the people who held the mission in their heart. And they were willing to do whatever it took to make this reality happen because the alternative is a central bank digital currency dystopia that nobody wants to live in right and so if there’s not an option available at that time when the CBDC gets here then everyone is forced into the fiat standard and so the people who are in the governance position on top of all of this that’s a group of about 40 people and so we are decentralized from the very top. So whatever centralized entity exists within our ecosystem, an LLC, a C-Corp, those entities themselves are centralized. There’s one person’s name on the LLC, on the C-Corp, but the governance from the top is decentralized by 40 different people.

Timothy Allen: But what kind of decisions need to be made under that model, for example? What would be a day-to-day decision? Yeah, so the sovereignty and autonomy of the startup is very much protected. But if there’s something that the startup itself can’t solve within itself, then that issue is moved further up into the governance board. And what about the physical nodes and things like that? How are they? How do you decide what goes on here or what, etc? That would be each individual organization making their own decisions on that. But what about, do they have their own space? Is that how it works? Yeah. So the laboratory is where these startups are incubating. And then once they get mature and they have a team, they have an investor, they have everything they need to move forward, then they start looking for their own space. And what are they? What are some of the startups? Give me some examples of what they’re producing? So ultimately all of the startups are building different aspects of the decentralized internet that we’ve been talking about. Like I said you can’t just fix the internet with an app.

Polycarp Nakamoto: Or a website and so there are startups working on servers and bitcoin nodes for food trucks and… A what? Bitcoin node for food? That’s right. Because they move around? Well not only that but you need to be able to do off-grid Bitcoin payment processing, you need to be able to do invoicing and all of the things that BTCPay Server gives you. And so we’ve created a node that has internet connectivity all the time. You’re able to order food off of the Bitcoin node website that’s hosted on the Bitcoin node. And you’re able to manage all of the operations of your food truck, ordering food, budgeting, forecasting how much food is going to be needed. And all of it is done in a sovereign way on your Bitcoin node. And that’s a bit of hardware and software as well. And also a food truck with labor.

Timothy Allen: Oh, really? Yeah. Oh, you create a food truck as well? Yeah. Blimey. That seems like a very specific application. It is. Why don’t you just produce the node and then let food trucks have it? Wouldn’t that be a better idea?

Polycarp Nakamoto: The problem is that this is a hard thing to figure out. And we have to actually perfect it before we sell it to other people. And we don’t want to have people adopt the technology and then have it be too difficult for them to use or not be able to use it the way they thought it would be used. So we’re figuring out what’s missing, what we have, what we yet need to build to make this a reality for that startup. Another startup is building tiny homes out of shipping containers that is using our Archipelago Bitcoin node server for home automation, home security, hosting of data on a private cloud. It has a private ChatGPT and a private Alexa all in one, and it’s built into the home. And so you get all the benefits of a smart home, but it’s actually a dumb home. It’s well, it’s, yeah, it’s behind.

Timothy Allen: Wow. That, that sounds like one of the big things that that’s what, one of the things I grapple with at the moment, especially because I use AI a lot, a lot now is, is not telling. Like I used to be very careful about what I told Google and all of a sudden I’ve opened my life up to to Claude and ChatGPT in quite an incredible way it’s it’s I I must admit there I it’s just my business life and in in a sense I don’t really care I it’s helping me run my business but it I never I never talked about it I never I never let it dive into my sort of like private life although it probably is just by dealing with me however I do that is something that is high on my list is getting a a sandboxed AI what I’ve realized so far is I tried maple you know maple there’s a kind of sandboxed one you know it’s kind of like using someone else’s sandbox right and I just found it wasn’t it wasn’t giving me the results that maple that Claude could for example so but I’ve I I’ve I get tell me if this is right I get the feeling that pure sovereign ais aren’t quite as good yet as GPT 5.

Whatever it is and is that right I would say it’s it’s correct looking at it from a hundred foot view but ultimately I have an analogy that will kind of describe the state of AI right now. Some people, they like to cook and they make all their own food and they know what ingredients are going in it. They’re making the right portions. There’s a lot of reasons you would want to cook for yourself. Some people are not good at cooking and they get fast food or they order from a restaurant. When you’re using ChatGPT or something of that nature, it’s like fast food. It’s convenient. You don’t have to do any cooking. It just works. Maybe it’s not that good for you, but you get by. Self-hosted AI, open-source AI is actually something that requires you to cook a little bit. And some people are really turned off by that. And it’s not worth the effort to have better ingredients, healthier food, or correct portions. And so while I might say that using AI that is centralized is typically better than self-hosted AI, you can make it better, but you have to actually do the work. You have to research the models, program the parameters, understand what your computer is doing. You have to do it yourself. Tell me a good setup then.

I want to commit it to memory myself because I think I remember when I first started building my node years ago, I had a sit down with a friend of mine who’d done it. And I said, look, tell me about this because it’s very easy to want to do these things. But the actual nuts and bolts of it are what often stands between me and having a more self-sovereign life. For example, I have, you know, I’ve got a GrapheneOS phone. So have my kids. you know like I that thing though that’s becoming much easier used to be quite difficult now it’s really easy to to put GrapheneOS on a on a google phone but the new one for me is the self sandboxed AI that allows you to basically interact with an AI in an unfettered way without someone else knowing what you doing basically that’s the only AI that I will use I won’t use ChatGPT Claude any of those I have a server that has an AI Max chip from AMD sorry you better say what all these things yeah sure.

Polycarp Nakamoto: Sure so it’s an AMD chip AI Max chip and then it has 132 gigabytes of ram the machine costs about 3,500 and it’s the top third AI machine on the market. So it’s in the top three and it is a fantastic machine. I can load any AI that I want on it. There’s over 950 models available and you can have full control over the input, the output, the settings. My AI, my ChatGPT will literally show me what it’s thinking before it gives me the answer so if if it’s already thinking in the wrong way I can just stop the prompt and redo my prompt I didn’t realize there were 950 models I thought there were kind of six or so main ones is that not true yeah not true so what does that mean does that mean somebody like I I don’t really understand what an AI model is it’s just a massive bit of software right so presumably some people have open-source to AI models and now people are just tweaking them themselves and you end up with 950 models is that right essentially it’s like cryptocurrencies right okay so there’s a there’s a base layer there’s the original bitcoin protocol which is how ais do their thing prediction model their prediction models or whatever I don’t know and everyone else is tweaking the edges of them basically exactly based on their community.

Timothy Allen: Needs or what they want the model to do or the data set there’s so many variables which is why it’s really important to test out all of the different open-source models right so going back to what you your setup how do I how do I do this so you that 3500 is that the machine with the chip on it and everything yep and what is it is it a like a stack like a computer stack you know.

Polycarp Nakamoto: Yeah, it’s a small box the size of like two ramen cups. It’s very tiny, but it packs a lot of power. The company that makes it is Framework Computers, and it’s the desktop version. And that’s the hardware.

Timothy Allen: And then where do you find a raw AI model?

Polycarp Nakamoto: Yeah, so it’s actually on your Bitcoin node. If you have an Umbrel or a Start9 Bitcoin node, there is an application there that allows you to download the front end and the back end for your AI. Your listeners might not know what that means, but it’s fine. We’re going to get technical. We’ll move past it. And then you can choose between the 950 AIs and a couple of different back end protocols. and then you can create agents. I mean, everything now can be done on a Bitcoin node. That’s really the main innovation of the last couple years. Umbrel started in, I think, like 2016, 2017. Correct me if I’m wrong, but they started first and then Start9 came out. And those two Bitcoin node companies have really added a ton of features that makes running a Bitcoin node more compelling. It’s no longer just about having more privacy with your Bitcoin transactions. There’s now services and features with Nostr that really make the Bitcoin node worth it.

Timothy Allen: I don’t understand what you mean by, like my node is an old RaspiBlitz.

Polycarp Nakamoto: Yeah, it’s a raspy pie with, and I have to flash the card every few months.

Timothy Allen: And it’s a pain in the ass, but I built it myself out of pieces. You’re talking about nodes now which come fully packaged with, but what’s the AI bit? I didn’t understand that. What’s the connection with AI?

Polycarp Nakamoto: It’s just an application that lives on your Bitcoin node, and that application allows you to run a personal AI as long as the hardware is up to date. I wouldn’t try running an AI on your Raspberry Pi. But your $3,500 thing,.

Timothy Allen: Is that like a Start9 as well? Have you got your Bitcoin node on that as well? Is that what you mean?

Polycarp Nakamoto: Yeah, so we’re using that machine to test out the Archipelago software, the operating system.

Timothy Allen: Which is one you’ve invented yourself?

Polycarp Nakamoto: Yeah, that’s one that we’re building. It specifically allows you to have mesh network capability on your Bitcoin node as well as having a private ChatGPT a private cloud and a private Alexa And it a one-button push It already configured ready to go We wanted to make it as easy as possible for people. I was going to say, that sounds like a joy. That’s like your self-sovereign.

Timothy Allen: Life, right? That’s right. Yeah, but that’s a real good hole in the market. I don’t know whether there any products exist already but that would be something I would buy right which is the one size fits all thing it’s something that everyone will have to buy if they want to access the.

Polycarp Nakamoto: Internet because the internet that we have today is not safe it was not built for 2026 the internet was built for the 90s right and so there needs to be an update the internet has no backup if we lose the internet there’s not a another way to communicate most people find their jobs on the internet most people eat off the internet with Uber Eats most people get their prescriptions and pay all of their bills on the internet if we lose the internet then we lose the fabric that’s.

Timothy Allen: Holding society together in many cases so how does it work then if you say you’re using a mesh.

Polycarp Nakamoto: Network off from your bitcoin well I wouldn’t call it your bitcoin node I’ll call it this yeah your bitcoin node well it is your but it also is a lot of other things as well right yeah but the backbone is the bitcoin node okay right so you’re using what when when you.

Timothy Allen: Say you want to interact with Uber how does that work it still jumps onto the the internet and connects to Uber.com yeah so in if you have a house the house has many doors to the outside.

Polycarp Nakamoto: You can come in through any of those doors right that’s kind of the way that Archipelago works the server, you have the regular internet, you have Web5, you have satellite, you have fiber, all of those different inputs are ways to access the internet. But as you said earlier, if Amazon goes down, you might still have internet access, but those websites are unavailable. The DNS can break and you can’t go anywhere. And since you’re not hosting those websites locally in your home, you have no way to access that information.

Timothy Allen: If Google goes down, you lose all of your Google services, right? And so it’s very convenient right now. And we’ve never seen an outage that was global, except for CrowdStrike and a couple of other things the last few years. but if there was a global outage something like what happened in iran when they turned the internet off you would you would not have society as we know it so use that as an example iran turning.

Polycarp Nakamoto: The internet off if a mesh network existed there what rails would it be using if the internet was turned off what would it be forced to use it would be using radio to communicate and you can get 30 megabits a second using radio signals peer-to-peer from one server to the other without a Wi-Fi antenna. If you add an open-source Wi-Fi router and the antenna, now you have connectivity for five miles as we spoke about earlier. But there are so many different ways to communicate. We talked about Bitchat, there’s Meshtastic, there’s all kinds of technologies that have come about recently that give us the ability to have a fully decentralized internet when the internet started they had to take all of the switchboard operators you know used to call on hello operator they plug it in manually yeah yeah they took all of that away and they put data center servers there and the servers connect AT&T to Verizon to Google Fiber and that’s how the internet works currently with just a few disruptions in those internet hubs you could cause a blackout that would be across the country because the internet was built on centralized third-party rails it’s not sovereign rails right it’s not so there’s a third-party counterparty risk for every step of the internet.

Timothy Allen: So would radio be one of the prime prime ways of communicating if the internet as we know it goes down I’ve never thought I didn’t even realize you could transmit stuff like data of course you can I mean that’s what radio is right right if it’s good enough to play music in your car it’s good enough to send data miles away so that is that’s incredible and how does how does it work like In that example let use the kind of worst case scenario right The internet goes down Can you go abroad still Like what would happen when you reach the edge of America or the edge of the UK? How does it jump the sea if it’s more than five miles or whatever? So there are many, many different ways to make that happen. Satellites are obviously a great way to send data to the other side of the world. And even if we’re not utilizing the internet service providers, there’s still dark fiber that’s under the oceans. It’s fiber that’s not being used by anybody.

Polycarp Nakamoto: And you could put Bitcoin nodes on both sides. And now that fiber connection is able to transmit data from one content to the other.

Timothy Allen: But how do you do that? Is that something you have to do subversively? Oh, we would have to purchase some dark fiber, but there’s a lot of it for sale. Is that right? That’s right. Is that like a section of the big cable that runs under the Atlantic, for example? Yeah. You just lease it or something? There’s satellites that are for sale. You can buy satellites that already exist. I did it. Funnily enough, I did an episode a couple of years ago with a space lawyer guy. And he told me, you can stick a satellite into the sky for $1,000 now if you really want to. Yeah. I mean, it’s insane that that notion that I think I always thought that in the future, personal satellites would be a massive deal. And I think he said the same thing. And he’s he’s he’s literally teaches this stuff to students, you know.

Polycarp Nakamoto: Yeah. And something that’s surprising is Nostr is actually giving us the ability to build these mesh networks and still use some of the old architecture. with Nostr for the listeners that aren’t familiar the real magic behind Nostr is that it takes an intelligent server that is 10 times more powerful than your computer which is how it is now right now you you connect to the internet you go visit a website you have a small little computer and there’s a big massive computer that’s thinking way faster than your computer can think.

Timothy Allen: So you are already at a deficit right just logging on you can’t compute as fast as they as they can and that’s what we live in now smart server dumb computer with Nostr all of the processing happens on your computer and the server now becomes a dumb relay that’s just moving information from one place to the other indiscriminately right that is how you fix the architecture of the internet because if you rent a satellite you’re like oh great I’m sovereign I can get data from one place to the other but who owns that satellite and what control do they have over it with Nostr you can put up a satellite it has a Nostr relay and it’s just relaying data it’s it’s not discriminating. There’s no one with a power button on that. And so it is possible to reuse the old architecture for Web5. What do you think in terms of what’s likely to happen? Do you think Nostr might be the protocol that does that? I mean, I use it. I mean, it’s my network of choice now for social media, but still it’s very clunky still. Oh yeah, it’s hard to use.

Decentralization is hard so what do you think do you think nost has got a good chance for establishing itself I I think it’s too soon to tell with any of these technologies innovation is happening so fast it’s almost impossible to predict what’s going to happen next it’s almost impossible to make a business plan longer than a few years because ChatGPT just came out a few years ago and it already feels old right I mean it does yeah it’s it’s happening too fast it is I’m I’m I’m how do I describe it I mean it’s like a fatigue I’ve got yeah of from things moving too fast I I don’t want them to move too fast I get it it’s a good thing it makes people more competitive it makes people more productive it makes people more have to fine-tune what they do but I’m I’m kind of ready to do things at a nice slow pace I’ll be perfectly honest I think in a way I I mean if I look at say take this podcast it’s a business right if I look at how AI has started operating within this business it it’s probably 60 AI now right but that doesn’t mean but I I do realize there’s probably a limit to how much AI will basically run this business really you know there’s no need to keep innovating.

I think there’s a kind of, there’s a 0 to 90%, you know, bit. The last 10%, I don’t think it really matters a huge amount. And I really feel like I want to get to that. point because every time I think of a way that AI might be able to streamline what I’m doing I just get oh god I’ve got to do all that again I’ve got to tell it I’ve got to try and design you know I want I want a bit like your self-sovereign home tiny home yeah I want that for podcasts for example this bit of a podcast will always exist I hope you know two people sitting opposite in a table but what I want is to take that camera that camera these sound give it to the AI walk away come back tomorrow and it’s produced a show show notes shorts for the internet and it’s doing all that that bit that would be my dream but that seems incredibly complicated because I’ve tried disparate ways of doing that sure and there’s a few things like the editing’s getting better but really I need an AI to take control in a sovereign way like I have a box with my AI on it and you know even would be great if it watched me for a couple of weeks running the show and then started doing it itself I imagine.

That will happen in the future yeah I mean but that’s actually where it’s going right many business owners that I know they’re aware that if they’re not using AI in their business, then they’re not going to have a business. But they are very weary of feeding all of their business to some third-party AI who could very easily turn around and share it with a competitor. Or in the case of DoorDash, they could take all of your customers. If I’m a restaurant, a mom-and-pop shop, and I’m using DoorDash, I might get more sales for the first couple weeks but if DoorDash decides to market another restaurant to all of my customers and give them a discount for going there then I’m going to have a week where almost nobody shows up it’s interesting yeah right I funnily enough I’ve come across a version of that already in the in the governance space which is that I’ve realized now I’ve stopped using google and I’ve started using AI for for my knowledge and searches and stuff and what you discover is when you ask an AI something it it’s pretty good at working out the answer if you ask it a very specific question like if I said give me show me the landscape of the alternative governance scene right but it has these glaring holes in in its kind of methodology I mean it misses some.

Major things and when you say to it right show me your thought process here you realize the problems which you can actually back engineer I’ve tried this I’ve noticed that it there’s a lot about alternative governance that it missed so I I asked it to show me why it was coming to this conclusion then I went out into the real world and I re-engineered some websites, let it sort of percolate for a few weeks, then came back raw with a brand new chat on a brand new system. And then it starts noticing those things. So you can re-engineer it like that. But what I find a bit unsettling is when you ask at what’s a good pizza place it gives you three examples of real life businesses now how is it working that out and who’s telling it that this is a good business when you look into it often it just says well it says it’s the best on the website it says it’s the best pizza place in downtown Austin it’s like yeah but that’s their their website you know what I mean I think at least with a kind of a lot of google there was sort of rating involved and there doesn’t seem to be any of that with AI at the moment and it seems to be getting quite a lot of stuff wrong but more and more because I.

Noticed myself I’m using it to tell me stuff about the real world and it’s actually it’s gatekeeping that that information for me you know yeah and that’s why having a model that’s based on good data is so important what’s good data what is good data.

Polycarp Nakamoto: Well, you know, you gave an example, like find a good pizza place.

Timothy Allen: How does the AI determine that? The truth is, is we’re not able to look at the AI and figure out how it got that answer. It’s just synthesizing data in a black box. But I mean, in the case of the one I gave you, I said to it, right, you need to show me your methodology here. And it did. And it did. And it showed that it basically put a lot of weight on peer-reviewed things. So, for example, when it talked about alternative governments, it never would fall on places like this, even though this is a version of it. Because it’s too crazy, it’s too out there. You know it would see what very common institutions are saying and use that as a starting point And then so and but it starts so it starting off on a foundation of a very limited amount of info and it doesn look back in hindsight it just moves on from that point that’s what I’ve noticed well also what if the owner of the pizza place is you know brothers with someone that works at OpenAI sure yeah right how do you know the AI is telling you the truth when you ask it to show you how it got to that answer.

Polycarp Nakamoto: Well, you would hope it would be checking like reviews on, on, on DoorDash or something, but it doesn’t appear. It often, and also I know it, it always Claude, especially Claude references and internet from a little while ago. It takes a while for it to, and when you ask it,.

Timothy Allen: When are you going to get an updated version of this? It’s looking at an old webpage and it keeps saying no it says this I’m like dude I’m looking at the real one now so you’re being gatekept here.

Polycarp Nakamoto: Exactly yeah it’s really hard to trust an AI because they can change it you might be using Claude for six years and all of a sudden they change it and it doesn’t remember any of the data you trained it on it doesn’t remember who you are or any of the things it used to know when when they moved from ChatGPT-3 to ChatGPT-4 people were online and saying like they killed my friend.

Timothy Allen: It’s I the other the other thing that I I’ve noticed because I built some I built some web applications recently with Claude and I saw something on Nostr this morning actually I’m sitting in the taxi on the way here someone had designed a whole project over six months using Claude and it worked it did what it was supposed to and he gave it to a real developer real life developer to sort of take a look and he said it was the most it was the most ridiculous form of coding you would ever do you can’t change one thing without breaking the whole thing and I found the same thing when even designing a website it could solve individual problems but I it didn’t do it in an inefficient way it needed me and I have very limited abilities it needed me to say well is that a good idea why are we complicating that you know and I obviously that’s going to get better you would imagine that’s going to get better but at the moment yeah big problem it could also get worse because once you have AI generated code and there’s something wrong how is the developer going to fix it they’re going to go back to AI and try to regenerate the fix which it just keeps getting sloppier and sloppier and that’s where a lot of the big tech companies are.

At right now they’ve been using AI their developers are using AI and things are getting worse and worse and breaking more and more look at Copilot right I what why what about Copilot oh just Microsoft I I think the majority of their code base right now is being written by Copilot. And that’s why every couple days you see these news articles like, you know, thousands of laptops bricked by new update. Really? Yeah. I didn’t know that. Yeah. Wow. So how do you code then personally? I have a self-hosted AI that I’ve been working with and training and it helps me out. and instead of it making everything, I just ask it about specific functions. But I’m actually the one who’s working, right? I don’t want to outsource my brain to the AI because you don’t really get it back once you start doing that. It used to be that doctors would search with their eyes for what was going on, and now they just ask ChatGPT, one second, bro. They type in the parameters and then they give you the results. And so as we’re relying on AI more and more, we’re thinking less and less. I actually have limited my AI use to really specific use cases. I don’t want it to run my day. I’m not looking for an agent to answer my text messages.

There’s a lot of ideas out there that one person can run an entire business using a whole bunch of AI agents. And I think that the AI can help us make things more efficient, but it can’t do what we do.

Polycarp Nakamoto: We are the most advanced technological computers in the world. We have wetware instead of hardware. One cubic inch of our brain has more processing power than any computer in the world. Hmm. So, I mean, my opinion on that would be, sure, but in the end, I mean, even if it’s a thousand years in the future you have to expect that synth synthetic tech you know tech that technology actually does outperform us right am I wrong there I think it has limitations just like we have limitations.

Timothy Allen: What would they be for example then so AI has figured out how to program light particles with data so that it can send data into interstellar places at the speed of light. Obviously, we’re reaching a point where anything that we want to know can be known. But as we learn more and more, we realize how much we don’t know. And I don’t think we’re ever going to get to the point where we don’t have any more questions. I think they’re just going to get bigger and bigger. And eventually, the limitations of AI will reveal themselves because AI can only make decisions based on data and we don’t have all the.

Polycarp Nakamoto: Data we haven’t been collecting verifiable data for thousands of years right not yeah go yeah so the AI might be able to synthesize data but because it doesn’t have the whole picture it has these limitations I can have it write me a poem faster than I can write a poem but ultimately it’s not going to figure out the secrets of the universe I think that’s something that only we have the capacity to do I could be wrong well no I mean I mean I’ve had a couple of AI discussions on this pod one of them in particular which went very very deep and I think my conclusion was that the limitation of AI is the spiritual experience like that we have and if you If you think about the future, what makes humans unique, it might be the spiritual experience.

Timothy Allen: And in fact, you know, often people say, well, what jobs are going to exist in the future? Because AI is going to outcompete everything. But then you start thinking, well, people might start putting, especially if we end up in a place of abundance, people might start placing more emphasis on the spiritual experience. because if if abundance exists and we’re not striving for things in the same sense that we are now I mean let’s face it most people are are striving for a certain amount of monetary monetary power and if that was to disappear slowly which theoretically it would because robots will build robots and they’ll get cheaper and cheaper that everything will trend to the marginal cost of zero possibly in many cases what are you left with as a human and what you are possibly left with is the spiritual journey and AI will not be able to it will be able to mimic it but it won’t be able to tread on new frontiers there presumably I mean that’s purely yeah like based I mean that’s based on the fact sorry that the face who knows AI might have a spiritual element to it I don’t really know I don’t really know how that worked. Yeah, I mean, does God want to talk to AI? That’s really the question, right? I see AI as being something that humanity has created.

It’s a form of creation. It has limitations. And part of the AI psychosis that I think everyone is experiencing is we just assume the AI is right. People are not questioning what they get from the AI. it’s almost like in some ways we’ve made our own golden calf which is AI and we’re all worshiping this false god that knows all sees all and can tell us whatever we want but the reality is it’s more like a dog that can talk even in the future I I can’t predict the future but right now I agree with you there because it says some really ridiculous things with complete authority oh yeah and doesn’t mind and never says sorry when it’s wrong either it’s just it just says something different oh you’re correct it really does it never says anything unauthoritatively either.

Polycarp Nakamoto: If you ask it a question to you it’ll never say do you know what I’m not 100 sure but my hedge.

Timothy Allen: Would be this it just tells you that thing but once you get used to that it gets a it gets a lot easier to deal with in my experience but I would say theoretically because it could have access to the hive mind of humanity it would be better at making decisions on on the on the running of society on the run you know I think I mean I I don’t really know the problem is is it’s not accountable right what do you mean so if if the AI makes a mistake and ruins somebody’s life, sends someone to jail who’s innocent because they matched the facial recognition, there’s no accountability there. You can’t reason with it. It doesn have the ability to feel remorse or compassion It not able to take in all of the data I mean many times I looked at data and came to a conclusion that I was very sure and confident about The AI does the exact same thing It doesn’t have the full story and neither do we. Humans have our own limitations. We can only see things that are so big. We can only see things that are so small.

We can only see into the future so far and into the past we really have no idea what’s outside of those limitations I agree with you there which is why possibly the spiritual realm might be the new frontier for the human experience because the day-to-day stuff the things we pride ourselves on I’m a plumber I’m a I’m a you know like I’m a podcaster I’m a whatever they will quite easily become out competed by humanoid technology the spiritual experience though I don’t know what do you think about the future of the human experience when you when you track it into the future what’s going to for example in your case what’s going to keep you ticking what’s going to get you up in the morning. Ultimately, when I look at the future, I see either the greatest dystopia we’ve ever seen, or the greatest solarpunk future that we could imagine. And they’re probably going to exist at the exact same time. Just like right now, there’s places with very little freedom, and places with a ton of freedom. And so I think the technology that we adopt now is going to set the future of humanity.

Either everyone has an identity that they own fully, and they control that identity, and they’re able to build reputation in a sovereign way where they’re not being tracked, but they’re actually taking their data and putting it into different buckets, if you will. This is my work identity. This is my job number two. This is my home life. This is my children’s life and when I take them to, you know, soccer events and stuff like that, like we need different.

Polycarp Nakamoto: Buckets for our identity. And if we have that, if we own our digital footprint, then we have the basis for security, privacy, freedom of speech, self-expression. If we don’t have that, if we have an identity that’s owned by a government or a bank and they’re tracking us and attributing things to us and using analytics to determine our future then we basically lose all sovereignty at any time any moment people’s free wills could be violated by autonomous decisions made by a central authority that limits your ability to freely express yourself. I would say my prediction would be that both will exist. So how would you personally, taking that as a proviso that that’s probably the likely outcome is both systems exist alongside each other. How would you navigate the physical world when one side of it is completely gatekept by algorithms for example you want to get the train somewhere you want to drive your car somewhere you want to walk somewhere possibly as well but the computer says no in the real world you’ve eaten.

Timothy Allen: Too much meat this month sorry you can’t drive how how do you operate if you’re if you decide to adopt the self-sovereign life how do you operate in that world do you just have to get as far away from it as you can or what no I don’t think that’s the solution I think the solution is you need to have.

Polycarp Nakamoto: A network. There’s power in numbers. And the Bitcoin node network is really an analogy for us. All of us are nodes in the network. And the nodes that we associate and share information and communicate with, that is our strength. And that’s going to be what builds society when the internet goes down. If we have the ability to communicate outside of the internet, then we don’t lose our sovereignty when the thing that everyone’s depending on goes away. And that’s really the key or the focus for me is I want everyone to be able to be in control of their own destiny. And the only way to do that is to give people digital sovereignty. What Bitcoin did for money, Web5 is going to do for the internet.

Timothy Allen: But what about the literal physical world? What about when you walk outside of this compound and there’s cameras on every corner that is monitoring you and you can’t go beyond this little geo-fenched area for some reason? That’s the thing.

Polycarp Nakamoto: Once we’re at that point, it’s too late.

Timothy Allen: You think so?

Polycarp Nakamoto: This has to be something that happens before the CBDC is implemented. Because the only way they’ll control people is if they have full control of your identity and your money and your data. That’s the triple threat. If you own your own identity and you’re in full control over it and you have sovereign money that’s open-source and you’re owning and holding all of your own data, it’s like it’s like property in America they’re very big on owning property because it’s the basis of a free society digital real estate is property and either you own it or someone else does and they’re either using that against you or you’re using it to direct your your path so there is a point of no return according to you though in the in the dystopian digital id that’s that’s it for me the line in the sand is digital id gosh because we’re having that issue in the europe at the moment in the uk digital id keeps popping up and as far as I can tell it will happen and there’s no stopping it I I don’t see a way to stop it my my strategy has become not that it’s a line in the sand for me but that it’s a line to sort of like opt out but it’s a line in the sand to make me go.

Timothy Allen: Right now put plan b into action but really the best plan b I can think of is going somewhere where.

Polycarp Nakamoto: Digital id doesn’t exist but you could predict that it’s all going to exist everywhere that’s the thing it’s going to exist everywhere so what you need is a network of individuals that is willing to trade communicate and work together to provide everything that the digital id is going to provide you but don’t we end up just being a little subculture then of people and then then then like you say in the end we reach that point where the other world is so gate-kipped and so ubiquitous that it becomes impossible to to work to to live within it unless you adopt it and the only option then is to go live out in the woods like a mountain man I think about this all the.

Timothy Allen: Time. What happens when AI consolidates everything and centralizes everything? And I tried to think of a historical precedent where there was that much centralized control in the world. And the only thing that I could draw on was the Tower of Babel from the Bible. Because if you read that story, regardless of what anyone thinks about the Bible. There’s a story where there’s an evil king and he enslaves everybody in the world to build this tower. It’s like the clearest picture of.

Polycarp Nakamoto: Centralization that we have. And apparently, according to the Bible story, this makes God.

Timothy Allen: So angry that God decides to step in with a supernatural miracle. And what God decided to do, according to the story is change all of the languages of the people that were speaking so that people could not understand each other except if they found someone else that spoke the same language then they did and what happened was the moment the language changed and no one could speak to each other the king would tell his guard hey go kill those people and the guard was like what? What do you want me to do? I can’t hear you, right? And it broke the power structure. It broke the centralization. It broke the single individual holding all the power. And now the power was distributed amongst many people. We now have a new Tower of Babel. It’s called the internet. It’s one language of computer code that controls everyone around the world. Doesn’t matter what culture you are, how old you are, how much of a celebrity you are, all of the things that we pride ourselves in don’t matter when you’re a number on a computer. And who owns those computers? It’s just a few people at the top, right?

And so if this plays out the same way that it did, then what we need is to change the language of all of the computer networks so that they can’t talk to each other unless they’re permissioned. I only want to associate with people that share my destiny. And when I meet people that have a shared destiny with me,.

Polycarp Nakamoto: I would like to link our Bitcoin nodes together so we can stay in touch. And we keep out everybody else from our network. Because if they had access to it like they do now, then you could just crawl the internet and get everyone’s data and then use AI to decide the future of humanity But if they can do that if they can crawl the internet and get all of our data and use that against us then their power just like the evil king in the Bible is limited It sounds like a great parable, but I think the part that is unsettling is you said it took a supernatural intervention. You’re talking about humans, though. We’re talking here about humans intervening. And my experience of being a human and being amongst humans is the majority of humans probably wouldn’t intervene. I think we had a great example of that during the pandemic. Most people did the worst things. And it was horrible to watch. It was so disappointing. Maybe something supernatural might step in. I don’t know. Well, I mean, we have Bitcoin.

Is that supernatural I it can’t be recreated true the unique conditions in which bitcoin was created there there can never be another bitcoin because if you tried to launch another version of bitcoin the miners would just eat your chain and so there’s there’s no way to do that a second time for me it does feel miraculous when I understood bitcoin for the first time in 2016 I felt like this was the first opportunity I was given to actually make a change in the world because there was no other option. There was no plan B. There was the government. There was the banks. I had to get an ID to get a bank account, to get a job, right? We’re already living in a CBDC world.

Timothy Allen: So the miracles, I believe, are actually the only way that we’re going to get through. just like you mentioned a little bit earlier that the spiritual realm is really going to be the new frontier once AI gets you know fully integrated well it is potentially the place that technology.

Polycarp Nakamoto: Well who knows actually who knows whether technology can can manipulate the spiritual realm I’m not even sure I know what it is to be perfectly honest I do know that I do believe certainly a number of things about Bitcoin, which are probably in alignment with you, in the sense that the Bitcoin protocol offers you a, and this is the wrong word, a kind of ideology to align yourself with, which gives good characteristics to a human. And that’s why the only way to build a worldwide mesh network with no single point of failure is to build it on the backbone of Bitcoin. Because where Bitcoin is going, that’s where this mesh network is going. I would agree with that. Like I say, the bit,.

Timothy Allen: The Achilles heel is the human condition. Who wants that? And if you look at the liberty movement in the world, it’s a very small percentage of people, really. But that’s all it takes. You know, Christ only had 12 people and changed the course of history. So it doesn’t take a lot. Big things have small beginnings. do I agree with that or not give me another example a real world example of some massive change well King Leonidas in the 300 but give me something that I that isn’t come from a very old book.

Polycarp Nakamoto: Anyone could I don’t know whether it really happened Lab 484 in Austin Texas right go on but.

Timothy Allen: How much of an effect is it having so far though well we’re still early you reckon well I think that goes without saying but all right you’re we’re early okay and I agree when I when when I.

Polycarp Nakamoto: Hear what you’re saying I love all these ideas the problem is I see CBDC’s rising much faster and in a much more impressive way than I see for example you’re the first I mean no I’ve talked about mesh networks with people before but it’s it’s it’s at the fringe it’s at the is at the edges and I definitely class you as being at the edge along with most people who are who I associate with this kind of world I don’t see it filtering I don’t see it as a large movement maybe you do maybe I mean I know the U.S. government just announced in congress two or three days ago that they are running a bitcoin node and they’re experimenting with the bitcoin protocol to secure computer networks.

Timothy Allen: Is that right? I would say this is now mainstream, but people just don’t know about it yet. How do they secure networks? So imagine that you are logging into your email, and when you log into your email, it costs you one satoshi every time you log into your email. You wouldn’t even feel it. it wouldn’t even it wouldn’t affect you at all right now if someone was trying to hack into your email they would need like seventy five thousand dollars in.

Polycarp Nakamoto: Bitcoin to be able to do it and that’s how you can secure networks with the Bitcoin protocol you put a toll for people to pay before the data is sent why hasn someone done that already probably because it would increase the freedom and sovereignty of everyone and prevent.

Timothy Allen: Big tech from being able to crawl the internet no but someone like Jack Dorsey or someone why doesn’t he come up with a with an email package that that requires one sat I cannot wait to meet jack and ask him because he built the Web5 protocols oh so go on go into that what what are the actual Web5 protocols then yeah so what are they called so the first one would be.

Polycarp Nakamoto: Decentralized web nodes and we find that with bitcoin we have that with bitcoin but wait a minute that’s bitcoin now he didn’t he didn’t write bitcoin no no but for Web5 one aspect of that is to have a node to be able to run Web5 and we believe the bitcoin node is the best node to use for that but what was jack what’s Jack Dorsey’s connection with bitcoin nodes well he created the five protocols that make up Web5 and the first one is a decentralized web node and I didn’t know that yeah is that well known I didn’t realize that probably none of this is well known the whole show has been not well known information but yeah he also made verifiable credentials decentralized identifiers Web5 wallets and browsers and progressive web apps and so those five protocols make up the Web5 stack that we use to rebuild the internet with and it’s all designed to work on bitcoin notes it’s it’s all designed to work on a nodal network okay any nodal jack jack I’m not sure what his thoughts were if it was gambi bitcoin or not the team that he hired was there was debate there over how it would be implemented but to us it was clear. We needed the largest open-source nodal network to rebuild the internet on and Bitcoin is.

Timothy Allen: The largest open-source nodal network on earth. How does Nostr fit into that though? Because Nostr.

Polycarp Nakamoto: Is a nodal network. Nostr runs on Bitcoin nodes. You can get a computer and put Nostr on the.

Timothy Allen: Computer and now it’s a Nostr node. But don’t you want to zap and send payments? So then you’ll end up running Bitcoin software anyway. It’s kind of inseparable. They’re kind of blended together now. So what ties all of this tech together is spending, is value transfer really?

Polycarp Nakamoto: Well also data ownership, actually being able to host your own data and then have verifiable credentials that link back to the Bitcoin blockchain as a third ledger bookkeeping, essentially. So the Bitcoin blockchain, we want to use that as a new DNS. Instead of you paying a company like GoDaddy for a domain name, you’ll simply register your domain name on the Bitcoin blockchain and when you pay the fee it’s the fee for the transaction and one bitcoin transaction can validate 10 000 domain names all at once so it’s like a domain name is the block and then there’s sub domains within that block and that’s how you can have a fully decentralized domain name.

Timothy Allen: System that can’t be censored and can’t ever go down and can you have and can you have repeatable domain names in that sense or is it only a one-off one-off yeah first come first serve what would they look like what would most likely a dot btc so Polycarp Nakamoto dot btc butter coffee with cinnamon before. And it’s amazing. Thank you for that. I’ve, I’ve, I’ve, it’s a whole new, is that good? Yeah. Right. Okay. So we were at, there a load of stuff about Bitcoin that I don know There a lot of stuff about Bitcoin that nobody knows It most likely because we don have Bitcoiners that are really digging deep into the protocol. Bitcoin itself is still very small. We’re not mainstream yet. People might have heard of Bitcoin, but the understanding of Bitcoin is really missing from the public. Tell me something else about Bitcoin that I don’t know then. or I probably don’t know. I know quite a lot about Bitcoin. I’ve been an avid follower for many years.

Polycarp Nakamoto: Many people don’t know that with protocols and implementations like Fedimint, we now have off-grid Bitcoin. Bitcoin that can be spent even with no internet access.

Timothy Allen: Is that the same? I use a Cashu wallet, funnily enough. It’s the same thing. Same thing, yeah. Tell me how this works, because Cashu is amazing. Cashu allows me to spend Bitcoin with you peer-to-peer over Bluetooth with no connection to the Bitcoin network at all. Yeah. How does it work?

Polycarp Nakamoto: In order to mint something like Cashu, you have to have a node. So it all goes back to the Bitcoin node again. And you essentially create a warehouse receipt for Bitcoin. And if people don’t know what a warehouse receipt is, that is a tangible piece of paper that shows how much of the asset you own in the warehouse.

Timothy Allen: Like let’s say it’s gold, right? You would be given a receipt for the gold and that receipt is as good as cash because whoever comes to the warehouse holding that receipt can get the gold. And so you can spend that. I can give it to you. You can give it to someone else in exchange for goods and services. And eventually somebody will bring that warehouse receipt back to the warehouse. What I don’t understand, though, I understand that theory. I don’t understand how you spend bits of it, though. How is that? How is that monitored? How much of it? Like if I it’s like a it’s like an abstract, an abstraction of Bitcoin. So say I took a Bitcoin out and took a receipt for one Bitcoin, but I spend 500,000 sats with you. How does the network know who spent what with who if it’s not connecting to some kind of?

Polycarp Nakamoto: Well, that’s the beauty of it. Your Bitcoin node is holding the Bitcoin and then it mints the Cashu warehouse receipt. And then you get to spend the receipt that’s on your phone with a friend. That friend is now holding that receipt in their wallet on their phone. And then when they go to cash that out, it goes from your node to their wallet.

Timothy Allen: Right. So it’s the single, that node, and this is obviously one of the downsides to it. That node that took the original receipt is a central point of failure or whatever you want to call it. Well, at least you know who you can trust and who you can’t and you know the person, right? So it’s something where if someone is being dishonest, they’re being dishonest with such a small amount of Bitcoin that you don’t really care. And you know who it is that stole your money. In my case, I don’t actually know who it is. I’m using my wallet. One of the wallets I use, it just has, you trust the Mint, let’s say. And the Mint is the people who run the wallet, but I trust them. And I don’t mind trusting them. And also, this now gives us the ability to do things with Bitcoin that we could not do before. So as an example, we are creating, along with some other open-source developers around the world, the ability to send data with a payment of Bitcoin along with the data. And so if I send you an email, it costs me a fraction of a penny in satoshi’s. But when you get the email and you open it, you get the satoshi’s. and e-cash like Cashu or Fedimint that’s what gives us the ability to build that network.

Polycarp Nakamoto: Because everyone will be sending data to each other and as it’s hopping from one bitcoin node to the other it’s dropping little bits of e-cash along the way so by putting up this antenna you actually have the ability to get passive income from your node. Your node is transferring, relaying data down the street, and you’re collecting little fee in e-cash. And then once you cash that out, you get the Bitcoin, or you can just keep it in your e-cash wallet. And as you’re browsing the internet, you’re now sending that off to somebody else.

Timothy Allen: I must admit, back in the day when I first had my node going, I was relaying transactions for about a year and a half. But in the end, it became so difficult on the Lightning Network. Yeah. Rebalancing channels, all that kind of stuff. was horrendous. I just stopped. I just use it to sign my own transactions. And e-cash is so much easier, so much better. And that might be an incentive to get the network up and running as well, because there’s a…

Polycarp Nakamoto: That’s right. If I’m trying to make the most amount of value with my Bitcoin node, I will put my Bitcoin node in a place where there’s not a lot of nodes,.

Timothy Allen: And now my node becomes a heavily used highway. to other nodes it all sounds great but like I say one that I just can’t stop thinking about the fact that probably not many people are going to do this well but think about this imagine if the internet went went down right tomorrow how fast are people going to adopt this tech well they need to know about it first well they’re gonna know about it when there’s bitcoiners walking down the street talking on the phone and everyone else’s phones are dead I suppose but how long is the internet going to go down for plus is the internet going to go down probably probably two weeks to flatten the curve tell me about that what do you mean so in my opinion the internet has to go down sometime in the next five years really yeah why cyber war rogue AI or infrastructure collapse five years sure give or take and it will coincide conveniently with the central bank digital currency. Because when the internet goes down and the masses are screaming for a solution, the solution will be a new internet that’s safe and secure. And all you have to do is scan your face every time you make a post. Because they’re going to have to regulate AI somehow. And with all the deep fakes and all the scams,.

Polycarp Nakamoto: And especially if we have a quantum event, or some super AI that’s able to hack into all kinds of networks, we’re going to hit a breaking limit. The internet is already at a breaking limit. One update from CrowdStrike will just shut down all the airports. One mistake from the DNS and all of Amazon goes down. one mistake with Cloudflare and the majority of websites go down which we’ve had we’ve had that’s actually and we’ve had it for small amounts of time but if this was something that was a threat like cyber war or rogue AI they’re going to have to turn it off for some amount of time and if everyone’s phones are not sovereign not open-source they don’t have the ability to put.

Timothy Allen: Whatever software they want on their devices, then those devices are going to be bricks. Makes me think about the physical node network as in of places. That’s right. Right. And where are you at with things like self-sufficiency and power self-sufficiency and food self-sufficiency, that kind of stuff? Every community has these challenges of how do you feed people? How do you handle disagreements with people how do you make money right it took us a little while to figure out the solutions to.

Polycarp Nakamoto: Some of these issues we haven’t figured everything out we’re not perfect that’s what makes us a laboratory we’re experimenting with different ways to do governance to do voting to to manage society but we have figured out a couple of things and ultimately what it comes down to is with sovereignty comes responsibility. Everyone needs to be responsible for themselves. And those who are producing are given more, and those who are not able to produce are not given more to work with. Getting hungry there. Just a little bit hungry, yep. They’re not feeding you well here. It’s the coffee, really. The cinnamon did the trick. So with that being said, you need to be able to manage your community in a way that gives everyone the ability to achieve their dream as well. And I think that that’s what we really miss when we try to do community or business is there’s one guy that has a dream and everyone is sacrificing their dream for that dream.

Timothy Allen: The salary is a bribe for you to not fulfill your dreams, right? And so we’re either working on our own accord in our sovereign way, or we’re working for somebody. And with the fiat system, it forces more and more people to work for other people. It doesn increase the sovereignty with your money slowly melting away in your hands It actually increases insecurity It increases dependence And I feel like people are more dependent now than ever before Everyone needs energy independence They need food sovereignty, and they need open-source money to be able to create a community or an ecosystem that can withstand the challenges of human drama here’s my here’s my anecdotes anecdotal problem with with some of that I’ve moved my family we’ve moved to a farm.

Polycarp Nakamoto: Recent in the last few years with land and opportunities galore and we have a polytunnel with a bit of some stuff growing in it and we have some animals, but there’s no way we would be able to be self-sufficient because it’s literally more than a full-time job for two adults to do.

Timothy Allen: And this is why you need a community. Correct.

Polycarp Nakamoto: We do. And there is a community. But once again, it’s still my community. It’s a farming community. currently I’m probably the only bitcoiner within a 25 mile radius you know what I mean actually no there is one other one sorry but once again I see a massive uphill struggle there and also I I do think of I I do think of myself as wanting to be self-sovereign and my I have I have the intention to be self-sovereign but the ability to grow your own food takes up so much of your time you can’t do anything else at all even even running a small like a we’ve got a polytunnel the size of this room that’s a full-time job you can’t have a job and grow food in a polytunnel as well you know what I mean by polytunnel no no yeah yeah and that’s that’s where the network.

Timothy Allen: Effects come in so you’re familiar with ebay and paypal sure why did ebay become the king of the auction sites? I don’t know. Branding maybe? I don’t know. One network effect. They had one network effect which made eBay so sticky that no one else ever used any other form of auction site. And that’s PayPal. They had a relationship with PayPal. Right? And so network effects, I believe, are the key to being able to be sovereign and be in community because you don’t have a network without community. You’re just a node. Like you said, you’re the only Bitcoiner out there, right? So you’re the only node out there. There’s no other nodes there yet. So you’re really lacking network effects.

Polycarp Nakamoto: We have a whole bunch of nodes here in Austin, Texas, but not a lot of farmland, but there is a garden out there growing food we’re doing what we can we’re not fully self-sufficient but we have enough independence and sovereignty where we can get by and we’re making the mesh network communications needed for any type of disaster which means people will be trading with us a lot and those network effects the trade the communication the circulation of energy that’s what every community needs yes 100 is it’s a it’s a struggle though I have to.

Timothy Allen: I have to I think when I link my own scenario the big barrier is bitcoin because so many people have wrong opinions and impressions and ideas about it and you say the word bitcoin even in this day and age with with the biggest etf in history and government stacking bitcoin and all this kind of stuff yeah most people still think it’s it’s for buying drugs on the internet and in all honesty that’s true and that’s a feature not a bug right now if you meet if you meet a bitcoiner there’s a high likelihood that you’re going to get along with sure yeah I’ve used that all the time right and so it’s it’s actually a really good filter that’s why I’m sitting here talking to you now because another bitcoiner I know said go and meet this guy at this time on the other side of the world and here I am and so the network effect is affecting right here right now right and if you are able to stack network effects then you become incredibly sticky and very hard to just just you know you you your work your proof of work can’t be undone like the bitcoin blockchain and Bitcoin has seven network effects that’s why no other cryptocurrencies ever again dethrone Bitcoin is the king it has speculators it has the miners it has the node runners it has the app.

Makers I can go on and on and on but all of these network effects keep Bitcoin in the position that in And it will also keep us in the position that we in Because everyone is working on an open-source protocol which rewards you based on the amount of work that you put in. In the game of Monopoly, everyone is playing but only one person is going to win. And in the board game of Bitcoin, everyone who’s contributing gets out exactly what they put in. That’s a real difference in how you build society, how you structure community, how you value people. Do you think it’s important to stay under the radar a bit? And I mean physically here, like how many people know this place exists and who is it? Too many.

But this is something we talk about a fair bit on this podcast when when you’re starting alternative societies let’s say a very good strategy is to just not tell anyone that in fact it’s one of the best strategies but it only it only works in certain scenarios and it and I would call that the intentional community end of the spectrum you know buying some land in the middle of nowhere setting up a community and just living is a great way to live the life you want to live and mainly because just nobody knows what’s going on however when they find out you’re a sitting target sometimes so what what what’s the deal with your network of physical places yeah so when we operate in a location we’re not looking to build a fiat brand we’re not looking to grow and then we need more money and then we grow and then we need more money that that whole methodology is a fiat mindset right the investors are looking for you to raise even more money next time so they give you a lot of money now so it’s guaranteed that you’re going to need 10x you know a year from now instead the bitcoiner mindset is very different right there’s a low time preference we’re not in a rush right we’re following the four-year cycle.

Polycarp Nakamoto: That bitcoin gives us as a monetary policy and that monetary policy is set for 110 years into the future I can actually make decisions for my life based on the monetary policy of bitcoin which never changes. And that type of standard gives me the ability to create things, express myself, and to really live the life I want to live. And I think it can be done anywhere. I don’t think I need to go out into the middle of the woods and do it there. I think it can be done in the middle of the city. It could be done at your house. It could be done in a warehouse. It can be wherever.

Timothy Allen: The people are what about though I agree with the low time preference ideology but how does that fit in with cbds are coming fast right yeah well that’s the thing the best money goes where it’s treated best and there’s a competition between bitcoin and the central bank digital currency and I think I could be wrong but I think AI is going to want the better money over the not so great money and I don’t think that there’s any way to stop the bitcoin standard from becoming the standard but it won’t be the standard if we’re not building the network I have often recently started thinking that maybe because you’ve been thinking about mass adoption for years and AI does present one of the most the best examples of how it could actually occur very very quickly you know in a in I’m undecided what I don’t know what do you do I presume you think that that could be the event I think AI is great but ultimately you you just need to look at the data there are 8 billion people 2.5 billion bank accounts everything that you and I have ever known about the economy is just 25% of the population of the world being represented. The banks don’t have the ability to sign on 5 billion people in a month or in years or in 10 years.

They have to validate everyone’s identity. They have to deal with fraud. They are the centralized third-party with the counterparty risk of having to verify all this and manage everyone’s money. Bitcoin could be adopted overnight by the entire world because there’s, I think last time I checked, like 9 billion phones in existence and like countless laptops and computers All of these devices are gateways to a Swiss bank account that anyone can own And so I think the value of Bitcoin will overshadow all of the economies we ever known quicker because the adoption can happen overnight. Something that’s been floating in the Bitcoin news recently, which everyone seems to be getting, well not everyone, and a lot of people seem to be getting very upset about is this kind of threat of quantum computing. What’s your take on it as a techie person in this space?

Polycarp Nakamoto: I’m a mesh network guy. I’m not a quantum computer guy,.

Timothy Allen: So I really can’t speak too deeply on the subject. I’m mostly just going to parrot what I’ve heard other people say. But that being said, I don’t think quantum is the risk. I’m not afraid of quantum. It’s going to break things,.

Polycarp Nakamoto: But I think AI is going to break things much much faster and the CBDC is the real risk and they may use quantum or AI to justify the need for a CBDC it’s funny I it was a few years ago you know that meme of the yeah the guy’s name right okay you know what I’m about to say and and it and it’s like it always has been yeah exactly I remember memeing that about four years ago which was it’s about CBDC’s and the guy’s going always has been always has and I think when it comes down to it that is the battle and that was the point of everything when you look at the evolution of bitcoin and why it came around and where we’re at now I think the final boss is bitcoin CBDC and that’s always been always been the case yeah and I think they’re going to have a harder time getting people to adopt the CBDC than we are going to have getting people to adopt bitcoin.

Timothy Allen: How so I I get the sense that it’d be very easy this is how I see it unfolding here’s a wallet.

Polycarp Nakamoto: Government in a government CBDC wallet we’ve got they’ve got two strategies one is you have to pay your taxes with it. Or two is, here’s $150 worth of free money. And 75% of the country is going to just take it because it’s free money. You know, I see a very, I see it that it’d be very easy for people to sign up. And then in tandem, you close down the off, on and off ramps to Bitcoin from the CBDC. And therefore you’ve just created a two tier society. You either pay with CBDC or you don’t exist. Or, well, you can exist, but on a Bitcoin standard but that’s already a problem because when you follow that timeline you end up with physical gatekeeping the kind that you might say see in certain parts of china at the moment where you can’t buy a ticket for the train unless you need a CBDC unless you have a mesh network with no gatekeeping sure and then and then bitcoin actually becomes something that can rival the Sure, I agree with that. The question is, I think that requires a level of the state collapsing under the weight of itself. And that’s inevitable.

Timothy Allen: You think? So possibly in your timeline, Bitcoin’s the phoenix that comes out from the flaps. I don’t think I need to do anything to accelerate the fall of the systems that we currently have. I think that the CBDC is their plan for when the system can no longer go forward.

Polycarp Nakamoto: And that includes turning off the internet, everyone being totally dependent upon whatever solution the government offers, and it’s going to be a CBDC. If they turn off the internet and Web5 just explodes overnight, because everyone who’s running an Archipelago server already understands how to set them up, and having an Archipelago server allows you to make copies on your USB stick that you can go around and make every other computer you know into a mesh network node and deploy them to all your friends, now you’re all communicating to each other, that’s going to happen. just to reaffirm Archipelago is one of your startups that’s the operating system that we developed it’s a bitcoin node operating system it’s open-source has yeah it’s based off Linux but it has four things it gives you the mesh network capabilities it gives you a private AI private version of alexa and a private Google Cloud and so what you can do is you can download all of the websites that you like to visit, all the movies, media, everything, stuff on Nostr. And it’s available for anyone that’s connected to your network, to your node.

Timothy Allen: And is that open-source and available now? It is. So you can, what’s the GitHub for? It’s not ready for people to download. We’re testing it out right now, but it’s built and it exists. And very soon we’ll be putting it up on our own private server for people to download. Right, we better talk. We’ll wrap it up soon, but let’s talk about the future then. Give me some timelines that, will excite me things like what you’re producing what you’re doing what your plans are what even what the plans for the network of physical locations all this kind of stuff yeah so and also another thing which I haven’t really talked about is how do other people get involved in this I mean it’s not it wasn’t easy to make contact with you and I was only introduced to this whole network through someone who another anon on the internet kind of thing you know who listens to this podcast basically so how does your average person get involved in this someone who’s just like listening to this going that sounds interesting and I’m in the I’m in the states or I’m in the.

Polycarp Nakamoto: Austin area and I’m you know so we have lots and lots of events every month that people can come to and if they come to our events our live events there’s many different ways for them to get plugged into the ecosystem. If they want to reach out to us, we have a website that we’ll give you the link to you put it in the show notes, and they can schedule a call and we can get to know each other. Some of these podcasts that we’ve been on have been the greatest signal for people to follow, like the bat signal. Also, there’s a divine connection between these people that we meet who really get involved in deep way. It seems to me that God also wants the mesh network to be built and is actually giving us favor and providing us with the nodes to connect to, if that makes sense. I look at every single person as a Bitcoin node. They are holding data in their mind. They have a form of processing power and talent. They’re like an AI. We’re like walking, talking AIs.

And everyone has something to contribute to the internet of the future that’s really the thing there are people that meet us and they see what we’re working on they think it’s cool and they support it great but then there’s people that meet us and they feel like they found a missing piece to their destiny it’s a natural thing it’s not contrived it’s voluntary just like bitcoin and what about so like I say in the show notes there’ll be a way to get in touch that’s right.

Timothy Allen: What about future plans and timelines ahead and how you see this whole thing unfolding we’re looking to either start laboratories in places that don’t have them yet or partner with node runners who already have working laboratories you know in their own location recently we met a good friend that lives in France and now that he’s visited us and we’ve gotten to know him.

Polycarp Nakamoto: Our nodes if you will if you will are connected and now we’re communicating sharing ideas and supporting one another that’s how it works it’s your node connects to mine and then we share that’s that’s a network effect how do you do you care much for the other well-known bitcoin nodes as in more mainstream, you know, like Nashville, like, you know, the circular economies that are popping up all around the world. Because Bitcoin Park, that kind of stuff. Yeah, because Bitcoin is decentralized, there is a space for everybody in their own self-expression. And there’s lots of bitcoiners I I like there’s lots of bitcoiners I don’t like and that is a sign of decentralization it should be that way fair enough there’s bitcoiners that like me there’s bitcoiners that don’t like me and I’m thankful for that so so the plan going forwards is the network increasing in size physically and obviously and is the main reason for it the incubation of new technology as well or is it is it more about a kind of I mean I see you as as like I said earlier I see you as an intentional community a decentralized intentional community you’re like a network state but with real physical locations well that’s the thing if we can’t do it with three or four locations in in a populated city then we definitely can’t do the network state in.

Rural areas and right like we we need it we need it to work on a small scale before we deploy it large scale and my biggest problem with all of these network state meetups and the people who are working in these different types of charter cities organizations is they not building a network there’s there’s not there’s not a there’s not a physical aspect to the ideas that they’re well in that’s not strictly true I mean in the for example I just lived in Próspera for a year for a month not a year I’ve just come here from Próspera which is a essentially a charter city with physical location and with people coming and going as far as their network goes is as you your barrier to entry for a network I would say is much lower because you just need one property and you could rent it and you could start one prosper is slightly different they the process of getting to prosper was 12 years plus legal plus a change of a constitution plus building you know it’s it’s a very long process but I but their plan is always has always been to be a network of places I mean it whether there’s much overlap between you and them it’s very hard to say like I say well that’s the thing though is they should be different from us and we should be.

Connected true but what what I think separates projects like yourself and Próspera is degrees of autonomy I see you entering into the intentional community situation without necessarily thinking you want some autonomy recognized autonomy the whole point of somewhere like Próspera is to do a deal with the people in charge to get autonomy. It’s not the right or wrong way, nor is yours the right or wrong way. It’s a different way of doing it. And when I look at the whole spectrum of Free Cities, as I would say, but they’re not necessarily cities, but it’s about freedom really. It’s an idea. Yeah. It’s about a spectrum of sovereignty. And at one end, the people just amassing together and creating a society and staying under the radar more often than not. At the other end is places like somewhere like Liberland, which is a bit of land in Serbia and Croatia, which they’re just no one’s claiming.

Timothy Allen: So they’re putting a flag down and saying we belong here.

Polycarp Nakamoto: We are self-sovereign. We have no if you want to deal with us, you have to come. You know, there’s no we don’t need you to recognize us. We this is ours, you know, and there’s a spectrum in between. Totally. And they’re all valid and they’re all about the market of living together.

Timothy Allen: But let me ask you, if you are building a new city and you’re using Google as your office suite, are you really sovereign? If you are building a city and all of the communications run on the regular fiat rails, are you actually building something that’s truly autonomous and sovereign? No, I do agree with you. I think the difference is that I think in the world, I mean, I mean, essentially, I am in your world really as well. I love the idea of self-sovereignty. However, most people are happy with degrees of sovereignty. I’m a bit of an absolutist like you. I don’t like the idea that I’m not completely self-sovereign, even though in lots of aspects of my life I’m not. But I don’t like it. But your average person that’s building Próspera.

And you know this this goes for for many things is is it even one percent freer than what we’ve already got even that’s better right you know there there’s degrees of this if you and and I I would probably hedge as my bet would be is it is this freer than what was here before and if it’s if it’s true then it’s a good thing as far as I’m concerned you’re you’re you’re working in the right direction does it have to be absolute no it doesn’t well I would I would agree with you it’s it’s a spectrum right but being a bitcoiner is a spectrum some bitcoiners use.

Polycarp Nakamoto: Coinbase some don’t what I would say is our tech is agnostic to how you want to run your city or your network state or anything like that but our tech will increase the sovereignty of any city that adopts it that’s that’s really our goal we’re not here to judge this project or that project We love Próspera. We love charter cities and all of that. But if they themselves are not using Sovereign Tech then there an Achilles heel in the sovereignty of that city And that what I hoping Web5 solves for everybody Interestingly with regards to what you’re saying there, I would have said the Achilles heel of Próspera was government shutting them down. And they just survived that in the most extreme way. So in one sense, and this is different from what you’re saying here. The legal protection was what saved them in the end, really. They basically changed the constitution of a country, or they didn’t. The constitution was changed. They then used that to create legal frameworks, which meant that when the socialists came in to shut them down, they couldn’t. And it seems to have worked, which is quite incredible, really.

Timothy Allen: I mean, the thing about this space of alternative governance is there are very few working models, especially at that end of the spectrum. You get a lot of intentional communities. I think that’s what I’ve lived in intentional communities when I was younger and just groups of people coming together and not even really taking it that seriously necessarily. But they are the easiest place to start. You get a group of friends and you buy some land or you rent some land and you live on it and you do your thing. Where at the other end of the spectrum though, that’s when it becomes difficult that’s when you’re dealing with the beast you’re negotiating I think your strategy from what I can see is it’s the bitcoin strategy it’s not try and negotiate with that side it’s just ignore them and build something else you know and then and it’s not even something that’s opposed to what’s already here it’s just better just makes the old thing obsolete one more thing I want to add we’re talking about sovereignty and I’ve thought about this a lot. Ultimately, there’s only one sovereignty that really matters. That’s the mental individual sovereignty. Because someone could put me in jail, and I can still retain my sovereignty. My sovereignty is not a place I live in. It’s a state of being that I exist in.

It’s the expression of my free will. So when it comes to the technology that we’re building, we want to not create a standard for other people to follow. We simply want to create technology that respects the sovereignty of the individual. And we feel that the ripple effects of that will make everybody more sovereign, no matter where they are on the spectrum. But if they’re not mentally, spiritually, within themselves, already sovereign, then there’s no amount of sovereignty you can add to somebody for that okay before we go then when do you think we’ll be able to me I might be able to tinker with.

Polycarp Nakamoto: Your which what was it called Archipelago yeah yeah we’ll give you a copy today to take with you it’s ready for testing the operating system has been built we’re just figuring out the bugs and getting it ready for mass adoption which we think will happen soon and what what what hardware would I need? With Archipelago you can run it on an old laptop, you can run it on a brand new $3,000 AI server. The functions and the abilities that the Bitcoin node will have will vary depending on the hardware. So if you want to use the mesh network ability no problem you’ve got that. If you want to use AI if it’s not powerful enough of a computer that part will be grayed out you just won’t be able to use it and what just quickly as well for someone who wants to get a self-sovereign AI what’s the cheapest most efficient option do you have to spend three and a half thousand to do it or what are you using the AI for if someone’s using it for word processing yeah you can get away with something for 1500 if if you’re trying to get a recreation of ChatGPT you need to get the big one right so you need to be spending about three and a half thousand dollars for a piece of hardware and then the rest of it doesn’t cost you.

A thing yeah well Linux is free if you don’t value your time I’ve heard people say that a lot it’s true it is true.

Timothy Allen: It’s why people pay us to program their Linux devices right Poly thank you great conversation This has been fun. I’m really interested in what’s going on here. And you mentioned we can go and see some of the other places. I’d love to do that.

Polycarp Nakamoto: Yeah it great I really like what you got going here And I think it inspiring I think it I don know I not sold on I think it way ahead of its time The Bitcoin stuff. The living together bit, I love it.

Timothy Allen: I think if I was in Austin, I would, this place is incredible. I would be in a place like this myself. The Bitcoin stuff, I just, having been around for a while, I think it’s a slow and long process. But maybe, hey, maybe AI is the thing that kicks it up the butt and gets it. I mean, they’re printing more money. It’s only a matter of time before hyperinflation sets in and then Bitcoin really starts to shine.

Polycarp Nakamoto: But I’d like to leave your listeners with one last thing. I want to encourage everybody to plan for decentralization. People ask me all the time, poly, what’s the one thing that people can do to move the needle for Web5? And I tell them that what they need to do is remove the centralization from their hearts. That is the only thing that will change the future. And if you think about building a utopia, let’s just pretend one of these charter cities starts up and it becomes wildly successful and it’s literally a utopia. if it doesn’t fall apart from within with human drama and the humanity and that whole thing, then it’s going to be attacked from the outside and plundered. I can’t think of anywhere that you can build on the earth where eventually it’s not going to get swept away. So if you’re not planning for decentralization, then you’re going to have a beginning and an end. if you are planning for decentralization, when hardship comes, you break into two. You split into three. Every time the hammer hits the table, there’s now two, three, four of you. And that’s really the model that Bitcoin gives us. The more that Bitcoin is attacked because of its decentralization, not only does it withstand it, but it actually grows.

And that’s what I would want to encourage anyone who’s thinking about doing something revolutionary right now if you’re listening to this and you’re building something you’re working on on a project that will change the world plan for decentralization no matter how good you make it there will be something that comes to sweep it away but if it’s easily decentralized easily replicatable if anyone can do it just like bitcoin downloading some software running it on a computer then it won’t ever go away.

Timothy Allen: Perfect that’s the title of this episode as well plan for decentralization thank you Poly nice to meet you you as well and looking forward to seeing what else you’ve got going on here but thanks very much for inviting me here and absolutely great yeah it was a lot of fun this is one of my favorite podcasts that I’ve done so thank you.

Notes

This transcript was reconstructed from the episode’s raw machine timestamps. Speaker labels, timestamps, repeated fillers, obvious false starts and ASR line breaks were removed or tidied for readability. The meaning, voice, swearing and main order of the conversation were preserved where possible.

The supplied source contained the episode metadata, Timothy’s solo introduction, sponsor read, Free Cities Conference promo, Value4Value acknowledgements and the outro. As in the previous template, those sections were omitted from the main conversation transcript. The conversation as transcribed begins at Timothy’s first question about anonymity and ends with the sign-off after Poly’s closing argument.

The raw transcript had no speaker diarisation, so speaker labels were inferred from the two-speaker flow, the questions, the answers, and the context. Any small back-channel interjections may need checking against the audio before final publication.

Proper nouns and technical terms were checked and normalised where possible. The following corrections/standardisations were applied: Polycarp Nakamoto; Poly; Lab 484; Archipelago; Archipelago Foundation; Web5; Web 1, Web 2, Web 3 and Web 4; Amazon Sidewalk; Ring; Bitchat; Nostr; Meshtastic; Ubiquiti; Bitcoin; Bitcoin node; Tor; DNS; ISP; AWS; AT&T; Verizon; Google Fiber; GoDaddy; Google Cloud; Cloudflare; CrowdStrike; BTCPay Server; Lightning Network; Fedimint; Cashu; e-cash; satoshi/sats; CBDC/CBDCs; DoorDash; Uber Eats; ChatGPT; Claude; OpenAI; Copilot; Framework Desktop; Framework Computers; AMD Ryzen AI Max; Umbrel; Start9; Raspberry Pi; RaspiBlitz; GrapheneOS; Linux; USB; Tower of Babel; King Leonidas; Jack Dorsey; Bitcoin Park; Coinbase; Próspera; Liberland; Serbia; Croatia; Veritas Villages; Shadrach; and Free Cities Foundation.

A few claims and names are speaker claims rather than externally verified facts. The following should be checked against the audio or guest notes before publication if exactness matters: the number of Bitcoin nodes and Tor nodes; the U.S. government/congress reference to running a Bitcoin node; the five-year internet-down prediction; the exact status/download URL of Archipelago; and the precise spelling/identity of any local Austin community members not named clearly in the transcript.

No external fact-checking has been applied to the substance of the speakers’ claims beyond the spelling and normalisation pass above.