Anarchism, The Origins of Nostr, & The Future of FOSS with Ben Arc (Founder, LNbits)

I sit down with LNbits founder Ben Arc for a wide ranging and fascinating conversation about political philosophy, Nostr, and the future of FOSS/AI. Check out the notes below for more details on our discussion. This was a treat to record and I hope you enjoy!

* Ben’s left libertarian / anarchist lens on Bitcoin - the ultimate goal is liberty 

* Stateless socialism, Marx, and Adam Smith 

* Open protocols like Bitcoin / Nostr  and public key cryptography replacing functions of the state

* Pierre-Joseph Proudhon: “Property is theft, property is liberty”

* Soulful vs. soul-less capital 

* “The Adam Smith Invisible B***h Slap” - Ben’s synthesis of left anarchism and Austrian/ancap thought. Open protocols, public key cryptography, FOSS create new more efficient commons in which private capital can participate. But if capital tries to co-opt the commons, it gets the Adam Smith invisible hand b***h slap (see the big blockers from Segwit2x). This creates the playing field for an actual free market 

* Collaboration vs extraction - key is aligning incentives so both parties win and grow the pie

* “Value waterfalls and the remix economy”- Max’s idea of how BTC and open source protocols will evolve - similar to Stemstr. Both parties win when they collaborate are incentivized to share the same stream of files which get remixed and create thicker value waterfalls or a bigger pie for all 

* Peter Kropotkin and Mutual Aid - rereading Darwin for mutual aid as a driving factor in evolution 

* Karma and evolution: 1) nothing is permanent; everything is in flow; everything is relative - one order lower of complexity sees only itself + information 2) karma may be the ultimate driver/law of evolution - a system evolves in its totality toward more mutual aid and complexity 

* Hegel and the Master-Slave Dialectic - exploitation requires dehumanization making both parties less in touch with reality and happy; in order for them to both be free they need to become peers. The ultimate goal is more liberation/liberty 

* P2P peer relationships are the best healthiest relationships: what we see in Bitcoin and open networks 

* John Nash: non oppressive mind space is healthiest - Mind on Strike: giving more people mind space allows their minds to explore and explode open; libertarianism comes from liberation and the need for some equality for this to happen.

* Is John Nash Satoshi?

* Ben’s entry to bitcoin: dorky Uk news correspondents, his students using dark markets, a hatred of banks, and Wikileaks 

* The mindseed for nostr: Ben’s Diagon Alley 

* Pirate Bay and p2p markets 

* Building the first twitter clone on nostr; apologies for NIP-04

* Reverting a fiatjaf hard commit led to Branle

* Securing nostr.com for 1 BTC

* First talk on Nostr at Paralelni Polis

* Finding the alpha with the productive nyms; spear fishing for projects; hanging out on edge of internet; if you’re sending a deck it’s generally too late for me 

* Nostr and free / open / non Orwellian / non evil IoT

* what all can we build with relays, web sockets, and public key crypto 

* Building a new web with Nostr (e.g. see Nostr Wallet Connect and early IoT)

* Protocol stack; the old web is compromised and drowning in AI spam; dead internet theory is here; Nostr (public key crypto) for signing notes is our best defense 

* Nostr.com is selling dope NIP-05 verifiers 

* LNbits released a Nostr signing device for identity management

* Nostr is best of both worlds online - create smaller forum like communities while still riding on a global network effect 

* “A better Internet is possible” - we’re not at the end of history 

* FOSS, nostr, and bitcoin are viruses which infect the system: Just like the major financial institutions with Bitcoin, eventually Twitter will plug into Nostr 

* Monopoly of the commons is the future; FOSS eventually swallows all (see Switzerland recently requiring the government to use FOSS)

* AI brings the age of disposable software at least at the level of building extensions 

* The need for more Bitcoin and Nostr tooling in Python for the AI community so they can easily bring identity and payments / value transfer to the agents 

* Max’s thesis: evolution of digital life forms : open source models will evolve into swarms of agents with value - see hivemind.vc/ai

* The importance of reputation in Nostr: Web of Trust as a theoretical solution; open timestamps with payment to go higher up a merkle tree; AI agent as dvm for calculating trust 

* Ben is more wary of AI long term and thinks it will be more monolithic than swarm-like; perhaps it becomes a benign dictator that could kill us or just give us what we need to be happy; could be capitalism as we know it eating itself and requiring a new system?

* How the Light Gets In: philosophy festival (part of haybook festival): open AI guy calling the god AI Super Gaia

* Max’s idea on AI: there will be always trade-offs resulting in different forms of intelligence 

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