No solutions, only trade-offs. Walking towards a better internet through freedom tech, open protocols, and sovereign engineering.
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"There is no creation without also being created." Zaza & Gigi take a walk in Madeira. Listen on sovereignengineering.io This dialogue starts with a simple observation from the previous days at Sovereign Engineering: the conversations had been wandering from skateboarding to metaphysics, from interface design to spiritual orientation, and somehow all of it belonged in the same walk. Zaza came to SEC-08 as a FOSS UX designer thinking deeply about protocol UX, including work like Neode, but the conversation refuses to keep design in the shallow box of making things pretty or easy. His path runs
"I have found my people, and that is the craziest discovery for me." The SEC-08 crew & Gigi pass the mic around on a pirate boat. Listen on sovereignengineering.io This one is not a single guest walk so much as a moving snapshot of the final days of Sovereign Engineering SEC-08: tired builders, unfinished follow-ups, jokes over the water, and a quick tour through what actually stuck after six weeks in Madeira. The recurring answer is that the cohort felt wider and deeper than expected. People came in for Bitcoin, Nostr, Lightning, or AI-adjacent hacking, and ended up talking about rebuilding p
"The only one I need to convince is myself." Sherry & Gigi take a walk. Listen on sovereignengineering.io Sherry came to Sovereign Engineering through gsovereignty, a long-running Bitcoin friendship from Hong Kong, and a sudden gap between contracts. One day she was ending a job. The next pitch was simple: if you are free now, come to Sovereign Engineering. The walk starts with the obvious and not-so-obvious labels: woman, Chinese, engineer. Sherry traces the path from math olympiad incentives and China's gaokao into computer science, then back toward Bitcoin and Nostr. She first heard about B
"There is no real address book for the internet." Julien & Gigi take a walk. Listen on sovereignengineering.io Julien came to Sovereign Engineering through a strange path: Nix, Bitcoin Core, ASMap, Nostr, and a growing sense that packaging, routing, identity, and deployment are all part of the same sovereignty problem. The first part of the walk goes deep into ASMap: why Bitcoin Core cares which autonomous systems its peers live in, how eclipse attacks turn peer discovery into a security question, and why mapping the internet is harder than it looks. The trade-off is familiar: IP addresses are
"No Solutions, do the homework." WhisperHash & Gigi take a walk. Listen on sovereignengineering.io WhisperHash came to Sovereign Engineering by following breadcrumbs: Bitcoin first, then small solo miners, then Nostr, then No Solutions, then the strange realization that the protocol was not just another social network. After losing a valuable Instagram handle to platform control, the idea of cryptographic identity stopped being abstract. If you do not hold the keys, you do not own the thing. The mining part of the walk starts with NerdMiner and ESP32 tinkering, moves into BitAxe and open-sourc
"You can always buy more tokens, not more time." Pablo & Gigi take a walk. Listen on sovereignengineering.io Pablo and Gigi start with the FIPS map: the strange pleasure of seeing a protocol become a place, with nodes scattered across the world, Archipelago getting faster through a FIPS connection, and Nostr VPN quietly pulling more people into the mesh. From there the conversation turns into a familiar No Solutions pattern: if you try to make one global thing, you usually fight the design. FIPS works better as locality. Nostr works better as locality. There is no global. The second half becom
"You should be able to compose your clients." Sandwich & Gigi take a walk. Listen on sovereignengineering.io Sandwich and Gigi spend the first 45 minutes or so talking through napplets: composable, sandboxed Nostr apps that can run inside a host shell while the host mediates signing, storage, relay access, uploads, permissions, and user trust. What starts as a conversation about applets quickly becomes an operating-system conversation: if Nostr is flexible enough to carry many kinds of software, clients probably need to become composable runtimes instead of monolithic apps. Along the way they
"You cannot look at something without touching it." Calle & Gigi take a walk. Listen on sovereignengineering.io Calle and Gigi start with Cashu mint internals and end in embodied cognition. Along the way they unpack sparse Merkle trees, exclusion proofs, unilateral exit, trusted execution environments, recovery paths, the move to BLS signatures, agentic coding workflows, specialist versus generalist models, world models, and why Bitcoin, Nostr, and local AI still feel like reasons for optimism. In this dialogue: how mint state can be compressed into a sparse Merkle tree and why exclusion proof
"We just need to speak human." MouxDesign & Gigi take a walk. Listen on sovereignengineering.io Recorded in June 2026. Mo and Gigi keep circling one question: how do you build products for people who speak plain language instead of protocol jargon? From there they get into wallet copy, fee panic, backup rituals, agentic design workflows, broken Nostr onboarding, fun-first software, and the old Bitcoin fight over purity versus adoption. In this dialogue: why design starts before the interface, at the app store screenshot, the first sentence, and the story a user tells a friend Mo's current work
"It’s the people who receive Bitcoin as payment for something who decide what Bitcoin is." gsovereignty & Gigi take a walk. Listen on sovereignengineering.io Recorded in May 2026. They explore what it would take to separate business from the state, why a Bitcoin economy still depends on fiat imports, and how Nostrocket might route human energy into Bitcoin-native production. Along the way they get into circular economies, merchant adoption, stablecoins, organizational design, application-specific agent harnesses, and the trade-offs behind merit-based equity, minimal governance, and forkable ve
"The user joins the community, and the community does a lot of the heavy lifting." Franzap & Gigi take a walk in Oslo. Listen on sovereignengineering.io In this dialogue: How Zapstore grew out of the first Sovereign Engineering cohort in Madeira, earlier experiments like ZapThreads, and Franzap's frustration with closed mobile app stores Why Ninite, app stacks, and curated discovery mattered as much as the raw "permissionless app store" idea What it means to run Zapstore as a real marketplace: breaking the chicken-and-egg problem by pre-populating supply, signing apps under the Zapstore key, a
"What we're actually building is an unstoppable messenger." Jeff G & Gigi take a walk in Oslo. Listen on sovereignengineering.io In this dialogue: Jeff G explains how White Noise started as an attempt to build the most private messenger possible, then slowly mutated into something else: an unstoppable messenger that can survive ugly network conditions and hostile environments Why MLS on Nostr is mostly an ordering problem: identity and delivery are the easy parts, group-state evolution is where everything breaks Forked histories, missing commits, and the nightmare scenario where a group silent
“Don’t be afraid of going your own way.” Johnathan Corgan & Gigi take a walk in Madeira. Recorded during SEC-07. Listen on sovereignengineering.io In this dialogue: Why FIPS started with Arjen asking for networking that does not depend on registrars, central authorities, or yankable domain names Johnathan disappearing for a month after Costa Rica, then returning with a protocol design that scratched the itch FIPS as a self-organizing peer mesh: no privileged coordinator, only what each node can enforce locally Transport-agnostic networking: Ethernet, Bluetooth, UDP overlays, Tor, serial links,
“I want to optimize for hackability and customization.” Justin Moon & Gigi take a walk in Madeira. Recorded during SEC-07. Listen on sovereignengineering.io In this dialogue: Justin’s new obsession: building Shadow, a hackable mobile operating system for people who want full control over the stack Why Android is interesting again: not because it’s clean, but because it is at least open enough to fight with Android file chaos, and the immortal “file saved successfully” meme One wallet, one relay connection, one shared set of primitives at the OS level, instead of every app reinventing the same
“Permissionless, permissionless, permissionless.” Yo & Gigi take a walk in Madeira. Recorded during SEC-07. Listen on sovereignengineering.io In this dialogue: Gigi’s AI setup: voice prompts via vibeline to brainstorm, brainstorm to implementation plan, cron job that tackles one to-do every 20 minutes, builds overnight One agent per project: dergigi.com/projects, each agent spins up with an nsec and gets to work Nihao: Gigi’s skill for spinning up Nostr identities from the terminal Claude Code “Mythos” codewords leaked – swearing at your models actually helps Planner vs developer vs tester: th
"We have this window of opportunity to steer the LLMs and the future of technology into a freedom-tech direction." Martti Malmi & Gigi take a walk in Madeira. Recorded during SEC-07. Listen on sovereignengineering.io In this dialogue: Martti's GitHub annoyance spawned Hashtree: a content-addressed file system on top of Blossom that adds directories, file chunking, and encryption. Everything encrypted by default using content hash key encryption (inspired by Freenet), so Blossom server operators have cryptographic deniability about what they host. git remote hashtree: set up a hashtree remote f
"Bitcoin doesn't need more believers. Bitcoin needs more understanders." Shadrach & Gigi take a walk in Madeira. Recorded during SEC-07. Listen on sovereignengineering.io Projects & tech mentioned: Archipelago (sovereign home node and mesh network platform) Archipelago Foundation Archipelago promo video AtoB (interoperable service protocol, co-authored with Jesus) Angor (Bitcoin-native crowdfunding; Archipelago placed 2nd in the Angor pitch contest) Podcasting 2.0 (open podcast ecosystem) #DeMu (decentralized music on Nostr) Fountain (podcasting app with value-for-value) castr.me (Nostr-to-RSS
"I need to build something to test the thing." Pablo & Gigi take a walk. Recorded December 2025. Listen on sovereignengineering.io Projects & tech mentioned: TENEX (multi-agent coordination on Nostr) Agora (Nostr client for local communities, by Pablo & Leopoldo Lopez) NDK Swift & NDK Kotlin (native ports of NDK) nostrdb (embedded Nostr database) NIP-60 (Cashu wallets on Nostr) Podcasting 2.0 (open podcast ecosystem) #DeMu (decentralized music on Nostr) Olas (rebuilt with TENEX agents) castr.me (Nostr-to-RSS podcast feed) ants (Nostr search) Boris (reading and highlighting) Pyramid (fiatjaf's
"You're yelling at someone who is lying to you." Pablo & Gigi take a drive. Recorded December 2025. Listen on sovereignengineering.io Projects & tech mentioned: TENEX (multi-agent coordination on Nostr) NDK (Nostr Development Kit) NDK Swift & NDK Kotlin (native ports of NDK, vibe-coded) nostrdb (embedded Nostr database) Negentropy / NIP-77 (efficient event sync) NIP-60 (Cashu wallets on Nostr) Vercel AI SDK (multi-provider LLM abstraction) Notedeck & Nostur Olas (rebuilt with TENEX agents) In this dialogue: Bitcoiners in cars getting coffee: recording from the sun visor, Seinfeld style TENEX r
"Nostr is organic tech. Data will flow more naturally instead of going out and fetch, going out and coming back, going out and coming back." Arjen & Gigi take a long walk. Recorded October 2025. Projects & tech mentioned: Blossom (self-healing links) noDNS Tollgate (router-to-router payments) Wally (Cashu wallet connect) innpub (positional audio, innpub.dergigi.com) Citrine (Android local relay) Amber (Android signer) nostr-relay-tray Applesauce (code snippets) Wingman (remote dev assistant) CDK (Cashu dev kit) NIP-03 (OpenTimestamps) ants (Nostr search) OTRTA / Routstr (pay for LLM compute wi
"You have a roaming army of servers." The crew continues on the pirate boat. Recorded October 2025. Projects & tech mentioned: Paygress (VM provisioning over Nostr) Error 402 (HTTP payment required) nostr-relay-tray Pyramid Relay castr.me PM Tiles (offline maps) In this dialogue: The dream: press record, press save, everything auto-publishes to Nostr Zero post-processing, zero editing Error 402: endpoints that can be paid over the protocol level nginx 402 module: it takes lightning, it takes e-cash Paygress: buy a VPS just knowing an npub Get an IP address, a Docker container, SSH access, and
"127.0.0.1 -- that's the only IP address we're gonna need." The crew passes the mic around on a pirate boat. Recorded October 2025. Projects & tech mentioned: Beacon noDNS innpub MOQ (Media Over QUIC) ContextVM Chrysalis (self-replicating Cashu mint) Paygress (VM provisioning over Nostr) BloVM (blossom server monitor) HyperNote In this dialogue: "How was Sovereign Engineering for you?" -- "Inspiring. Stressful." Most exciting demo? Beacon has been trending noDNS mentioned by basically everyone Mapping projects: putting OpenStreetMap tiles on Nostr/Blossom MOQ working live in innpub, eight peop
"I want Nostr to be the perfect thing just for me." Justin & Gigi drive to the airport. Recorded October 2025. Projects & tech mentioned: Blitz (Rust HTML/CSS renderer) QuickJS (lightweight JavaScript engine) Dioxus (Rust UI framework) Iroh (peer-to-peer networking) MOQ (Media Over QUIC) White Noise (MLS-based private messaging on Nostr) Ladybird (independent browser by Andreas Kling) VRChat In this dialogue: Driving to the airport "Don't say anything that could be used against you" The low quality of this podcast focuses the mind of the listener You need proper headphones Walking focuses you,
"The identity should be outside of the computer." hzrd149 & Gigi contemplate local relays. Libraries & apps mentioned: Applesauce Boris Citrine nostr-relay-tray In this dialogue: Automation & robot armies If this than that (IFTTT) Permissioned vs permissionless automation Self-hosting and the local-first people "The identity should be outside of the computer" Private vs public, local vs remote DRM and other nonsense Private means encrypted with my key Nostr apps should be local-first, thanks to local relays All nostr apps should work in flight mode, somewhat Outbox model, writing, and reading
What does it mean to build something "in the spirit of Bitcoin"? Pablo and Gigi want to encourage you to apply for SEC-05. Books & websites mentioned: Stackoverflow is dead by Gergely Orosz Sovereign Engineering by Gigi and Pablo In this dialogue: Gigi's vibeline & vibeline-ui Pubcastr aka castr.me Pablo's thread about TENEX Alex Gleason's MKStack What is the essence of nostr? What are nostr's values, and can LLMs extract them? Agents and workflows living on nostr Agent specialization and Roo code “What would Jesus do?” What does it mean to build something "in the spirit of Bitcoin"? Hierarchy
