recap/history/1775223585124-NDE0NjE5NDgtNDFi.json

{"id":"1775223585124-NDE0NjE5NDgtNDFi","videoId":"41461948-41b1-4ca9-bdf7-f59bc7e11956","url":"https://serve.podhome.fm/episode/8029725b-0319-44b9-4793-08dc404e83a4/63909632332260150341461948-41b1-4ca9-bdf7-f59bc7e11956.mp3","title":"CD196: EVGENY POBEREZKIN - SIMPLEX PRIVATE CHAT","type":"podcast","topicCount":19,"segmentCount":325,"createdAt":"2026-04-03T13:39:45.124Z","uploadDate":"20260320","chunks":[{"title":"Introduction and Zaps","summary":"The host welcomes viewers, thanks the audience for their support via zaps, and introduces a new Nostr-integrated website for the show.","entries":[{"text":"Host: Happy Bitcoin Friday, freaks! It's your host, Odell, here for Citadel Dispatch, the show focused on actionable Bitcoin and freedom tech discussion. A busy morning over here, I just wrapped up Rabbit Hole Recap, my other show, but we have a great show planned today. I'm very excited for it, but before we get there, as always, Dispatch is funded by our audience. We have no ads or sponsors. Thank you, freaks, for continuing to support the show.","offset":0,"duration":46},{"text":"Host: The largest two Bitcoin zaps from last episode... Our episode was Vexl, focused on no-KYC Bitcoin, Bitcoin donations. Peter Missouri: 21,000 sats. \"I have to admit that I often forget to zap because I listen to podcasts during my hour and a half long commute, and then I forget by the time I get to a stopping point. Although much of this is over my head, I'm trying to learn as much as I can, and this one definitely inspired me.\" Thank you, sir, for your support. And just on that perspective, that's how I've learned a lot of what I know today, just immerse yourself in things that are over your head, it means you're in the right room. Absolutely love to see it.","offset":46,"duration":48},{"text":"Host: And then the second largest zap was from RyderDie Freak Mapp21: 10,000 sats. He said, \"Great rip.\" As always, freaks, all relevant links are at CitadelDispatch.com. I know sats are scarce, I know Bitcoin... you're working hard to accumulate as much Bitcoin as possible. If you cannot spare the Bitcoin donations, the next best way to support the show is to share it with your friends and family. Citadel Dispatch is available on every major podcast app by searching Citadel Dispatch. Take your friends and family's phones, open the podcast app, search Citadel Dispatch, press subscribe. They won't know what hit them, but they'll be better off for it.","offset":94,"duration":48},{"text":"Host: And freaks, on that note, by the way, I've been... as you all know, I've been neck-deep in the AI world. I rebuilt CitadelDispatch.com. It still has all the relevant links you would expect, but it also is live-polling Nostr for the top zappers. So it's cumulative; the more you zap, the higher you get listed on the website. It's a little bit of a work in progress because it's polling Nostr live, and so sometimes it does different results, but the dream is that the people that support the show the most, the top 10, will always be highlighted on CitadelDispatch.com and you can just click their profile picture and it goes straight to their Nostr profile. Pretty excited about it, but work in progress, hands up.","offset":142,"duration":48}],"startTime":0},{"title":"Introduction to SimpleX","summary":"The host introduces Evgeny, the founder of SimpleX, and discusses how they initially connected using the decentralized messaging app.","entries":[{"text":"Host: Anyway, freaks, we have a great show today. A lot of you freaks have heard me talk about in the past the SimpleX encrypted chat app. You freaks know I love Signal, you know Signal... Signal has its own set of trade-offs, but it's fantastic that it exists in the marketplace. The two big ones are that it requires a centralized server and the second one is that they use phone numbers as a way to mitigate spam and bots. Fortunately, they recently removed the ability for other people you're messaging to see your phone number, but it still requires phone numbers nonetheless. SimpleX is a very exciting alternative that mitigates both of those concerns, and I'm pleased to have the founder of SimpleX here, Evgeny. How's it going, sir?","offset":190,"duration":49},{"text":"Evgeny: Hello, Matt. Thank you very much for having me. Excited to be here.","offset":239,"duration":6},{"text":"Host: It's a pleasure, sir. I... by the way, freaks, I think the way this came together is kind of cool. He found my SimpleX contact on my website, Odell.xyz, and messaged me on his own app and reached out and then we got onto a phone call, and I have to say the audio calls are working quite well now in SimpleX and we set this up pretty cool how it came together.","offset":245,"duration":31},{"text":"Evgeny: That's true, indeed. Yeah, we've been using SimpleX chat as the only communication tool, obviously, since we began building it, and yes, phone calls are fine, they're fine.","offset":276,"duration":11},{"text":"Host: I have to say, sir, my whole life I've been fortunate enough to successfully have moved the majority of my communications to Signal, which is great, massive improvement over regular phone calls and texts and email. But when that thing goes down, I feel quite vulnerable. And we've seen a couple outages lately, so I'm very grateful that you're building SimpleX. I think a great place to start here is just high-level: what is SimpleX? Why does it exist? Why should people care?","offset":287,"duration":40}],"startTime":190},{"title":"Core Philosophy: Sovereignty and Privacy","summary":"Evgeny shares his foundational motivation for building SimpleX. He emphasizes user sovereignty, trustless architecture, and privacy as an inherent right.","entries":[{"text":"Evgeny: I think my primary motivation to start this, to design the protocol and to build it, was never about technology. It was about all the sad state I've been observing the world is going to, how people were losing their jobs for stating the truths, and it all has become more and more pronounced in the last couple decades. So I... I should make some like embarrassing admissions, probably. I was never deep enough in any of the cryptocurrencies world, it was alien to me. I was never deep enough in privacy community, I didn't know it even exists. But I was in publishing. I spent a large part of my life in publishing from different angles. I worked as executive in publishing organizations, I owned magazine in my home country, then I worked as head of engineering at MailOnline, one of the largest tabloids. To me, publishing and communication was always one and the same, and to me, ability to say the truth is fundamentally foundational for the society, right?","offset":327,"duration":50},{"text":"Evgeny: If you can't say what's right, what's wrong, if you can't say what's truth, we can no longer exist even, right? Because everything breaks. And when we were building the SimpleX, retrospectively we can say it's built pretty much on the same values as Bitcoin. It's sovereignty. As primary value, primary foundational truth that we build on is sovereignty. Users should own their conversations, their channels, their connections, their identity, everything that they use. The fact that we build protocol by removing network-wide identity for the users means that now users own everything, now they are in full control in the same way you hold your Bitcoin keys. You own your SimpleX identity and your identity is what your friends see, what your contacts see, and it's not something that exists on a network, that's why you own it.","offset":377,"duration":54},{"text":"Evgeny: And the second principle was that it's trustless, right? So we always thought that I was... I just always thought that if a technology is built on the idea that for it to function I have to trust my technology provider, then it's not good enough because today technology provider can be practicing don't be evil principle, and tomorrow some pressures come along and it all ends up quite evil, and we've seen it over and over again. So the only way to make it not happen is to architecturally prevent it, right? To build technology in a way that single provider cannot act against users even if they want to, right? So it's like... and sovereignty has always been number one value here.","offset":431,"duration":43},{"text":"Evgeny: So like we had a lot of discussions with privacy community, obviously privacy community was the first to discover what we built, and obviously they had their own ideas about how we should build that, and traditional privacy messenger would be like you can always delete messages you sent even if they land on another person's device, right? And this kind of approach was kind of more and more pervasive and happens on Telegram, it happens on iMessage, and I think to this at this point we've been consistently refusing to do it this way because to me it was like I have files on my computer, I have to allow somebody else to delete those files, it's just wrong, right? So I have sovereignty on my machine, right? Why should it happen unless I agree to that? Then that was interesting. So like whenever privacy and sovereignty were in conflict, we were saying sovereignty is foundational both for security and for privacy. So fundamentally that's that's why we're building. We wrote some like philosophical almost statement recently, it's on our website, about that we don't we don't see privacy as some add-on, right? It's not like a shield and key, it's not a measure of protection, it's just literally a thing that always existed, right? We always had privacy before the internet.","offset":474,"duration":68},{"text":"Evgeny: You could talk to people, right? And nobody knew that who you were talking to or nobody was tracking where you go, nobody was tracking who you talk to, and we could have genuine conversations because this whole ability to have genuine conversation with people is predicated on the fact that nobody else knows who is talking to whom, and that was the whole the whole premise, to return it to the to return communication to pre-internet state, almost, right? When we can trust the the environment.","offset":542,"duration":38},{"text":"Host: Incredibly well said. I mean, this is something that I bring up all the time. I think first off, people don't real... the human condition is to accept the status quo as something that's always been. But we've never lived in a society that is as digital as it is today and it's getting increasingly more digital, our lives are increasingly more online. And as a result, we've lost a lot of the implicit privacy and sovereignty aspects of non-digital life and we need to protect it. I like to distill it as I say: no privacy, no freedom, and no freedom, no wealth. They're all interconnected and that no wealth piece, I think, is really important when we're bringing it back to Bitcoin specifically, but if you don't have freedom, it's not your wealth, someone else controls it.","offset":580,"duration":50}],"startTime":327},{"title":"Bitcoin Stats and Publishing Background","summary":"The host reads the current Bitcoin block stats before asking Evgeny about his career. Evgeny explains how his background in publishing and freedom of speech inspired the design of SimpleX.","entries":[{"text":"Host: I just want to apologize real quick, I did mess up the intro, um so I'm just gonna run through real quick. Today is March 20th at 1700 UTC, the current block height is 941454, current sats per dollar is 1,432. That brings us to a Bitcoin price of $69,792 and one Bitcoin will get you 15 ounces of gold right now, we're up on the one day, one week, and one month chart against gold. Um sorry about that interruption. I want to talk... so I didn't realize your background is publishing. Is it... were you act... what... were you an engineer involved with publishing? You came from the free speech side basically, not the privacy side.","offset":630,"duration":45},{"text":"Evgeny: It's hard to say what is my background. I I always enjoyed coding, but somehow it happened that I only did coding as a hobby for my own businesses. I probably am just entrepreneur who is doing what works. I spent a lot of time in different businesses, but yes, so I was in originally I was on publishing as a as an executive, not technology executive. I moved to the technology full-time about 12 years ago, or like a little bit more, maybe 14 years ago, and yes, I was working at MailOnline at on technology side. But yes, I came to this design from freedom of speech angle and interestingly SimpleX protocol was created, invented you can say, pretty much at the same time when Nostr protocol was invented.","offset":675,"duration":49},{"text":"Evgeny: But to me, you know you know this XKCD comic when one guy one nerd says to another or his computer has like you know that, right? Like 4,000, 906 bits of RSA encryption, it's kind of a trillion of years to break it...","offset":724,"duration":16},{"text":"Host: The $5 the $5 wrench the $5 wrench one, right?","offset":740,"duration":2},{"text":"Evgeny: Yeah, yeah. Go get go get $5 wrench, right?","offset":742,"duration":3},{"text":"Host: We joke around in Bitcoin that with inflation now the wrench is like $20, but yeah.","offset":745,"duration":4},{"text":"Evgeny: Yeah, exactly, yes. So and to me, to me like freedom of speech is just impossible if you cannot say say the truth without revealing who you are, right? So privacy is not about hiding, I think it's like it's in cipher from cypherpunk manifesto, right? You privacy is about selectively revealing yourself to the world, right? It's not about hiding, right? And depending on what you say, you may want to say it under your name or you may want to say it under a pseudonym, and it's essential to ability to criticize powers, it's essential to ability to share some uncomfortable truths, and that's what it all was about. But when we designed the protocol for private for for publishing that's resistant to attacks on individuals, we said oh, that's a messaging protocol clearly what we did, so why don't we make a messenger first?","offset":749,"duration":27},{"text":"Evgeny: Right. And we're just now approaching to the piece of the technology that we always originally wanted to build is effectively a publishing channels, large communities that can scale. We're like weeks away from launching the first version of scalable channels on on SimpleX network.","offset":776,"duration":34}],"startTime":630},{"title":"Comparing Telegram, Nostr, and SimpleX","summary":"The conversation contrasts Nostr's public broadcast model with SimpleX's private messaging. They explore the complexities of handling privacy within large group chats like Telegram.","entries":[{"text":"Host: Like a a better version of Telegram channels or Telegram groups, right?","offset":810,"duration":5},{"text":"Evgeny: Yeah, we had like large Telegram communities that literally tried to migrate to SimpleX network. Obviously, that didn't work because the current implementation scales to maybe thousands of members reasonably well after all the improvements, but not to tens of thousands as many Telegrams communities have. So yes, so we have a lot of interest from Telegram communities to use the network because because they would own it, right? We develop it in a way that each community can run on multiple relays, so in a way it's a it's a similar design to Nostr with regards to censorship resistance, but it's very different design with regards to privacy because to publish on Nostr you have to connect to relay, to publish on SimpleX channel, there would not be no direct connection, the connection to relay will be through the messaging network which means that privacy is preserved on a transport layer.","offset":815,"duration":51},{"text":"Host: Well, yeah, I mean, let's dive in here a little bit because to me, I've always considered the two protocols you... I mean, it is interesting how that worked out, right? That they both get birthed around the same time. That they're more complementary than competitive in terms of their feature set and use case. I mean, specifically Nostr is kind of trying to solve this one-to-many problem, it's a broadcast protocol first. If I want to broadcast to the world my thoughts, something like Twitter, right? Uh would be a comparison, that you know that's the kind of use case Nostr is trying to solve. And then also on top of that, kind of goes hand-in-hand, is an associated fixed identity that can be as public as you want it to be, right? You can be, you know, it doesn't it doesn't require permission to create these identities. You can have many disposable identities, but most people are using it in a way that they're connecting it to some elements of their real-world life and their real-world identity and then they're using it as a broadcast medium and discovery protocol.","offset":866,"duration":62},{"text":"Host: And then with SimpleX, you know, you have rotating identities, maybe you use different identities in fluid in-app with different people and different groups. And it's more like... I would compare it like if Nostr's like the soapbox that you're standing on the corner broadcasting your thoughts to the world, SimpleX is maybe the dark pub where you're with your local community having a beer and talking about really important things that maybe you don't want to be on the record about, but you just want to have free-flowing conversation.","offset":928,"duration":30},{"text":"Host: Now, when you start getting into the channels and stuff, it gets a little bit different, right? Telegram channels, I would say, Telegram's the behemoth in the room, that's why we're going to probably keep bringing them up, you know, they have two billion users at this point and they make a lot of privacy claims that technically are bullshit. Um so there's a a decent amount of overlap in the communities. But Telegram channels, so Telegram first started as DMs, then they had group chats, group chats I would say I would put more in the pub kind of scenario until they get bigger. Sometimes group chats get big, they're like a thousand-person group, then you're in like an auditorium maybe or something. But then Telegram channels are like more of a competitor to broadcast media, whether that's Twitter or Nostr or something like that, where the actual participants are not able to interact more so than maybe there's a comment box or maybe there's emojis, but it's really one person broadcasting to a bunch of people.","offset":958,"duration":58},{"text":"Host: And the reason I bring this up is because net-net you want those Telegram channels or large groups, I think you can kind of put them in the same... small groups and and personal messages, DMs, I think could be in the same group, and then large large groups and large channels can kind of be in the same group. Net-net, you want them to be end-to-end encrypted, but you always historically have the problem of all it takes is one person out of 2,000 people to be compromised uh or their their phone compromised or themselves be against whatever the group is, and they can be recording everything that's happening in there. So as you move into that feature set, how are you thinking how are you thinking about privacy in that scenario, right? Because like if if there's a thousand-person group, once again I think it's important that it's end-to-end encrypted regardless, it's the basis that everything's built on, but uh all if one journalist is in there or whatever just writing it up in the Wall Street Journal, then how much, you know, how you dealing with that? How you thinking about that?","offset":1016,"duration":64}],"startTime":810},{"title":"Participation Privacy and MLS","summary":"Evgeny critiques the Message Layer Security (MLS) protocol and highlights the importance of participation privacy. He stresses that users should be able to read and follow channels without being tracked or targeted.","entries":[{"text":"Evgeny: I think I think, Matt, you we all have tendency to conflate what what privacy means and here we're talking about two different aspects of privacy. I 100% agree with you that once group is free to join, right? And anybody can join, then it's unrealistic to expect any degree of content privacy in such group. And it's just dangerous to rely that there is a content privacy, because if you if you expect privacy but there is no privacy, then you may be saying something as if it is private conversation but like beyond thousand peop... that's, by the way, the basis of my scathing criticism of MLS specification, right? You know this message layer secrecy, I wrote...","offset":1080,"duration":41},{"text":"Host: I was gonna bring that up. By the way, it's not a surprise that you came out of publishing because your blog is one of the best blogs in tech to follow, by the way.","offset":1121,"duration":9},{"text":"Evgeny: Thank you.","offset":1130,"duration":1},{"text":"Host: But yeah, continue. You have a blog about MLS, which is what Signal wants to move to.","offset":1131,"duration":5},{"text":"Evgeny: Look, I think it's no, actually what Nostr what what was implemented on top of Nostr with White Noise is a different thing, right? Because they correctly identified the weak spot of MLS design and they completely side-stepped it because Nostr identity is the key so effectively authentication is bundled with identity. But that's a that's an I would even say it's almost like an edge case because in majority of systems people don't see key as identity, right? People don't are not hard-wired to to kind of equate identity to the key. I mean, Bitcoin community's very hard-wired to equate those things, right? Or just generally cryptocurrency community. But in normal world, identity is a name, right? And how do you know that this name...","offset":1136,"duration":41},{"text":"Host: Or a phone number.","offset":1177,"duration":1},{"text":"Evgeny: Exactly, so something secondary, something which is not cryptographically strong, and how do you equate this identity to something... so MLS MLS tries to solve the problem of key agreement in large groups, but it's kind of futile because it all depends on authentication service, which is still depends on provider, right? And the whole point of end-to-end encryption is to provide protect from provider. So effectively we need a trust to provider to protect from provider and to me it's like a logical impossibility. I only wrote this post because I was asked by like 20 different times members of our users were chasing me and asking me to explain why we're not adopting MLS at like after I explained it like 20 times I said all right, it's time I write something about this. So it's not like I had some kind of vested interest into into criticizing MLS. But the point is like once the group goes beyond thousands of members, there are two possibilities: it's a public group, it's publicly available and content is impossible to protect and there is no point trying in a strong to expect that it's protected.","offset":1178,"duration":61},{"text":"Evgeny: Another possibility: it's a corporate group, right? It's hosted on corporate servers, right? So however much we may all hate corporations, they exist, right? And if it's on their servers again, there's about protecting their servers and not end-to-end encryption.","offset":1239,"duration":14},{"text":"Host: Yeah, and to be clear here, Google has 190,000 employees, right? So you can easily imagine a 5,000 corporate group.","offset":1253,"duration":6},{"text":"Evgeny: Exactly, yeah, yeah. Exactly right, yes. So but why do they need MLS for this case, right? So they who are they who are they protecting it from, right? They they just need security of infrastructure, they need discipline, they need proper OpSec in Google, right? So they don't need MLS for that. So they may use it for some cases, but it's still it's still unclear why would they use it. So but reality the main thing about privacy is participation privacy I think, right? Because we've seen it all over and again that not only publishers are being like de-platformed, de-banked, high- fired from jobs, right? Or or worse, right? So like it doesn't matter that like the like if you're being dragged to court for whatever you said in public, right? It doesn't I mean, it's kind of great that legal system is not completely broken and eventually you are released without verdict, right? But the problem is that the whole process is the punishment, right? You're being dragged through interrogation, you're being dragged through court process, you have to waste money on lawyers, you have to engage with all that.","offset":1259,"duration":65},{"text":"Host: Time.","offset":1324,"duration":1},{"text":"Evgeny: Yeah, so so the process becomes the punishment, and that's the problem. So publishers kind of learned: if they publish something controversial, they have to do it behind a pseudonym, they have to do some reasonable OpSec to protect their identity, right? And and rather even if they say legal things, there are some strong and powerful people who don't like those legal things to be said, so they protect themselves. But their audiences may not do that, right? And we've already seen people in in various countries, it happens in some even European countries unfortunately, and it happens in in Russia, right? You like some thing and the next thing that happens...","offset":1325,"duration":37},{"text":"Host: You don't even comment on that.","offset":1362,"duration":2},{"text":"Evgeny: You don't even comment on that, you simply like something controversial and then you're being riddled with some fine for liking thing which in...","offset":1364,"duration":7},{"text":"Host: Or maybe you're not even liking it, I mean, we you can pull out this as an example... yeah, you're in a far- you're in a you're in a certain politician's Telegram channel and they're just taking a full list of who's in the group and using it against you.","offset":1371,"duration":10},{"text":"Evgeny: Exactly right, yes. And that's that's what's critically important. Privacy of participation is very... so so we currently live in a world when when some powers believe that they have to regulate not just what's being said, but also what's being listened to, and it's even more dangerous, right? So people want... and there is no law for that, right? There is no it's a completely outside of legal process, so it's completely outside of any precedent we've we've seen in history. So people reasonably want to protect their identities and they don't want to conflate their identities so the in Telegram if you follow 20 different channels then everybody knows all the channels you follow, right? There is a picture. The next thing that happens, you're branded as a conspiracy theorist and it's not the worst outcome.","offset":1381,"duration":43},{"text":"Evgeny: So and unfortunately Nostr has similar thing, right? So either I have to have a discipline and create multiple profiles, and it's just inconvenient, right? I have to think about it and I have to go through the hoops and like all the applications don't really make it simple to create alternative identities just for participating, right? So you end up just joining with the same identity and now everybody knows what what you're reading, what you're listening, what you're engaging with. So what SimpleX protocol achieves is that every time you join a community, it's a next set of keys, it's a next set of addresses, it's a next set of credentials, and your participation remains private.","offset":1424,"duration":44},{"text":"Host: If you want to. It's a new identity by default.","offset":1468,"duration":4}],"startTime":1080},{"title":"SimpleX Architecture: Addressing Connections","summary":"Evgeny dives into the technical innovation behind the SimpleX transport network. By assigning addresses to connections rather than endpoints, the protocol improves privacy and significantly reduces battery consumption.","entries":[{"text":"Evgeny: It's not even a new identity, network doesn't operate on a concept of identity. I think I think, Matt, let me explain. I think I think it's important to understand that we didn't really build one thing. People think that we build one thing, but even if you take our earliest white paper, like written in 2021, even before the business was started, so it says very clearly: so we build a network for delivering packets between applications because this is was the missing bit in the World Wide Web, right? I was web developer, I just wanted a channel on my website.","offset":1472,"duration":38},{"text":"Host: Right.","offset":1510,"duration":1},{"text":"Evgeny: Right, so how do you do it? You need a messaging protocol to achieve this. To do publishing you need messaging. So we created a transport network that allows to deliver packets between the endpoints. And this transport network today already used beyond SimpleX chat application. It's used by low-end devices, people experiment with IoT devices using SimpleX network. Uh one substantial distinction of this transport network was if you if you look at the internet, internet is a transport network. What internet does: it it has endpoints, like devices, right? And it deliver packets to the endpoints, right? And internet uses what's called endpoint addressing, right? Each network each endpoint is assigned an address, right?","offset":1511,"duration":45},{"text":"Evgeny: We flipped it upside down this design and we said all right, we're not going to assign addresses to endpoints for various reasons. It compromises their security, it also compromises their battery consumption because if you think about mobile devices, right? They don't have fixed address. They keep switching between networks, they are assigned dynamic addresses. So the problem that network initial internet was quite symmetric, right? All net point all endpoints had addresses, right? Fixed addresses. And now internet evolved to the point that some kind of nodes, we call servers, they have fixed address, but all other nodes and user devices, they don't have fixed address, they have variable addresses. And that makes addressing really hard, it makes asynchronous communication really hard, it makes all application really hard, because in order to receive messages you now have to poll, you have to go to the server and ask keep asking do I have messages, do I have messages, do I have messages? People believe that's how SimpleX network works, but that's not how it works. The problem with this asking is that you lose power every time you ask.","offset":1556,"duration":56},{"text":"Host: Right.","offset":1612,"duration":1},{"text":"Evgeny: So we said okay, what if we design transport network in a very different way and instead of assigning identities to the endpoint addresses, we assign identity addresses to connections between the endpoints. And that's how SimpleX network is built. We simply built a packet routing network when address is assigned to connections between endpoints. So every time you want to connect endpoints, you create a connector and slap an address on this connector, and that's it. That's all the innovation was about, just flip the addressing scheme upside down and instead of assigning addresses to endpoint... you said the audience is quite technical, so I hope I'm not going too deep, but you tell me if I'm going too deep. So that's that's the whole idea, right? Assign addresses to connectors between the endpoints. And it solves two problem. It solves problem of endpoint security because the second endpoint address is known to the network, it can be attacked, and it solves problem of power consumption because if endpoint cannot have fixed internet address, it becomes problematic how to connect.","offset":1613,"duration":65},{"text":"Evgeny: And what SimpleX nodes are is routers that route packets between endpoints. So endpoints use these routers or rooters however, depending on which country you are in I guess, so to to deliver packets between endpoints. That's what we built. And then we said all right, I have experience of building open-source applications and I know that if you build a component that's not used by end users, it's really hard to make it valuable, it's really hard to make it into a everyday business, it's hard to get adoption because you're effectively build technological cog in a large wheel and you have to convince people to use... I'm talking about my library for data validation, right? I built like starting from 2015, I built a JavaScript library that now has close to a billion downloads every month because it's used probably by like, I don't know, most JavaScript applications depend on it...","offset":1678,"duration":51},{"text":"Host: Which one?","offset":1729,"duration":1},{"text":"Evgeny: It is, right? It's it's one of the biggest used libraries because it's in a dependency chain of many applications, but most people don't know it exists because it's a it's a little cog well, not so little, it's a highly reliable cog in the wheel that's surviving AI-led attacks right now, people try to find highly reliable, it's been highly supported, used by lots of people. My kind of thinking when we designed this transport network is we'll have to build application in parallel, we we cannot just build transport network and hope that it somehow used, we have to build some application that uses this transport network.","offset":1730,"duration":36},{"text":"Host: You're proving the use case.","offset":1766,"duration":2},{"text":"Evgeny: Effectively. So we build SimpleX chat. And what is SimpleX chat? SimpleX chat is a peer-to-peer messenger that uses this transport network. And the fact that SimpleX chat doesn't need identities for the end users is a direct consequences of transport network not having endpoint addresses and instead having connector addresses. So and these two things have been evolving in parallel. They live in different code repositories, they obviously SimpleX chat application uses library provided by SimpleX network software, but for us it's always been like two things are evolving in parallel and try to make this whole ecosystem work but together, right? But and that's that's the foundation of technology we built.","offset":1768,"duration":53},{"text":"Host: That makes a lot of sense to me. I mean, so the dream is that you have that there'll be many different applications and use cases on top of this protocol, but SimpleX is the first one and it's paving the way and proving how it works and how how resilient it is, right?","offset":1821,"duration":19}],"startTime":1472},{"title":"SimpleX as an Application Platform","summary":"The discussion shifts to viewing SimpleX as a platform akin to a web browser. They explore exciting use cases like trust-minimized crypto swaps and interacting with AI chatbots over a secure transport layer.","entries":[{"text":"Evgeny: Correct. SimpleX yes, correct, yes. We see SimpleX chat platform also as potentially a platform for applications similar to a browser, right? We're already playing with the idea of adopting programming language that will enable to have widgets in a chat that have some custom interactivity, etc., etc. So SimpleX chat in itself is also like a platform you can develop on, and people already develop chatbots, right? So there was like I was very excited to see that guys from Unstoppable, you you know this Unstoppable wallet people probably, right? So they developed a chatbot that allows to do swaps via SimpleX chat chatbot.","offset":1840,"duration":38},{"text":"Host: Yeah.","offset":1878,"duration":1},{"text":"Evgeny: And the good thing is like you're doing swap without connecting to any server, without exposing your IP address, without sharing your transport information, you're effectively... yeah, there is it's not completely trustless, of course. Yes, you you trust some swap providers...","offset":1879,"duration":14},{"text":"Host: Right.","offset":1893,"duration":1},{"text":"Evgeny: But SimpleX chat itself is rather trustless, right? And you can...","offset":1894,"duration":4},{"text":"Host: The communication protocol is is trust-minimized.","offset":1898,"duration":4},{"text":"Evgeny: Yeah, and private. Yeah. So so we and I mean, it makes sense because I do think, you know, I think the truth is somewhere in the middle and there's a lot of hype, but I do think the UX of how people interact with a lot of these things is moving to like that AI chat interface. We're like going from we're going away from the world of point-and-click and more to the world of ask and get, you know, where you're like just asking an agent for something. And then it's the question becomes and we've seen it with the OpenCola movement, which is the fastest growing open-source project, end-user open-source project of all time, and everyone's using Telegram or Discord, centralized and not private at all, right?","offset":1902,"duration":50},{"text":"Evgeny: 100%. And I I I agree with you. You know I was a CTO at startup that was selling fashion via WhatsApp, right? To me, commerce moving to messaging environment, all interaction with services moving to messaging environment, was like inevitable future of technology because this whole kind of point-and-click interface, they requires a lot of like thinking about what to point and what to click, right? And sometimes just want to ask, and the the constraint was always an intelligence of or or like some ability to interpret our requests if they are said in plain language, right? And we certainly past the point when we can get very valuable responses from LLMs, right? But the problem now is that the whole kind of communication pipes around LLMs are extremely insecure. Not just LLM provider can read what we say, but like all the transport environment around it is not quite secure, plus we are not private with that. So I think I think what we're building can be an interesting transport layer for interacting with LLM models.","offset":1952,"duration":71},{"text":"Host: Yeah, I mean, you especially see it the commerce as messenger in the developing world. Like whenever I'm in Latin America, it's very obvious. Um and I mean, to tie it back to Bitcoin again, the number one way that people do p2p Bitcoin trades is through WhatsApp, is through existing messengers. Not through like application interfaces. They're going they're going into WhatsApp, they have their broker-dealer or whatever and they're just messaging them directly there and exchanging information.","offset":2023,"duration":33}],"startTime":1840},{"title":"Router Trust Model and Preventing Collusion","summary":"Evgeny outlines the minimal hardware requirements to run a SimpleX router. He explains how the protocol prevents servers from observing message contents or correlating IP addresses through multi-hop routing.","entries":[{"text":"Host: I uh so I want to pull it back for a second. The so the key here the the SimpleX servers, right? Anyone can run a SimpleX server. The they are they're routers, they're routing the communication between each other. Um how heavy is that burden and what trust is being put in the server by the users?","offset":2056,"duration":36},{"text":"Evgeny: The burden that router holds is very much dependent on the traffic. If you're just running a set of routers for a small group, you can have single core virtual machine with like half gigabyte of RAM or even less.","offset":2092,"duration":16},{"text":"Host: Super minimal.","offset":2108,"duration":2},{"text":"Evgeny: Yes, yes. It's it's extremely low uh resource consumption because all it does it receives a message. We our default implementation doesn't use any database layers. It can run on like it's just single executable that keeps the state in memory with a fall-back state in a append-only logs, so effectively it wouldn't lose the connections even on hard reset. It may lose some messages on hard reset, but if it if it terminates normally, it wouldn't lose any messages, it will persist them on stop. So we don't we don't run these in memory servers anymore for those that are processing up, we use Postgres uh database for that and we know quite a few people who migrated to Postgres database as well who run them in their companies or in their working groups, so they use use those routers with with Postgres database with high traffic. It's more efficient, but still we're talking about relatively low power uh machines or virtual environments that can transform millions of messages.","offset":2110,"duration":68},{"text":"Host: So I'm just trying to like I'm trying to key in here on what you perceive as... yeah, go on.","offset":2178,"duration":8},{"text":"Evgeny: You said you asked the second question was trust, right? The level of trust.","offset":2186,"duration":3},{"text":"Host: Yes.","offset":2189,"duration":2},{"text":"Evgeny: I think I think we probably thanks to our advisor, we have been very explicit about trust model. It's in our white paper. So servers obviously can routers disrupt communications, right? So we trust routers not to do it. But what they cannot do is important: they cannot compromise end-to-end encryption because they do not participate in key exchange, key exchange happens out-of-band. They cannot drop messages undetectably, they cannot insert messages undetectably. So the best the server can do is just delay communications or like send lots of spam traffic to the end-user device.","offset":2191,"duration":45},{"text":"Host: It's like reliability and uptime is the trust basically, right?","offset":2236,"duration":5},{"text":"Evgeny: Yes, yes, effectively yeah. And with server with the routers that we run we had very we had no much problem, right? I had like very funny situation when somebody who I connected like on a day of the first mobile app launch for years ago, recently messaged me and said hello, I said okay this is like four years ago, the connection somehow survived through all this time. So yes, so we we aim to minimize the trust and also if initial design had a single router in a message passing chain and obviously even though on a SimpleX protocol layer servers don't have identities there is IP protocol layer, right? And if server can if router can observe IP address of one party and IP address of another party...","offset":2241,"duration":46},{"text":"Host: My next question. Yep.","offset":2287,"duration":3},{"text":"Evgeny: Then they can see who talks to home. So on IP address level, right? So we changed the routing protocol so now messages are passed always through two routers, so even though the first router in a message passing path... okay, so each conversation we use four routers, right? When I say two routers, it's a one-way communication, right?","offset":2290,"duration":19},{"text":"Host: Okay.","offset":2309,"duration":2},{"text":"Evgeny: So I can be messaging you through one router and using anour another router to connects to yours, and when you're replying, you also would be using two routers. So effectively you choose the routers to receive messages from and I choose the routers to forward the messages to your router.","offset":2311,"duration":18},{"text":"Host: And they would all have to collude to connect the IP addresses.","offset":2329,"duration":3},{"text":"Evgeny: It's really hard, yes. They'll have to and it's really hard because it means they'll have to do some coordinated protocol changes and introduce some additional metadata in the message envelopes. So I would say it's not impossible, of course, if routers collude they can do timing correlation and compare those things. But the technical bar is quite high. And the clients are already programmed to use router not just different routers but routers of different operators. We introduced the concept of router operator, app understands that, and it will already has two preset operators right now, there will be more, so and if you add your routers then there will be third operator. So app knows this concept of not just router but of router operator and it chooses different operators, so different entities.","offset":2332,"duration":70},{"text":"Evgeny: That was my biggest criticism of Tor by the way, because Tor network is built on the idea that you choose three relays on on a packet passing path, right? But you don't control the relay choice, or you have limited control of relay choice, right? And we know that there are large entities operating those relays on Tor network, right? And we know that there are entities who sell traffic data as well, so effectively this whole kind of idea that different servers, different relays means that they don't collude is kind of questionable, right?","offset":2402,"duration":32},{"text":"Host: Right. the whole model is based on at least one honest actor in the route, but if it's all the same actor, then the the assumption breaks down.","offset":2434,"duration":8},{"text":"Evgeny: Exactly, yeah, and given that you have limited control of those again, there are some advanced settings, but by default you don't choose and it means that it means that you potentially don't don't have privacy of of the circuit. I think it's important thing for SimpleX protocols like if you compare with Tor, right? On Tor you create a persistent circuit. So you build a circuit and then all the packets come through this circuit and then this circuit can see all the packets on they understand they all understand that's the same circuit, it's persistent circuit, right? Uh so even though like for example it's a session design, right? So you may message different people through this network, but uh who the the server that receives your messages would know that they come from the same person, because they come through the same circuit. And you understand, right? Like because the session is the same, different packets come out of the same session, it means that you know at least that it's the same person communicating all these different contacts, right? With SimpleX network we designed it differently, we do the same as mixnet do, effectively there's no circuit, there is a packet level anonymity and the recipient router it doesn't know whether packets come from the same session or from different session, so it only knows that they come to different recipients, right? And the forwarding router again it doesn't know how many addresses would be because there is end-to-end encryption between sender and the receiving router, going deeper into technical details. So effectively they cannot establish who talks to home on a cryptographic level because the each each packet is anonymous in this message passing.","offset":2442,"duration":110}],"startTime":2056},{"title":"The Discovery Problem","summary":"The host asks how users find and connect with each other without centralized identifiers like phone numbers. Evgeny explains the use of QR codes and encrypted, out-of-band links to establish connections seamlessly.","entries":[{"text":"Host: That's awesome. Yeah, makes collusion significantly more difficult by default, which is key because defaults are what matter, most people are not going to actually be changing things. How do you how do you handle the like the discovery problem? And by discovery problem I mean it can mean a bunch of different things. What I mean is: you message me and I'm connected to a different router than you are. How does the path get determined? Like how does it how does it get to me? Right? You know what I mean?","offset":2552,"duration":107},{"text":"Evgeny: Your address, you publish an address, right? So we don't have have anything in the protocol or in the app to help me discover your address. That's the future uh...","offset":2659,"duration":12},{"text":"Host: That's that's a separate discovery problem, that's not what I'm talking about here. You went to my website and there was a there was my my address was there. So we just used a traditional website for that part of the discovery problem.","offset":2671,"duration":14},{"text":"Evgeny: Correct. The address... the way it works now, the way it worked before, the address itself contained the router address.","offset":2685,"duration":8},{"text":"Host: Okay.","offset":2693,"duration":1},{"text":"Evgeny: The way it works now, the address contains a a reference to an encrypted piece of data which contains the reference to the address which I have to message. So the address itself cryptographically bound to the point I have to forward my messages to. So your your router is determined by your address, and the router I choose to forward messages to this address packets is randomly chosen from my configuration from my client configuration. So my client says, okay, I will choose any router, but it will try to use router of another operator than you use.","offset":2694,"duration":40},{"text":"Host: Right.","offset":2734,"duration":1},{"text":"Evgeny: And when I send the first message to your address, when the client sends the first message, it includes the reply address end-to-end encrypted.","offset":2735,"duration":29},{"text":"Host: Got it. So it gives you a discovery path basically to get...","offset":2764,"duration":4},{"text":"Evgeny: Yeah, yeah, your client learns where it can reach me. When I message you, it's all it's all works rather seamlessly and on a technical level discovery is not a problem. Obviously, the whole idea is like for for us, right? We have a support team member who answers users' request. The most common request is how do I connect to people? Like where do I where do I type the name? Where do I type the phone number? How the hell like how is it even working, right? So the whole idea that you have to create a link and then share the link with somebody else in order to connect is is alien to absolute majority of people. We're doing a lot of redesign of this initial connecting experience right now to to make it easier to understand. We don't change anything in...","offset":2768,"duration":39},{"text":"Host: I will say the in-person is more intuitive than not because in-person you just scan a QR code boom.","offset":2807,"duration":6},{"text":"Evgeny: Yes, yes, yes, yes. But that was like literally version one of the app had nothing else, right? It you could scan a QR code and you could start sending text messages, that was what we released four years ago.","offset":2813,"duration":15}],"startTime":2552},{"title":"Scaling Encrypted Groups and Channels","summary":"Evgeny explains how the double ratchet protocol successfully scales for medium-sized groups. For massive broadcast groups, he introduces the concept of chat relays that efficiently rebroadcast messages.","entries":[{"text":"Host: But yeah, that makes sense to me. Okay, so one of the things that MLS does attempt to solve is uh is this idea of groups scaling poorly in encrypted chat. So a lot of times the most basic and you know you can correct me where I'm wrong here, my most basic interpretation of how standard encrypted group chats work, whether it's Signal or Matrix or any of the existing ones, is I'm basically if there's 50 people in the group I'm sending 50 individual encrypted messages every time I'm sending a group text, but the UI is making it look like it's just one message in a group text. But in the background what's really happening is every message has to be sent to every group member and private you know encrypted separately. My understanding is part of the MLS spec is trying to solve that scaling limitation because maybe it works at like 20 people, maybe it works at 50, but once you get to like 2,000, 5,000 people, it's insane, you're like basically DDOSing each other. Um and then the servers would obviously have a lot more overhead attached to them. So how are you thinking about that? Is that a real limitation? Is that and how are you mitigating it?","offset":2828,"duration":82},{"text":"Evgeny: Okay, so there are several questions, I'll try to answer all of them. So first, let's not that's not that's not exactly how Signal works, right? You're not sending messages to each member. What you do is you generate a random key for this message, and then you encrypt the key itself for 50 people, but the message is encrypted only once. So for example if your message is like 200 characters, but your key is rather small, you don't need to send message 50 times and you don't need to send message to 50 people in Signal. You encrypt message with the same key and then you encrypt key with different...","offset":2910,"duration":26},{"text":"Evgeny: I think realistically, to me, pairwise ratchets, like pairwise double ratchet, so for each member you encrypt separate key, it scales to quite large numbers. It scales reasonably well to even 5,000 recipients, and that's how we see large groups with end-to-end encryption in future. Not MLS spec, but effectively what Signal does. So Signal works... Signal limited it with 1,000 because they have like tens of millions of users and some of them are on really bad internet and they don't want to have and very low power devices, so they don't want to go beyond 1,000 with end-to-end encrypted groups. But I think even 5, 10,000 is a tractable approach if you only encrypt keys and not the whole message. But beyond that it's just like, it feels like you're not... you cannot remember 10,000 people. You don't know who's in a groups, you don't know who reads it, like what's the point of end-to-end encryption?","offset":2936,"duration":61},{"text":"Host: Right. So then we're moving into the channels, right?","offset":2997,"duration":2},{"text":"Evgeny: Yeah, effectively.","offset":2999,"duration":1},{"text":"Host: So then how are you envisioning the channels set up and what does that... what does that look like in practice?","offset":3000,"duration":6},{"text":"Evgeny: From user experience point of view, you just it works in a same way. You scan the link, you join the channel, you start receiving messages. The difference is that if you have right to send messages to the channel, then instead of sending it to whatever number of subscribers—1, 10, 1,000, 50,000 subscribers—you send it only to chat relays and they do rebroadcast.","offset":3006,"duration":25},{"text":"Host: The server.","offset":3031,"duration":1},{"text":"Evgeny: It is not exactly the server. It is again, it's some sort of a message... it uses client-side technology because you are not connecting to this chat relay over the internet. Effectively chat relay is a messaging client that cosplays or roleplays as a server, right? That is a router, right? So it receives your message as a SimpleX client, right? And it has... it's a special kind of client because you're never connecting to it directly. You don't know its IP address, you don't you only have its SimpleX address, forwards your messages through SimpleX network. You connect to it via SimpleX network and it forwards the messages to SimpleX network. So unlike Nostr relays, you never build direct internet connection to this relay.","offset":3032,"duration":47}],"startTime":2828},{"title":"Verifiability vs. Plausible Deniability","summary":"The speakers debate the trade-offs between verifiable cryptographic signatures and plausible deniability (repudiation). They discuss why preserving the deniability of private conversations is paramount, even in the age of AI deepfakes.","entries":[{"text":"Host: Okay, I mean to help me understand, maybe it's more helpful because if I don't understand it then it's less likely other people understand it. Let's say, I don't know, some politician wants to has a 100,000 person channel, right? Wants to broadcast to his audience 100,000 people big. What does that look like? Is he running his own chat server and who's running the chat relays and how does that all fit together?","offset":3079,"duration":31},{"text":"Evgeny: It's not different from who runs SimpleX network routers. It can be... there will be some chat relays that run by third parties pre-installed in the app. He can run his own. And each channel can have multiple. Our idea is that you want more than one chat relay in each channel for redundancy, for censorship resistance, for mitigating any trust issues. So the way we designed the protocol and already implements it is that some critical messages are signed by senders so they cannot be faked. Most messages are not signed, but they are kind of delivered redundantly and recipient clients can simply see if some relay decides to invent messages or change messages or... so we've like, that's in case they are not end-to-end encrypted, right? We're talking about public channels at this point.","offset":3110,"duration":53},{"text":"Host: Right. The big thing with public channels is not is not necessarily encryption of the content. It's verifiability of the content that it hasn't been changed in transit and privacy of the participants. Correct?","offset":3163,"duration":15},{"text":"Evgeny: Correct, yes. And end-to-end encryption between this relay and the participant helps privacy, right? Because there is end-to-end encryption between relay and participant all the traffic information is not uniform so transport network cannot observe the content, it cannot correlate the content, it cannot understand which groups you are receiving content from for the same reason it's end-to-end encrypted. So end-to-end encrypted and end-to-end between these broadcasting relay and the members helps privacy of the members. Because without end-to-end encryption transport network could see content, right? And if transport network could see content they know what you're reading, right? So this end-to-end encryption is very important to provide participation privacy.","offset":3178,"duration":51},{"text":"Host: Right, and then the members are known.","offset":3229,"duration":2},{"text":"Evgeny: Exactly, yeah. But and with end-to-end encryption transport network can see nothing, and chat relays don't see your IP address so they kind of protect you from each other.","offset":3231,"duration":11},{"text":"Host: And then from the... what why aren't all you mentioned so the broadcaster, let's call him the broadcaster in this in this scenario, the guy who owns the channel that's sending out the messages to people. You said every message isn't signed. Why isn't every message signed? Is it a is it an efficiency thing or...","offset":3242,"duration":23},{"text":"Evgeny: No, there is no cost in signing messages, but it's always a double-edged sword, right? So like one of the qualities in communication is deniability, right? So the double ratchet protocol has this quality called repudiation, which means that it's not possible to prove to a third party that you actually ever sent this message because the message is is encrypted by the key that the recipient also possesses. The second you start signing the message you're effectively putting your signature on the message saying \"I actually said that\" so you lose the deniability.","offset":3265,"duration":40},{"text":"Host: Because it's verifiable.","offset":3305,"duration":2},{"text":"Evgeny: Yeah, it's not just it's not just verifiable it's also non-repudiable. So you cannot no longer say \"I've no idea where this message come from, I never sent it\" like...","offset":3307,"duration":11},{"text":"Host: We see that issue with a separate rabbit hole that I've dove down in the past, which is the idea of of of more modern voting techniques that would involve a signed receipt, and that issue there is you could have an employer or a husband or a government come to you and be able to with with no doubt whatsoever know how you voted and then pressure you accordingly. Because on the surface it seems like such a great idea. It's like, oh, I should have a verifiable receipt so I can make sure they're not faking the votes. But then all of a sudden you realize why votes are supposed to be private in democracies.","offset":3318,"duration":40},{"text":"Evgeny: Exactly right. So we we effectively saying \"okay so some critical like for example if the command you are sending to chat relay is to remove a member it should be signed, right? because the consequences of of relay removing a member are irreversible so you have or for example you say I want to delete a channel, right? This action requires your signature because it's irreversible and it's destructive, right? So everything irreversible and destructive we add signature by default as a requirement and receiving clients will simply refuse to process the message if it's not properly signed. And your key is cryptographically bound to the channel link. So this is like we we build this whole kind of cryptographic trust chain with the channel owner that when the member when the subscriber just joins your channel they already get the key from the link, it cannot be faked, so effectively they know your credentials for this channel from the get-go from them joining, right? Relays can't fake it.","offset":3358,"duration":66},{"text":"Host: And they have that locally.","offset":3424,"duration":1},{"text":"Evgeny: Exactly, yeah. But for messages we want to make it an opt-in. If you really want to sign important messages then maybe we would provide it as as an option or as a feature, but we I believe it's wrong to make it a default. Because think about that. Let's say you already have five relays in a group, right? These five relays are operated by different entities, right? If one of them decides to substitute the message the recipient client will see it and say \"wait what's going on here?\" right? \"So there is some kind of trust violation here.\" Four said one thing and one said a different thing. Exactly. And I think it's actually better than signature because that gives them similar degree of trust right probability of four relays colluding if they are run by different parties, right, is low. Right? And especially if the politician himself runs the relay, right? So then then what's the chances of it being replaced? But at the same time the message cannot be used as you said as a signed receipt which kind of which can be used as a proof of of doing that, right? So like it...","offset":3425,"duration":74},{"text":"Host: That kind of makes sense to me. It it still solves the main underlying problem which I think is going to become a bigger concern is as digital communications become the main way people digest information, there are serious real-world consequences on what influential people say and we've seen this. Trump sends out a Truth Social post and military is moved and markets react and meanwhile there's zero way for me to know that Trump actually sent the Truth Social post, right? There's a bunch of men in the middle that could can fake that. And we haven't seen a large-scale repercussion yet of that type of attack, but I assume it's going to happen sooner rather than later and so it's important that there is at least some level of verifiability or trust here, and I see how you're kind of trying to there's trade-offs on both sides.","offset":3499,"duration":65},{"text":"Evgeny: Exactly. You know there is a value in being able to sign important messages 100%. But I believe it's wrong to make it default and rather than opt-in because like, okay, so we are like imagine this situation, right? You talk to me and we record this conversation people can listen it and obviously nobody of us can deny that this conversation happened, right? Imagine a different situation, we meet in a cafe we have a private conversation we really don't want this conversation to be public, right? Who knows what we may be discussing, right? It doesn't necessarily we're conspiring we can be just having a private conversation about our lives, right? And if any one later quotes that \"he said that\" it's unprovable. We have we have plausible deniability. Now imagine if it happens in encrypted messenger. If you use Signal you also have plausible deniability because or SimpleX because messages even though are end-to-end encrypted they are repudiable. So there is no way to prove that you actually sent this message. And we haven't seen what I hear the criticism I hear from technologists is that nobody has ever used this concept in courts, it has no legal standing and so on and so on, right? But reality is Signal is the first widely used messenger that pioneered repudiation as a as a cryptographic quality in message sending, and it only happened like 10 years ago.","offset":3564,"duration":97},{"text":"Host: Right.","offset":3661,"duration":1},{"text":"Evgeny: And before anything becomes understood by legal systems we usually observe like many many of decades of not understanding what it is and how it can be used and what legal consequences of this is. So yes, there I don't know any precedence of this concept being used but it doesn't mean it's not valuable potentially. So we we like to stick with repudiation as a cryptographic quality of the protocol.","offset":3662,"duration":28},{"text":"Host: Yeah, I mean it's it's the difference between like building the technical foundations versus real-world repercussions and the real-world repercussions always happen later. I mean this is the first administration that I know of where we've seen official business happen on Signal and there was that leak of that group chat, right? And I'm sure a bunch of those group members are grateful that at least they can technically say that they didn't send a message in there whether anyone believes that they didn't send the message is a different thing because you kind of have to modify some things in Signal to do that.","offset":3690,"duration":41},{"text":"Evgeny: Yes.","offset":3731,"duration":1},{"text":"Host: I mean and to your earlier point about different types of conversations I mean this is a perfect example right because we had a conversation on SimpleX that was off the record and then this one I will be hashing and signing with my Nostr key because as someone who has spent a lot of time broadcasting my thoughts and having candid conversations like this on the podcast it does frighten me that we could have AI deepfakes and basically me saying anything without no verifiability. So I really take that verifiability piece very seriously when it comes to these types of conversations. Like I want there to be for this conversation I want there to be a historical record of truth that if some AI in 5 years makes us say whatever it wants us to make us say you can go back and see that hash-signed version of the MP3 and know that it hasn't been changed and that's what was originally said, right?","offset":3732,"duration":67},{"text":"Evgeny: Yes.","offset":3799,"duration":1}],"startTime":3079},{"title":"Incentivizing Node Operators","summary":"The host asks about scaling the decentralized network. Evgeny notes that for privacy to reach the mass market, the network must offer financial incentives so that commercial operators can profitably run infrastructure.","entries":[{"text":"Host: Okay, this is all fascinating to me. I'm really enjoying this conversation. Uh, the the big one that will come up next is, which I mean I see all the time in distributed systems, is okay, so the system relies on people running servers and relays and whatnot. Ideally the system works best when there's many many operators doing that. And this is something that Tor for instance, I think on a widespread scale, has had a lot of issues with, right? Having more independent operators running these things. Bitcoin we've as it's a it's a major contention point on Bitcoin making sure that Bitcoin nodes are easy and accessible to run so people can use it without relying on a trusted third party. We see it in Nostr with relays. So how are you thinking about this like fundamental problem, right? Which is you need as many people running servers as possible. More the better, the more the better servers and so how do you see that scaling?","offset":3800,"duration":71},{"text":"Evgeny: Right now we see lots of communities running their own routers in SimpleX network. It's I think there are some Bitcoin communities, I think there are some Monero communities that do. There are some discussion groups that run around servers they advertise it on their website. We we cannot know exact number but I think conservatively there are over 1,000 routers in SimpleX network at this point. So and that's fine and it works and people get their own sovereignty and autonomy and independence of anything that that we may be doing or anybody else can be doing which is great. The downside of this model is that your your router because it has fixed endpoint address, right? Like the whole point of SimpleX network is protect your endpoint address, right? But if you run a router this router becomes effectively your address, right? So like if if if it... if it if it is run on public network then obviously anybody knows the IP address they somehow can link it to your identity and maybe that's not what everybody wants. If you run it on Tor then it's potentially not very usable. Even though we build internet-to-Tor routing capabilities. So for example if you send messages to Tor router it will be delivered even if you don't use Tor because SimpleX routers would they can they can connect to Tor routers. Right? So even if a router is only on Tor network then SimpleX router that has internet address will be able to forward message to Tor network. That's how that's why network remains interconnected, right? So you don't have to use Tor to deliver messages to Tor-only routers. And it's all great. But I think long-term this is not really scaling because I don't know you probably seen Moxie Marlinspike Marlinspike said once that people don't want to run their own infrastructure.","offset":3871,"duration":110},{"text":"Host: Yeah, the founder of Signal.","offset":3981,"duration":2},{"text":"Evgeny: Yes, yes. So my my view was always if we want privacy to be a norm then we have to be building technology that everybody can use, right? People who don't want to run their own server, people who don't want to think, who want to use just default software out of the box and get this privacy. And that's the only way it can be normalized, right? And I think it kind of resonates with what Cypherpunk manifesto author was writing later, right? So for just writing code is not enough. It was his later letter not the manifesto. That we have to have acceptance in the society, we have to have wide usage of those technologies. We effectively see adoption as a as a privacy feature. So so this whole idea is that in order to be autonomous you have to run the server it it is not it is not it is not scaling to the future. So so that's why we want to build a network when hundreds of commercially incentivized operators can run routers and be making more money from doing that from the network than they are spending money running this infrastructure. Bitcoin obviously has in-built monetization solution, right? You run the node it potentially can mine Bitcoin and it kind of at least covers the cost of operation.","offset":3983,"duration":86},{"text":"Host: Well, we kind of lost that to be honest. I mean most nodes are not mining nodes now.","offset":4069,"duration":5},{"text":"Evgeny: Yes, I understand that yeah, but at least you get indirect benefit that you can you can use the network without trust which is kind of what we're holding on to at this point. And then also if you hold the money the money tends to increase with purchasing power so we have that going for us.","offset":4074,"duration":18},{"text":"Evgeny: I'm I'm not quite I've I've seen some talk a couple years ago at a conference when somebody was talking about running Bitcoin miner at home and his idea was that \"okay, we can't make profit from running the miner but we can convert electricity costs to non-KYC Bitcoin and it's a great thing and let's do that.\" Right? So effectively you're...","offset":4092,"duration":22},{"text":"Host: No, we do have that aspect going well for us. And there actually is a company called Futurebit that like puts the node and the miner together in one convenient package that you can run at home. But a lot of those miners just to be clear here, and it's, you know, it's kind of a tangent it doesn't really matter that much for our conversation, a lot of those miners are they have the heater in their home but then they're connecting to someone else's node, right? So it's not their node they're not running the actual node infrastructure. More are, which is awesome to see. But yeah, fair enough.","offset":4114,"duration":90},{"text":"Evgeny: So for for SimpleX network we see the imperative to create a commercial model when anybody who wants to provide infrastructure can make more money from providing this infrastructure than running this infrastructure cost.","offset":4204,"duration":15},{"text":"Host: A financial incentive.","offset":4219,"duration":1}],"startTime":3800},{"title":"Monetization: Subsidizing the Network","summary":"Evgeny outlines SimpleX's revenue model, which mirrors web hosting. Large broadcast channels will pay for infrastructure and discovery, subsidizing the network so that standard messaging remains free.","entries":[{"text":"Evgeny: Yes, 100%. And we don't want to create any blockchains to do it. We don't want to do any mining operation. we don't want to create any... but we still need a solution and we've been discussing it with the community for quite some time. So the idea is that to answer how servers are paid we have to answer first the question is what what in the network itself is paid, right? When we were just starting developing this we were thinking okay maybe some premium features can do that maybe something else can do that, right? But then we've seen what happens with Telegram Premium. We keep talking about Telegram, right? To me Telegram...","offset":4220,"duration":33},{"text":"Host: Everyone's favorite.","offset":4253,"duration":1},{"text":"Evgeny: To me Telegram Premium is is a proof that premium model for messaging application is a dead end. Because yes you may be generating revenues and yes you may be developing the nice features but reality what happens is you're fragmenting your network, right? You very quickly as a provider of this application realize that in order to make profit you have to make your application unusable.","offset":4254,"duration":24},{"text":"Host: Yeah, the best features need to be behind the paywall basically.","offset":4278,"duration":3},{"text":"Evgeny: Uh pretty much all of them. So you already there already features when I can't message people until I have or I can't make call to this people and it's just like not because they choose to but it's just like it's just fun, right? So and to me that's kind of very much a dead end for communication network. Imagine like a web browser, right? We what we built we take lots of inspirations from the web. We we say often that what we built is a missing part of the web, the messaging part. We say a next web, right? Because web has never created messaging solution as part of it. So if you look at the web, how web is monetized? Users don't pay for the browsers, right? At all, at all. Users don't pay for using the web, at all. Uh, people may say \"oh yes we pay ISPs\" but it's different story. ISP is not the web, right? It's simply a transport network that connects you to the website. But the web itself like all the DNS systems, all the infrastructure that allows web to function, it's free, right? So who pays for all that? The answer is very simple: websites pay. People who want to host the websites they pay and because every content distribution network has this distribution when 5% of websites generate 90% of traffic.","offset":4281,"duration":77},{"text":"Host: Right.","offset":4358,"duration":1},{"text":"Evgeny: What it actually means is that it's enough to charge this 5% of websites and everybody else can be free. Right? You don't need to pay to host a small website today, right? You just go you create account you can pay either $1 a month or nothing or...","offset":4359,"duration":16},{"text":"Host: Right, it's subsidized by the big guys.","offset":4375,"duration":2},{"text":"Evgeny: Exactly, yeah. So the whole web is subsidized by the big websites, so 5% of websites create all the carry or maybe 20% of the websites carry all the costs of the web. And that's why we see channels as so important because we see channel on SimpleX network as equivalent of the website. And we believe as this part of the network grows, the the traffic distribution, the cost distribution will be similar. So uh, 10% of large channels will generate 90% of the traffic. Right? And that's who they should that's who should be paying. And they'll be paying, right? because if you say \"I'm a politician I want 100,000 100,000 people audience,\" right?","offset":4377,"duration":31},{"text":"Host: Yeah.","offset":4408,"duration":1},{"text":"Evgeny: If your choice is to be on the platform that can shut you down because the current administration doesn't like what you say, right? We've just seen it happening with Trump before.","offset":4409,"duration":12},{"text":"Host: Yep.","offset":4421,"duration":1},{"text":"Evgeny: Right, so before Twitter acquisition before...","offset":4422,"duration":3},{"text":"Host: Sitting President of the United States gets banned from Twitter and Facebook.","offset":4425,"duration":4},{"text":"Evgeny: Which is ridiculous, right? So and one of the...","offset":4429,"duration":2},{"text":"Host: And he ended up buying and building his own social media network.","offset":4431,"duration":4},{"text":"Evgeny: Exactly, yes. So what what we see is a much cheaper solution. So if you want a channel that's sovereign, that you actually own, you have to pay for it. You have to cover infrastructure costs, you have to cover discovery costs, you have to cover some costs. And that's the business model that we see for the whole SimpleX network. So messaging will remains free forever as a as a add-on service effectively, and small channels and communities can exist for free, but large channels and communities carry the whole cost. And we just need to find a solution that allows to transfer value from those channel owners to the infrastructure owners in a way that kind of preserves privacy and security of all all participants within within what's possible. So so that's our view. So our view is not... our view for the network is not that it's enthusiast-run network, but it's a professionally run network, but it's run by so many independent facility and infrastructure providers that trust is minimal because it's distributed, right? If each conversation you uses four different companies, right? And those companies are rotated on a weekly basis then your dependence on each particular company is extremely low. They get profits from doing that but they have no control over your conversation.","offset":4435,"duration":85}],"startTime":4220},{"title":"For-Profit vs. Non-Profit Models","summary":"They discuss the controversies and benefits of taking venture capital for open-source projects. Evgeny argues that non-profits are often captured by their donors and that independent, for-profit businesses can scale more effectively.","entries":[{"text":"Host: I love that. I mean look, I love from I wear two different hats. I wear my charity hat with OpenSats and I wear my for-profit hat with 1031 where we invest in for-profit businesses that are often built on top of open-source stacks. And so I see both both worlds in the greater open-source movement, the foundation-led, charity-led and then, you know, and then the opposite side, which is the for-profit-led. And oftentimes you see foundations get spun up and run donationware. I mean we've seen that with Signal is probably the best example. And it's probably the easier path for these type of things in the short term. I think long term they scale much worse. Uh, they're not sustainable. You have to go out and constantly seek donations. And the incentives aren't necessarily aligned that well. I think one of the issues you start to see is longer term it's like, okay, the employees or the stakeholders of the foundation don't necessarily need to see the thing grow significantly. And the reality is in the truth is in the reality, which is Signal is probably one of the most successful nonprofit privacy, freedom-focused projects and it's found massive success but it's at about 100 million users, maybe less. And then you have things like WhatsApp that are in, you know, 3 billion plus, you have Telegram that's 2 billion plus. And those are for-profit ventures. and I don't think it's a coincidence that those for-profit ventures tend to have significantly bigger user bases. I think it's an incentive alignment thing. So I do I have a lot of respect that you've tried you're trying to go this for-profit ethical for-profit sustainable approach. And I kind of want to dive a little bit deeper in here.","offset":4520,"duration":105},{"text":"Evgeny: Look, I think I think the challenge is that I I I can go philosophical here, Frank. I think it all comes from people seeing most choices as binary.","offset":4625,"duration":10},{"text":"Host: Right.","offset":4635,"duration":1},{"text":"Evgeny: So I have heard this in my life million times: you have to pick a lane. Right? And I refuse to pick a lane. Right? When I was building my you know, I was building like I will go again to this library that nobody knows about but it's a good example because when I was starting this library there was like 12 different competing libraries and they all were either super fast and really badly complying with the specification, or very very slow and somewhat better complying with specification. So I said, alright, how how about I just build one library that is fastest and also best in compliance with the specification? And everybody was laughing at me saying \"this is the classic also XKCD comic, right? There are 14 better frameworks, let's make one more framework.\"","offset":4636,"duration":45},{"text":"Host: Here was the 15th.","offset":4681,"duration":1},{"text":"Evgeny: Now we have 15 better frameworks. Like I was sent this comic by like 10 different people in my life. Right? But reality what I learned from this kind of retrospectively again, right? So if you refuse to compromise on important trade-off, because trade-off is artificial, right? The choice between fast and standard-compliant wasn't the real choice. It was just easy path, right? It's just harder to build something that is both fast and standard-compliant, but it's not impossible. So I built a library that came to be the only library that people use today for data validation in JavaScript world because the choice was eliminated. And again, same between like private messenger versus convenient messenger, right? So people have been trying to pigeonhole what we're building into like like some people say \"oh you're building a private messenger you shouldn't worry about convenience really you should add more privacy features,\" right? That's half of our user base what says. And some other half of user base says \"you're focusing on privacy too much you should compromise on privacy...\"","offset":4682,"duration":62},{"text":"Host: It's not convenient enough.","offset":4744,"duration":2},{"text":"Evgeny: Yeah, and instead like for example the fact how you discover people some of the hurdles, or for example that we still don't have multi-device in the messenger. I say, whatever, compromise on privacy build multi-device everybody wants multi-device. I don't know, I think my brain is wired against making such compromises and we instead find proper solution that deliver both without compromise. And it's obviously slower. The the downside is like what you compromise on is time to to working product. That's that's what have to go, right? But I think reality is by taking this slow... right, I mean...","offset":4746,"duration":33},{"text":"Host: Yeah.","offset":4779,"duration":1},{"text":"Evgeny: Signal's the perfect example here, right? Because the easy path was saying, \"okay, let's just use phone numbers as discovery.\" That's what WhatsApp does, that's what Telegram does, we can do that, my grandmother can use it. And then you're stuck.","offset":4780,"duration":14},{"text":"Host: Yeah.","offset":4794,"duration":1},{"text":"Evgeny: You took the easy path and then you're stuck with that building block. Exactly, yes. It's not something that you can revise later, it becomes a foundation of your architecture. It's used everywhere, it's pervasive, it's not removable. So I think what we're trying to build is a communication protocol and product and transport network that's used by everybody. And yeah, it may take decades to get there, but I I still have time. So and talking about private like for-profit versus non-profit, going back to your question, right? I also see it as a false trade-off, right? I was when we took venture capital money, we took it like without any control provisions. It's a proper Y Combinator SAFE agreement, there are no board seats, no control, right? I have to chase my investors for advice and they are very busy people, right? But reality is we run our business however we want. And they just trust because, you know, I think venture capital has changed dramatically after some major successes when most venture capitalists arrived to conclusion that they have to let founders do things they disagree with. Because that's the only way founders... I mean Facebook was a big one. I mean obviously it's kind of a weird example to use here because they turned into one of the most evil companies.","offset":4795,"duration":74},{"text":"Evgeny: Yes.","offset":4869,"duration":1},{"text":"Host: But Facebook early days was, \"we trust,\" you know, the investors were like, \"we trust Mark, Mark is the leader of the ship, we're not going to take any control.\" But before that historically it was like VCs would come in and they would just take full control of a company and then push the founder out.","offset":4870,"duration":16},{"text":"Evgeny: Yeah, Apple would be a classic example, right? And in this pushing the founder out pushed the Apple to the brink of bankruptcy so they had to bring the founder back, right? So so yeah, so we see world has changed. investment doesn't mean control. And yet we've been like vilified by everybody like that we did it, right? So I had to write a blog post.","offset":4886,"duration":20},{"text":"Host: For-profit capital.","offset":4906,"duration":2},{"text":"Evgeny: Yeah, I had to write a blog post about why privacy becoming a norm requires venture funding. Because to me, privacy becoming a norm requires building a mass-market, widely adopted product. The problem with this premise is that it is the costs are exponential. It's like getting like 10x more adoption is not necessarily... you know what I mean, right? So you simply cannot build a mass-market, widely adopted product on a grassroot movement. And that's what Signal observes, right? Foundation model doesn't scale, donation model doesn't scale. So either you build at some point the model that allows it to be a business that generates profit, right? And again when people say \"oh you're for-profit company it's a bad thing,\" my response was always like, what is profit, right? It's either it's independence, right? That's what I think Bitcoin community, privacy community believes in is in independence, right, in sovereignty, in ability to make their own choices. But nothing of this is impossible if you are existing handouts, right? Because you're dependent on whoever gives you handouts, right? Children are dependent on parent until they start earning their own money, right? People who get whatever social security benefits they are dependent on government to tell them what to do. And it's not a good thing. So any organization that wants to be independent has to make profit. Otherwise it becomes dependent on whoever gives its money. And that's another dark side of the kind of for-profit model non-profit model because not only you can't scale it really well, you become dependent on your donors. And those donors may have not necessarily like good motives, right? We've seen non-profits who were have been like you've seen this chat control legislation, right? The biggest lobby effort for chat control over legislation was coming from non-profits funded by big tech. So talking about non-profit being a good thing. So I honestly I honestly think that morality and integrity of what happens doesn't depend on the organization form. I think it depends on people behind this organization in the first place, right? We've seen companies doing moral things and we've seen non-profits doing immoral things. Right. And I think, yeah, so so what what we are doing right now. So we kind of understand we're building network that nobody should own. We don't want to own it, right? We want a general-purpose transport network that is run by community, operated by community, which means that the model when we control the protocol, the model we control all the licensing on the software is not sustainable long term, right? So what we are doing right now, we are we already announced to the community that we will be transitioning the governance we are transitioning the governance to consortium model, which is similar to how the web was governed until recently. It's interesting by the way I didn't know about that I only learned when was reading. So World Wide Web was governed by consortium, not an entity. like it's effectively an agreement between four different entities in different countries. Worldwide Web was governed by consortium from Netscape shut down in I think 2004 and until 2023 when W3C became a US non-profit, a single entity. Which is fun. Which means the Worldwide Web that we all believe is decentralized now have a centralized governance model. Even though it's by non-profit it's still centralized.","offset":4908,"duration":191}],"startTime":4520},{"title":"Consortium Governance","summary":"Evgeny announces plans to decentralize SimpleX's governance into a multi-entity consortium to prevent corporate capture. He cites the history of Netscape and the W3C to explain why rapid, centralized innovation must occasionally precede decentralized governance.","entries":[{"text":"Host: Right.","offset":5099,"duration":1},{"text":"Evgeny: So what we did we worked with one exceptional open-source lawyer, Heather Meeker. She has authored multiple open-source licenses such as Mozilla license, Elastic license. She participated in some exciting works. She helped us draft this agreement for consortium for SimpleX network and we are in a process of setting up the entity that will be in a consortium agreement with SimpleX the company and then we'll be setting up additional non-profits in different jurisdiction so this multiple entities will be able to run network together and this way avoid like jurisdictional pressures or risks and avoid any kind of corruption from any centralized governance model.","offset":5100,"duration":50},{"text":"Host: Like corporate capture and whatnot.","offset":5150,"duration":1},{"text":"Evgeny: Exactly, yeah. Because we've seen we've seen corporate captures happen in non-profits a lot, right? The whole Linux like look at this, you're probably observing this noise about California law of like...","offset":5151,"duration":11},{"text":"Host: Yep.","offset":5162,"duration":1},{"text":"Evgeny: ...requiring KYC to flesh Linux. This is insane. I made a tweet yesterday it resonates with lots of people. It's effectively they tell you \"you no longer own your computer,\" right? Just like we're going to break and enter into your computer and demand it's a violation of like multiple constitutional amendments like certainly First Constitution and Fourth and Fifth and god knows what else is violated and they say it's okay. What what I find completely ridiculous is that all those open-source foundations developing Linux software are just quiet. They don't say anything, right? They don't the only open-source the only privacy foundation is EFF. EFF is campaigning against this law. Linux Foundation says nothing, right? All these kind of foundations developing Linux software are saying nothing. They already commit code that implements this age control into open-source code which is just ridiculous to me.","offset":5163,"duration":56},{"text":"Host: Why do you think that is?","offset":5219,"duration":2},{"text":"Evgeny: Because they are captured. I think.","offset":5221,"duration":2},{"text":"Host: Right.","offset":5223,"duration":1},{"text":"Evgeny: Because we've seen a lot of decisions in those foundations that don't necessarily they they they have been pressuring creators of software to leave, they have been pressuring... so that's not that's not good.","offset":5224,"duration":13},{"text":"Host: They're reliant on their donors to pay their rent basically.","offset":5237,"duration":2},{"text":"Evgeny: I don't know, Matt. I I cannot say why it happens. But to me it was always like always the I don't want to go into there. But the reason I bring it up the reason I bring it up is because I'm neck-deep in this with OpenSats. You know, OpenSats we saw a concern of very centralized funding options for open-source developers building non-profit stuff in the Bitcoin ecosystem. And to be clear here, there's a bunch of foundational open-source stuff that can't be monetized. It just it cannot be monetized. It would it would ruin the value prop for something like Bitcoin protocol software to be to be monetized directly. And so we built OpenSats in a way to resist that. And I think one of the biggest thing is we're a volunteer board. We're a nine-person board that's all volunteers we make money doing other things. And it's because of that concern. You know, the concern that you get captured by your donors because you're making $500,000. Some of these non-profit boards it's insane how much money they're making. And if that donor if that donor base disappears then they lose that. If my donor base disappears, directly financially there's zero impact to me, right? And I think that's a key piece but it doesn't completely solve it. Obviously if the donors disappear OpenSats is gone. And so then I I do agree to your point that it does come down to the people in a lot of ways, right? It's like I would rather OpenSats be gone than ever take direction from a donor.","offset":5239,"duration":90},{"text":"Evgeny: Exactly, because you because you are independent because you personally making profit in your life and you wouldn't let other people run your life. That that comes to who should be on a board which is also very important question, right? We still didn't form the board but we are reaching out to various people who we believe can create value for for for governance and also it would be helpful to them as well. So yeah, so we but I think it's still important given that jurisdictional law changes quite rapidly sometimes, I think it's important to have multiple layers of decentralization of governance decision. So my initial thinking was that we should have shared ownership of IP, right? But intellectual property. The legal advice from from from our lawyer was that it's not possible really because there is no such thing, right? So shared ownership of intellectual property means that any owner can dispose of it, not just some consensus is needed. So what is going on happening is that the company will be remain the owner of IP but it will be licensed to all consortium members irreversibly. So there is a specific clause in open-source licensing when there is a lien attached. So even if the company stops existing or sold license still survives this. So effectively we will transfer licensing to multiple consortium members in a way that we can't revoke it and then bit by bit we want to transfer governance of the key protocol in the same way. Again, like Netscape has always been an inspiration to me as a company, right? Netscape built web as we know it, right? Because Netscape pick up web protocol when it was embryonic, right? Nobody like you know, who who knew about the web in 199 1995? Right? Nobody knew about the web. But they picked it up they built a browser, they added JavaScript, they added cookies, they added SSL, they added like, people think cookie is a bad thing, but cookie is a foundational piece that allows you Facebook know to you is you, right? It's verifiability, right? So without cookies Facebook doesn't know who you are. Or Twitter or whatever. They created web as we know and then they shut down in 2004. W3C took over abruptly and what happened is that all the innovation stalled completely, right? Took them like seven years to get CSS to next version.","offset":5329,"duration":159},{"text":"Host: Right.","offset":5488,"duration":1},{"text":"Evgeny: The industry was so frustrated with W3C governance so they had to hold their own working group, if you remember this WHATWG. So and they had to take matters in their own hand and it was like super frustrated for everybody, right? And that's exactly what the abrupt and that's what unfortunately we see I think with many decentralized protocol because they want to be decentralized, right? But they don't understand that from the point of early enthusiasts using this protocol to the point everybody else can use this protocol it's not just time and adoption, it's radical changes in the protocol. Yep. And these radical changes require speed, commercial incentive, funding, centralized decision-making. So you simply cannot get a protocol to mass adoption without running things as a venture-funded company would run things. That's what Netscape did, right? Netscape was doing Netscape browser at a time there like 30 other competing browsers also trying to do browsers with venture funding. It didn't occur to Netscape to ask other browsers what they think about protocol changes. They honestly didn't care.","offset":5489,"duration":62},{"text":"Host: Right.","offset":5551,"duration":1},{"text":"Evgeny: If they did, we wouldn't have the web. So that's how I see the whole kind of decentralized governance. There are some stable parts of the network and changing them should require consortium vote, right? But there are some evolving part of the network that kind of on the boundary require adoption, require radical changes, and they are not ready for decentralized governance yet.","offset":5552,"duration":21},{"text":"Host: You need to be able to move fast and adopt and...","offset":5573,"duration":3},{"text":"Evgeny: Exactly. Yes. And that's what we lost with...","offset":5576,"duration":13},{"text":"Matt: Agreed.","offset":5589,"duration":1},{"text":"Evgeny: Yes, so that's what we want, that's what we're trying to achieve.","offset":5590,"duration":2}],"startTime":5099},{"title":"Smart Contracts for Revenue Sharing","summary":"Addressing criticism from Bitcoin and Monero communities, Evgeny explains why SimpleX's infrastructure plans require smart contracts. Programmable blockchains are needed for global namespace discovery, server registries, and automatic revenue splitting.","entries":[{"text":"Matt: That's why I always use like Signal as an example, because they - once again, not perfect, but very pragmatic trade-off balance that they went with. They've had - it's funny, right, because you can look at it from both perspectives.","offset":5592,"duration":11},{"text":"Matt: You can be like, \"Oh, they're a massive success for a privacy project because it's 100 million people,\" and then you can look at it from the opposite side - \"That's nobody,\" right? Like it's still 2%, right? 100 million people is 2%, if I can count... yeah.","offset":5603,"duration":15},{"text":"Matt: Evgeny, I want to dive in just before we wrap here, I think it's important that like high-level the monetization makes sense to me. In practice, everything's harder to execute on in practice.","offset":5618,"duration":15},{"text":"Matt: So I want to dive a little bit more into the details because there was some controversy around it, about how you're thinking about implementing it. And the big one is, okay, so the main operators that are doing, you know, 90% of the traffic, these big channels, are going to be paying for things.","offset":5633,"duration":17},{"text":"Matt: You basically got flack - you know you're doing well when you get flack from everyone that has all different conflicting interests and everyone is mad at you. But the two big ones that I noticed was the Bitcoin and Monero communities, respectively.","offset":5650,"duration":15},{"text":"Matt: The Bitcoin community being saying, \"Why aren't we using Bitcoin for this?\" And the Monero community being like, \"Why aren't we using Monero for this?\" So my question to you is rather simple: why aren't you using Bitcoin for this, and what's the alternative, and why is that being chosen?","offset":5665,"duration":16},{"text":"Evgeny: Okay, so one thing at a time. To have network pay, to have network function, we need to - we don't need to just pay for servers, right? We need to have mechanism how governance layer can be paid, how software developers can be paid, and how channels can make profit.","offset":5681,"duration":17},{"text":"Evgeny: And that requires some mechanism of revenue sharing and distribution between those parties. We cannot tell channel owners, say, you have to pay this and this and this, right? So we have to create some codified approach for revenue distribution.","offset":5698,"duration":16},{"text":"Evgeny: And not just that. So we also need to solve problem of server discoverability, right? So how will people learn where the service exists? How they find them out? Right? Okay, they want to use paid service, how they find it out?","offset":5714,"duration":14},{"text":"Matt: Right.","offset":5728,"duration":1},{"text":"Evgeny: Or they want to have channel names, because again, if we're talking about usability, you need to have a name for the channel, right? Nostr keys are great, SimpleX addresses are all great, they're 100 characters of gibberish. Normal people will never ever use it.","offset":5729,"duration":17},{"text":"Evgeny: They want to type \"music\" and go to the channel with music, or they want to type \"sport\" and go to the channel with sport.","offset":5746,"duration":67},{"text":"Matt: For the same reason we don't go to direct IP addresses, we type in a domain.","offset":5813,"duration":4},{"text":"Evgeny: Exactly, we type domain names, right. So how do we do it? We need some mechanism to agree on what this address means. Because if we simply give this address to a server and say, \"Okay, I will tell you music, you will tell me the address,\" the problem with that is the server can give you any address. They can execute man-in-the-middle attack on your connection, right?","offset":5817,"duration":-38},{"text":"Evgeny: So you need some way to get trust to the information you're getting. And how internet solved this problem and world wide web solved this problem? They created like hierarchy of trust, right? Certificate authorities and domain name systems, when your trust is built ultimately because you have an authority.","offset":5779,"duration":20},{"text":"Evgeny: But that's antithetical to both Bitcoin, Monero, and to us. Because the second there is an authority, this authority will be corrupted, right? And we've already seen attacks on certificates via major certificate authorities, right?","offset":5799,"duration":15},{"text":"Matt: It's a mess.","offset":5814,"duration":1},{"text":"Evgeny: Yeah, it's a complete mess, right. So we cannot build a system based on trust or on authority. We have to build a system that's properly decentralized when any information you get about the network is trusted without having authority that you trust.","offset":5815,"duration":16},{"text":"Evgeny: And the solution exists, it's called blockchains, right? So, but I think the way I see blockchain - and that was the root cause of this misunderstanding, and the way many people see blockchain is very different.","offset":5831,"duration":14},{"text":"Evgeny: Because people see blockchain as a way to transfer value between participants, as a ledger that records transactions. But that's just one use case. Like since a lot of technology has evolved, and blockchain can act as a global distributed computer that can perform arbitrary computations and arrive to consensus about things, not just transactions, any consensus.","offset":5845,"duration":26},{"text":"Evgeny: Can execute arbitrary logic in a way that it's trusted without having a single party that you need to trust. That's what smart contracts do.","offset":5871,"duration":9},{"text":"Evgeny: Because people think contract is some sort of agreement that you sign or it's some sort of an asset, or - it's not. It's just a code, right? So when you go to the server, you run some code, it gives you some result, you have to trust the server.","offset":5880,"duration":15},{"text":"Evgeny: If you go to smart contract enabled blockchain, then you can run computation and get the result, and then your trust in this result is not based on a particular node of this blockchain, it's based on the whole decentralized blockchain.","offset":5895,"duration":14},{"text":"Matt: Yeah, the best example of that at scale, in my opinion, right now is Polymarket.","offset":5909,"duration":4},{"text":"Evgeny: Potentially, yes, I'm not that familiar with that. I know what Polymarket is.","offset":5913,"duration":3},{"text":"Matt: Well, I mean, they have a similar - I mean, they have a similar problem, right? The problem is if, you know, they can't have a centralized entity taking custody of funds and handling arbitrary code, like settling of the markets, right? If a missile strike hits or not, like it can't be a single company doing that.","offset":5916,"duration":15},{"text":"Evgeny: Correct. So when we say we need - so several things should happen for SimpleX network for it to be usable and sustainable, right? We need to have a registry of servers that can receive money and trust this registry, right?","offset":5931,"duration":18},{"text":"Evgeny: We need to have a registry of names so we can discover channels. And we also have design for private names when you can discuss people without anybody knowing their addresses. We have design for that too already.","offset":5949,"duration":15},{"text":"Evgeny: And we also have to have a way to transfer value as well, but not just transfer value, but also distribute the revenues in somewhat agreed way. So depending on - it's like programmatic value transfer, right? It's like an auto split that's going to multiple...","offset":5964,"duration":11},{"text":"Evgeny: Exactly, yeah, exactly right. So because otherwise, transfer value is a simple problem and yes, Bitcoin is the best at solving this problem and the first solved this problem. And if transferring the value would be the only problem that we needed to use, then Bitcoin is a viable solution, and likewise Monero is a viable solution, right?","offset":5975,"duration":14},{"text":"Evgeny: But that's not the problem that we need to solve. We need to have a distributed computer that we can trust that will solve all the problems that require network-wide state. Because today SimpleX network has no network-wide state. No registry of servers, there is no list of participants.","offset":5989,"duration":13},{"text":"Matt: No global state.","offset":6002,"duration":1},{"text":"Evgeny: Exactly, it's fragmented. And when people say, \"Oh, we have to bring the whole messaging on blockchain,\" that doesn't work because messaging has to be fragmented, right? Communities have to be fragmented, network - but if you want to have a global namespace that is recognized by all clients, then you suddenly want a network-wide state, right?","offset":6003,"duration":21},{"text":"Evgeny: If you want to have a server registry to which you can pay money, you want a network-wide state. And if you want an agreement with those servers that you can trust and everybody is paid who is doing the work for the network, you need some programmatic way to split revenues and distribute money. That requires smart contracts.","offset":6024,"duration":17},{"text":"Evgeny: So our whole idea is behind that to program all this logic effectively on the blockchain and have server operators and network users interface with smart contracts so that payments can be transferred from the channel owners to the servers with whatever revenue sharing agreements that can be put in place as code.","offset":6041,"duration":21},{"text":"Evgeny: Specifically, we're going to build a proof of concept quite soon on some blockchain so people can have a feel of how it's going to work. But imagine you're an operator, you're going to smart contract via some service, dApp hosted on IPFS for example, and you say, \"I want to be an operator.\" You will be asked to give your details, you will be asked to like, what are your server addresses and what not.","offset":6062,"duration":19},{"text":"Evgeny: You will be asked to sign a deed. So I believe that technical guarantees have to be supplemented by contractual guarantees. So let's say, if you want to run a server on SimpleX network, you have to guarantee the users that you're not going to sell the data, that you're not going to collude, that you're not going to - so there have to be legal remedies if you do.","offset":6081,"duration":19},{"text":"Evgeny: I think that's a big missing bit in networks like Tor, because they only - maybe because they are technologists, maybe they just don't think about it like this. But I think if I'm using the server on the network, I want not just technical guarantees, I also want contractual guarantees as well.","offset":6100,"duration":19},{"text":"Evgeny: And we want blockchain to deliver it all. So participation in network would require providing contractual guarantee in exchange for making the money, which I think is reasonable. So that requires programming, that requires writing code, that requires deploying code in a way that it's executed not on a particular computer but on a distributed network of computers.","offset":6119,"duration":18},{"text":"Matt: Independently.","offset":6137,"duration":2},{"text":"Evgeny: Yeah, and there is not a single - there are choices, right? There are multiple networks that can do it. I think it would benefit Bitcoin a lot to evolve into this direction, but it's not there yet.","offset":6139,"duration":13},{"text":"Matt: I mean, why does Bitcoin have to do all the things? I'm in the camp that like if you use - I mean, because the problem is adding that functionality reduces the robustness of whatever blockchain it has that functionality. That's always been the trade-off from Bitcoin protocol point of view.","offset":6152,"duration":22},{"text":"Matt: So like if you use like for instance - and I've gotten some shit for this and this is why I used Polymarket as an example - like Polymarket runs on I think like an Ethereum Layer 2 called Polygon, right? From a user point of view, I just need to be able to deposit Bitcoin.","offset":6174,"duration":14},{"text":"Matt: Yes.","offset":6188,"duration":1},{"text":"Matt: Like if it runs on a different tech stack, that's in a lot of ways a benefit to Bitcoin holders because it's not burdening Bitcoin with that tech stack. You just need to be able to send Bitcoin to it.","offset":6189,"duration":15},{"text":"Evgeny: 100%. And that's actually solved problem, right? The whole idea of like foreign assets have been executed in a trustless way by other blockchains. For example, I think Polkadot did it, StarkNet did it, there are some other blockchains that did it, that you can hold asset on a Bitcoin blockchain but in a way that you operate on this asset on another blockchain.","offset":6204,"duration":20},{"text":"Evgeny: So it's kind of - it's nearly non-trustless.","offset":6224,"duration":3},{"text":"Matt: No, no, there are trustless - there are trustless solutions as well.","offset":6227,"duration":2},{"text":"Evgeny: I question - I question if that's the case. There's a lot of hype around it. Look, I think it's important that you minimize the trust as much as possible for that cross-chain situation. There are atomic swaps that can handle it. You know, Boltz just released an atomic swap that moves you from, for instance, Bitcoin to Tron Tether, and in between there's no custody. But you know, trust is a hard thing.","offset":6229,"duration":34},{"text":"Evgeny: I agree that it's hard to do a completely non-trustless way. But I think they are doing something reasonable with that. But that's not the point. So what we want to do is to just have ability to transact with any currency on the entry, Bitcoin of course as well, but ultimately to have a mechanism of revenue sharing between participants that enable - like, you're using web browser, right? You're not paying to the web browser.","offset":6263,"duration":29},{"text":"Evgeny: It doesn't mean that the web browsers are not paid, right? Ultimately web browsers find a way to make revenue. So we believe that companies developing client software for networks should earn revenue from the network for doing that, right?","offset":6292,"duration":15},{"text":"Evgeny: And it's not just our company, any company that develops software should earn money proportional to the usage that they are able to generate for the network, right?","offset":6307,"duration":8},{"text":"Matt: Yeah, I mean the web browser's an interesting example, right? Because it wasn't built in a programmatic way of revenue sharing and stuff, they have to find revenue streams that are very convoluted and oftentimes have warring incentives. The best example being Chrome, which Google figured out was the way you monetize it is with search and mining data of people.","offset":6315,"duration":21},{"text":"Matt: Exactly.","offset":6336,"duration":1},{"text":"Matt: While like Internet Explorer was monetized basically through Windows and Windows lock-in and Safari is Apple's ecosystem. And as a result, we just don't have many different web browsers we can use.","offset":6337,"duration":12},{"text":"Evgeny: Exactly, exactly. So it stifles competition because there is no mechanism to get revenue for making a browser from the network that requires browser to access, right? And also all sort of perverse incentives, right? When privacy gets compromised, when security gets compromised, when users' data is being sold, and that's just corrupt model.","offset":6349,"duration":22},{"text":"Evgeny: And the only proper solution is to just build in this revenue sharing model in the network so browser developer - or whatever software developers get some share of the revenue proportionally to the value they create for the network.","offset":6371,"duration":14},{"text":"Evgeny: And likewise governance of the network, right? When we say we're establishing consortium, governance carries legal costs, right? It carries documentation costs. It may be not cost a lot of money, it may be whatever $100,000 a year, $10,000, it doesn't matter. It's still money that somebody has to pay ultimately, right?","offset":6385,"duration":23},{"text":"Evgeny: And until some point it's okay to sustain on donations, right? But beyond some point it may be hard to sustain on donations and it may require explicit revenue sharing agreement with the network. So we really - I really see it's important to have foundation that would allow it.","offset":6408,"duration":12},{"text":"Evgeny: I think it's fundamentally the vision of Tim Berners-Lee around the web, right? That's why we say that what we're building is potentially next web, because he was talking about micropayments powering the websites and generally web ecosystem from day one, right?","offset":6420,"duration":18},{"text":"Evgeny: It was way ahead of like blockchains or cryptocurrencies or even understanding what this micropayments means. But I think like he was talking about the future for which we today have technology.","offset":6438,"duration":12},{"text":"Matt: Fair enough.","offset":6450,"duration":1},{"text":"Evgeny: So, so yeah. So that's, that's, that's why we, we didn't, we didn't make a final decision. We're still iterating in which, which is the blockchain, what smart contracts. But fundamentally we're looking for solution with smart contracts.","offset":6451,"duration":16}],"startTime":5592},{"title":"A Prepaid Crypto Model Without a Token","summary":"Evgeny clarifies that SimpleX will not issue a proprietary token. Instead, they plan to build a privacy-preserving, prepaid credit system utilizing existing digital assets, emphasizing the importance of establishing product-market fit before achieving pure decentralization.","entries":[{"text":"Matt: I am - and this, I'm trying to be mindful of time because this was supposed to be a tight hour and I know time is scarce, and no, don't apologize, I was apologizing to you. But this conversation has been so fascinating that we're almost at two hours. But I still, I mean I still want to just go a little bit deeper on this before we wrap. If you have a little bit more time?","offset":6467,"duration":11},{"text":"Evgeny: I have all the time you have.","offset":6478,"duration":2},{"text":"Matt: Okay, great. Uh what thought have you given - I mean, the big concern, right? I would say, is we haven't seen - so basically there's two pieces here, right? And I think the first is the reason the community's gut reaction was outrage is because most of the time when a proprietary token scheme or credit scheme gets presented, it's very scammy.","offset":6480,"duration":35},{"text":"Matt: I don't think it inherently needs to be scammy, I just think that 99% of the time it is scammy and there aren't many examples of it not being. So people default to that. I understand why you would choose this path and I don't think it's necessarily unethical or anything.","offset":6515,"duration":16},{"text":"Evgeny: It's not even that, Matt. We're not going to do any tokens or emission for that. We see a smart contract as a holder of the existing value. We're not going to create any digital asset class.","offset":6531,"duration":12},{"text":"Matt: Okay.","offset":6543,"duration":1},{"text":"Evgeny: All we want is a scheme that allows people to deposit some existing asset - there is no final decision on what this asset is.","offset":6544,"duration":6},{"text":"Matt: But it can be multiple different assets, right? I mean...","offset":6550,"duration":2},{"text":"Evgeny: Exactly, exactly. They deposit it on smart contract simply holds it. We're not interested in emitting digital assets at all and we're not planning to issue any tokens. What we want is a autonomous smart contract on the chain when you deposit existing asset that we didn't create and then you assign it to a community using zero-knowledge proof, which already decouples your purchase from assignment.","offset":6552,"duration":21},{"text":"Evgeny: And then once community has assigned credits - and credit is existing assets, it's not our token, it's not something we created - then they can redeem it to the server and then when revenue gets distributed.","offset":6573,"duration":13},{"text":"Evgeny: What we achieve with this scheme is that privacy is preserved because it's effectively you're - think about it like prepaid telephone card, right? You go into the store, you pay cash and you get the card, and then you use the card to pay for your phone, or you may give it to your friend and your friend will pay for his phone or for her phone.","offset":6586,"duration":20},{"text":"Evgeny: So that's fundamentally what we want to develop: prepaid scheme allowing you to use existing digital assets on a blockchain to prepay server capacity and do it in a way that preserves your privacy.","offset":6606,"duration":12},{"text":"Matt: Right, but then to programmatically split it between...","offset":6618,"duration":3},{"text":"Evgeny: And programmatically split revenue. Right. So we have no interest in issuing tokens, we have no interest in creating any digital asset class. We have interest in creating a mechanism that allows people to transact in a way that protects their privacy.","offset":6621,"duration":16},{"text":"Evgeny: Because you cannot really - like yes, people go through all the hoops to have privacy, they have to think about how they connect to blockchain nodes, how they do this, how they do that. So privacy is possible with blockchain, but it's not possible for mass market users realistically, right?","offset":6637,"duration":15},{"text":"Matt: Yeah, it's quite difficult. It's been a major focus of mine.","offset":6652,"duration":4},{"text":"Evgeny: Exactly. So what we want to develop is a layer that is built on top of blockchain, uses existing blockchain primitives, existing blockchain assets, and that allows people to pay for infrastructure in the same way they would pay for telephone buying telephone prepaid card.","offset":6656,"duration":18},{"text":"Evgeny: We didn't, like if I tell you that we're doing a prepaid telephone card it doesn't mean we're printing cash. We're not printing cash, we're just doing prepaid telephone card. So we don't want to do any token that would hold value. We simply do effectively treasury contract which will hold some other tokens that already exist. We didn't know - it may be USDC, it may be some other token, it may be something that people recognize as a value and use it as a transient value store to pay for the servers.","offset":6674,"duration":30},{"text":"Matt: Well that brings me to my second piece, which I would just say as someone who is pretty excited about what you're building and understands the need for it, and I don't want you to make any bad decisions that you regret later - is you know the way Bitcoin is designed and the trade-offs Bitcoin has made make it very resistant to centralized capture.","offset":6704,"duration":24},{"text":"Matt: Both on the protocol level and then also the token itself is a native asset, right? When you're thinking about how you're going actually execute on this and build it out, I think it would - and I'm sure you're already thinking about it - there's two pieces, right? First of all, the protocol you decide to build on is going to have varying levels of centralization, right?","offset":6728,"duration":22},{"text":"Matt: So Tron for instance is an example I constantly use. Tron has $10 billion worth of Tether on it, but at the end of the day it's just Justin Sun has full control. Now regulators perceive it as federated control and he doesn't have full control, and maybe that's enough for him in his use case or whatever.","offset":6750,"duration":18},{"text":"Matt: But when it comes to something as important as SimpleX, I could easily see censorship happen on that chain. Now you could - now there's varying levels of this throughout the ecosystem, right? With I would say Bitcoin being by far the most secure but not programmatic for your use case or whatever.","offset":6768,"duration":18},{"text":"Matt: And then things like Tron being incredibly centralized but a lot of people are using them as a result. And then the second piece is the actual assets themselves, right? USDC, you know, is controlled by a centralized group of regulated institutions, right? It gets frozen all the time, so does Tether, right?","offset":6786,"duration":13},{"text":"Evgeny: We understand it.","offset":6799,"duration":1},{"text":"Matt: So you got to think through these because ultimately I mean I could imagine a world where you build this all out and then if that layer gets broken, everything starts to break around it, right? Like people it would hurt the robustness of the protocol itself. So these are things I'm sure - are you thinking about this? I assume you are.","offset":6800,"duration":24},{"text":"Evgeny: 100%. Yes. Matt, you know one of the reasons why we announced our strategy and technology direction long before we have answers is exactly that. Because we usually iterate ideas internally and then when we think, okay, we don't know how to make it better, at this point we announce.","offset":6824,"duration":15},{"text":"Evgeny: It sometimes happens months or even more than a year before we actually start building. We didn't start building it yet. We only - we only arrived recently to a cryptographic design that hits all the goals, right?","offset":6839,"duration":15},{"text":"Evgeny: We didn't even - we only recently running the review of all the blockchains that can be used for that. And Tron is disqualified, right, same as many other centralized blockchains. We absolutely don't consider high degree of decentralization.","offset":6854,"duration":16},{"text":"Evgeny: I understand that downside of so choice between USDC or Tether and other tokens is effectively volatility versus centralization. So it's a - it's very - it's a very hard choice, right? So and for many - so I would say in the same way I like reject false trade-offs and false binaries, right? Some choices are just not real, right? You just invent them and you say you cannot have both. In many cases you can have both.","offset":6870,"duration":29},{"text":"Evgeny: But sometimes there are some genuine trade-offs and they're really hard to take. And with this kind of specific technology, there are a lot of hard trade-offs. That's true. What I think - what I think is important though, we're still in enthusiast territory. I think it would be correct to see what we're building right now as a - as a prototype, right?","offset":6899,"duration":17},{"text":"Evgeny: In the same way as SimpleX v1 was a prototype. And if you compare SimpleX design on the day of launch with SimpleX network design today, it's like almost like two different products, right? We have completely different layer of security, we have completely different - and we managed to evolve it all kind of with backwards compatibility so people were effectively using a different network without changing the client without having being disrupted etc etc.","offset":6916,"duration":27},{"text":"Evgeny: So I think we can do the same with payments. So whatever we build in the first instance is likely to be a prototype we learn on and that will evolve dramatically as it gets adopted, as it gets tested.","offset":6943,"duration":15},{"text":"Evgeny: Because I think the biggest test for the product is not technology, it's market, right? We kind of hypothesized that channels will pay for servers, servers will want to participate. We hypothesized a lot about the market. And you, you know it better than anybody else, you're a VC, right? Products don't fail because technology fails. Products fail because nobody cares.","offset":6958,"duration":18},{"text":"Matt: Yep.","offset":6976,"duration":1},{"text":"Evgeny: Nobody cares to use them, nobody cares to build them. And I think at this point it's much more important to prove that our hypothesis about the world - that people will pay, that servers will want to sell - are correct, right? That there is actually a market.","offset":6977,"duration":15},{"text":"Evgeny: I think to prove this is much more important than to avoid like centralization - you understand what I mean, right? So like it's much more important to - and once we see, okay, yes there is a market, it can grow, we'll just rebuild the technology in a way to avoid the capture.","offset":6992,"duration":14},{"text":"Evgeny: You can see it's the same way as we were building SimpleX network. People were telling me from day one, \"You should create a foundation and should run protocol evolution.\" But my response was look, we don't know if anybody needs it, number one. We, we don't know what people need. It's not just we don't know. Even if we know that people need something, it's almost like you know, like your trade has an expression \"product-market fit,\" right?","offset":7006,"duration":23},{"text":"Evgeny: We've been running product-market fit experiment for four years and now we kind of have understanding of what people need in terms of messaging, right? What people need in terms of payment for infrastructure capacity, we're just in the beginning of running this experiment, right? We hypothesized, we learn, we talk to people, we believe we - it's putting the cart before the horse otherwise.","offset":7029,"duration":19},{"text":"Evgeny: Exactly, yes. So, so I think, I think it's important for community not to overvalue technology choices. Of course we'll make the best job, of course we'll do decent technology choice, of course we'll avoid obviously bad - like Tron is obvious bad choice, right? There is no way - there is no world in which we use Tron or Base or something else centralized, right? So it's literally not even on the table, right?","offset":7048,"duration":20},{"text":"Evgeny: But within reasonable choices, I think I wouldn't overindex the importance of doing it right on the first try, but rather doing something that's kind of usable - we're trying to do a good job, I think we're trying to do a good job with Version 1. But that's still...","offset":7068,"duration":13},{"text":"Matt: Directionally correct and learn from it is how I think you're thinking about it.","offset":7081,"duration":3},{"text":"Evgeny: Exactly. I think that, that's how we've been evolving the product from day one, right? We built something and then it was pulled by users into some direction and we pushed in some other, it was kind of a combined effort. And I think that's why people use it, because we tell people early what we do, we listen what they say, we learn, we do something that we think - we're building it for people, right?","offset":7084,"duration":20},{"text":"Evgeny: I'm too old to do it to be rich, right? I personally - no, come on, it's like you're not doing what you're doing to be rich, right? If you wanted to be rich you would be doing different things, I think.","offset":7104,"duration":11},{"text":"Matt: I agree with that. That is correct.","offset":7115,"duration":2},{"text":"Evgeny: Yeah, there are simple ways today to get rich, right? We really think what kind of is common between us is that you kind of dislike the place where this world arrived, right? And you do what you can in your place with your resources, with your abilities, to make this world a little bit better.","offset":7117,"duration":19},{"text":"Evgeny: I think that's why we're building communication technology because I, I care about communications, right? I experimented with page- you know, pagers like I had some was dabbling with those things so like I really care about people being able to connect to other people. There is nothing more important.","offset":7136,"duration":14},{"text":"Evgeny: And me seeing like the whole world is converted into some kind of a surveillance panopticon when like you can't really talk to anybody anymore, that's just not right. And trying to do something...","offset":7150,"duration":13},{"text":"Matt: Yeah, someone has to do something.","offset":7163,"duration":1},{"text":"Evgeny: Exactly. I was saying that something has to do something for the last 12 years. 15 years now, right? So like 4 years ago I say, alright, nobody does anything I have to do something, right?","offset":7164,"duration":12}],"startTime":6467},{"title":"Upcoming Crowdfunding and Wrap-Up","summary":"Evgeny announces an upcoming opportunity for the community to participate in crowdfunding for company equity. The host thanks him for the deep-dive conversation and wraps up the show.","entries":[{"text":"Matt: Yeah, that's what compels me too. I look, I think you're thinking about it the right way. I think it's the right perspective. Obviously you have my contact now, so if I can be helpful as you try and figure things out, don't hesitate to reach out.","offset":7176,"duration":12},{"text":"Matt: But yeah, I think it's the right perspective. I think it's I mean just really well set across the board. Evgeny, this was a great, really great conversation. I enjoyed it. Maybe we'll do a follow-up in the future like in a year or something, I don't want to like take too much of your time, but I think it'd be cool to have you know kind of like a timeline as, as you build all this out. It'd be fun.","offset":7188,"duration":24},{"text":"Evgeny: That would be fantastic, yes. So we kind of...","offset":7212,"duration":4},{"text":"Matt: Just try and make it work.","offset":7216,"duration":2},{"text":"Matt: Yeah we're past the two hour mark now. This was an epic, epic conversation. Do you have any final thoughts for the audience before we wrap? How they can be helpful? I'm going obviously link to all the important links in the show notes.","offset":7218,"duration":13},{"text":"Evgeny: We didn't do a formal announcement yet. And what we're planning this year is effectively transfer and give people more ownership of SimpleX network across multiple dimensions. So this consortium governance is one thing. Another big thing we're planning for this year is crowdfunding. It's not formally launched yet, we're kind of in testing the water phase so we're not accepting any money, we're not doing that.","offset":7231,"duration":23},{"text":"Evgeny: But we will be doing it this year. We've been criticized a lot by our users for taking private investors' money and we think it's like - I think our users have to own a piece in this network and have a say in where this network evolves and not only via non-profit governance but also via having shares in, in a company that builds this network.","offset":7254,"duration":23},{"text":"Evgeny: So we're creating this opportunity right now. It'll probably launch in like three months or so, but there will be announcement soon in the blog post, on Twitter, so yeah that's a big thing. So I really wish to see community supporting and benefiting from, from what we're building.","offset":7277,"duration":21},{"text":"Evgeny: Because we're not trying to be just non-profit entity. We believe like if what we're building is the next web and we're the company building the next web, then it may be really large business and our early investors can benefit a lot from participating in that. And I really want to see community members in their numbers.","offset":7298,"duration":16},{"text":"Matt: And I don't know if you're comfortable with sharing how that's going to be set up or like was that just a traditional equity sale or...","offset":7314,"duration":5},{"text":"Evgeny: Yes. We don't believe in tokens. We will sell company equity, it will be some sort of modified SAFE agreement. We can't use YC SAFE as is for crowdfunding. It's not decided, it's premature, it's currently what we're working with, with lawyers, but fundamentally yes it will be the community who can participate will own company equity.","offset":7319,"duration":23},{"text":"Matt: Awesome, got it.","offset":7342,"duration":2},{"text":"Evgeny: That's, that's our big news for this year. So...","offset":7344,"duration":3},{"text":"Matt: I'll keep an eye out for that.","offset":7347,"duration":1},{"text":"Evgeny: Yeah. And that's, that's - I have to say what my lawyers keep saying me: we have to say a disclaimer that this is not an investment offering and we cannot accept any money at this stage. This is just us testing the interest.","offset":7348,"duration":12},{"text":"Matt: I think that was good legal advice that you received, I'm glad you said it. Sir, it was a pleasure, thank you for joining us.","offset":7360,"duration":8},{"text":"Evgeny: It was a privilege, Matt. I really appreciate you doing that with me, thank you so much.","offset":7368,"duration":6},{"text":"Matt: Thank you. Freaks, thank you for joining us. I hope you found the show helpful or fascinating. I enjoyed it. As always, share with friends and family, search \"Citadel Dispatch\" in your favorite podcast app. All relevant links at CitadelDispatch.com. Love you all. Stay humble, stack sats. Peace.","offset":7374,"duration":15}],"startTime":7176}],"entries":[{"text":"Host: Happy Bitcoin Friday, freaks! It's your host, Odell, here for Citadel Dispatch, the show focused on actionable Bitcoin and freedom tech discussion. A busy morning over here, I just wrapped up Rabbit Hole Recap, my other show, but we have a great show planned today. I'm very excited for it, but before we get there, as always, Dispatch is funded by our audience. We have no ads or sponsors. Thank you, freaks, for continuing to support the show.","offset":0,"duration":46},{"text":"Host: The largest two Bitcoin zaps from last episode... Our episode was Vexl, focused on no-KYC Bitcoin, Bitcoin donations. Peter Missouri: 21,000 sats. \"I have to admit that I often forget to zap because I listen to podcasts during my hour and a half long commute, and then I forget by the time I get to a stopping point. Although much of this is over my head, I'm trying to learn as much as I can, and this one definitely inspired me.\" Thank you, sir, for your support. And just on that perspective, that's how I've learned a lot of what I know today, just immerse yourself in things that are over your head, it means you're in the right room. Absolutely love to see it.","offset":46,"duration":48},{"text":"Host: And then the second largest zap was from RyderDie Freak Mapp21: 10,000 sats. He said, \"Great rip.\" As always, freaks, all relevant links are at CitadelDispatch.com. I know sats are scarce, I know Bitcoin... you're working hard to accumulate as much Bitcoin as possible. If you cannot spare the Bitcoin donations, the next best way to support the show is to share it with your friends and family. Citadel Dispatch is available on every major podcast app by searching Citadel Dispatch. Take your friends and family's phones, open the podcast app, search Citadel Dispatch, press subscribe. They won't know what hit them, but they'll be better off for it.","offset":94,"duration":48},{"text":"Host: And freaks, on that note, by the way, I've been... as you all know, I've been neck-deep in the AI world. I rebuilt CitadelDispatch.com. It still has all the relevant links you would expect, but it also is live-polling Nostr for the top zappers. So it's cumulative; the more you zap, the higher you get listed on the website. It's a little bit of a work in progress because it's polling Nostr live, and so sometimes it does different results, but the dream is that the people that support the show the most, the top 10, will always be highlighted on CitadelDispatch.com and you can just click their profile picture and it goes straight to their Nostr profile. Pretty excited about it, but work in progress, hands up.","offset":142,"duration":48},{"text":"Host: Anyway, freaks, we have a great show today. A lot of you freaks have heard me talk about in the past the SimpleX encrypted chat app. You freaks know I love Signal, you know Signal... Signal has its own set of trade-offs, but it's fantastic that it exists in the marketplace. The two big ones are that it requires a centralized server and the second one is that they use phone numbers as a way to mitigate spam and bots. Fortunately, they recently removed the ability for other people you're messaging to see your phone number, but it still requires phone numbers nonetheless. SimpleX is a very exciting alternative that mitigates both of those concerns, and I'm pleased to have the founder of SimpleX here, Evgeny. How's it going, sir?","offset":190,"duration":49},{"text":"Evgeny: Hello, Matt. Thank you very much for having me. Excited to be here.","offset":239,"duration":6},{"text":"Host: It's a pleasure, sir. I... by the way, freaks, I think the way this came together is kind of cool. He found my SimpleX contact on my website, Odell.xyz, and messaged me on his own app and reached out and then we got onto a phone call, and I have to say the audio calls are working quite well now in SimpleX and we set this up pretty cool how it came together.","offset":245,"duration":31},{"text":"Evgeny: That's true, indeed. Yeah, we've been using SimpleX chat as the only communication tool, obviously, since we began building it, and yes, phone calls are fine, they're fine.","offset":276,"duration":11},{"text":"Host: I have to say, sir, my whole life I've been fortunate enough to successfully have moved the majority of my communications to Signal, which is great, massive improvement over regular phone calls and texts and email. But when that thing goes down, I feel quite vulnerable. And we've seen a couple outages lately, so I'm very grateful that you're building SimpleX. I think a great place to start here is just high-level: what is SimpleX? Why does it exist? Why should people care?","offset":287,"duration":40},{"text":"Evgeny: I think my primary motivation to start this, to design the protocol and to build it, was never about technology. It was about all the sad state I've been observing the world is going to, how people were losing their jobs for stating the truths, and it all has become more and more pronounced in the last couple decades. So I... I should make some like embarrassing admissions, probably. I was never deep enough in any of the cryptocurrencies world, it was alien to me. I was never deep enough in privacy community, I didn't know it even exists. But I was in publishing. I spent a large part of my life in publishing from different angles. I worked as executive in publishing organizations, I owned magazine in my home country, then I worked as head of engineering at MailOnline, one of the largest tabloids. To me, publishing and communication was always one and the same, and to me, ability to say the truth is fundamentally foundational for the society, right?","offset":327,"duration":50},{"text":"Evgeny: If you can't say what's right, what's wrong, if you can't say what's truth, we can no longer exist even, right? Because everything breaks. And when we were building the SimpleX, retrospectively we can say it's built pretty much on the same values as Bitcoin. It's sovereignty. As primary value, primary foundational truth that we build on is sovereignty. Users should own their conversations, their channels, their connections, their identity, everything that they use. The fact that we build protocol by removing network-wide identity for the users means that now users own everything, now they are in full control in the same way you hold your Bitcoin keys. You own your SimpleX identity and your identity is what your friends see, what your contacts see, and it's not something that exists on a network, that's why you own it.","offset":377,"duration":54},{"text":"Evgeny: And the second principle was that it's trustless, right? So we always thought that I was... I just always thought that if a technology is built on the idea that for it to function I have to trust my technology provider, then it's not good enough because today technology provider can be practicing don't be evil principle, and tomorrow some pressures come along and it all ends up quite evil, and we've seen it over and over again. So the only way to make it not happen is to architecturally prevent it, right? To build technology in a way that single provider cannot act against users even if they want to, right? So it's like... and sovereignty has always been number one value here.","offset":431,"duration":43},{"text":"Evgeny: So like we had a lot of discussions with privacy community, obviously privacy community was the first to discover what we built, and obviously they had their own ideas about how we should build that, and traditional privacy messenger would be like you can always delete messages you sent even if they land on another person's device, right? And this kind of approach was kind of more and more pervasive and happens on Telegram, it happens on iMessage, and I think to this at this point we've been consistently refusing to do it this way because to me it was like I have files on my computer, I have to allow somebody else to delete those files, it's just wrong, right? So I have sovereignty on my machine, right? Why should it happen unless I agree to that? Then that was interesting. So like whenever privacy and sovereignty were in conflict, we were saying sovereignty is foundational both for security and for privacy. So fundamentally that's that's why we're building. We wrote some like philosophical almost statement recently, it's on our website, about that we don't we don't see privacy as some add-on, right? It's not like a shield and key, it's not a measure of protection, it's just literally a thing that always existed, right? We always had privacy before the internet.","offset":474,"duration":68},{"text":"Evgeny: You could talk to people, right? And nobody knew that who you were talking to or nobody was tracking where you go, nobody was tracking who you talk to, and we could have genuine conversations because this whole ability to have genuine conversation with people is predicated on the fact that nobody else knows who is talking to whom, and that was the whole the whole premise, to return it to the to return communication to pre-internet state, almost, right? When we can trust the the environment.","offset":542,"duration":38},{"text":"Host: Incredibly well said. I mean, this is something that I bring up all the time. I think first off, people don't real... the human condition is to accept the status quo as something that's always been. But we've never lived in a society that is as digital as it is today and it's getting increasingly more digital, our lives are increasingly more online. And as a result, we've lost a lot of the implicit privacy and sovereignty aspects of non-digital life and we need to protect it. I like to distill it as I say: no privacy, no freedom, and no freedom, no wealth. They're all interconnected and that no wealth piece, I think, is really important when we're bringing it back to Bitcoin specifically, but if you don't have freedom, it's not your wealth, someone else controls it.","offset":580,"duration":50},{"text":"Host: I just want to apologize real quick, I did mess up the intro, um so I'm just gonna run through real quick. Today is March 20th at 1700 UTC, the current block height is 941454, current sats per dollar is 1,432. That brings us to a Bitcoin price of $69,792 and one Bitcoin will get you 15 ounces of gold right now, we're up on the one day, one week, and one month chart against gold. Um sorry about that interruption. I want to talk... so I didn't realize your background is publishing. Is it... were you act... what... were you an engineer involved with publishing? You came from the free speech side basically, not the privacy side.","offset":630,"duration":45},{"text":"Evgeny: It's hard to say what is my background. I I always enjoyed coding, but somehow it happened that I only did coding as a hobby for my own businesses. I probably am just entrepreneur who is doing what works. I spent a lot of time in different businesses, but yes, so I was in originally I was on publishing as a as an executive, not technology executive. I moved to the technology full-time about 12 years ago, or like a little bit more, maybe 14 years ago, and yes, I was working at MailOnline at on technology side. But yes, I came to this design from freedom of speech angle and interestingly SimpleX protocol was created, invented you can say, pretty much at the same time when Nostr protocol was invented.","offset":675,"duration":49},{"text":"Evgeny: But to me, you know you know this XKCD comic when one guy one nerd says to another or his computer has like you know that, right? Like 4,000, 906 bits of RSA encryption, it's kind of a trillion of years to break it...","offset":724,"duration":16},{"text":"Host: The $5 the $5 wrench the $5 wrench one, right?","offset":740,"duration":2},{"text":"Evgeny: Yeah, yeah. Go get go get $5 wrench, right?","offset":742,"duration":3},{"text":"Host: We joke around in Bitcoin that with inflation now the wrench is like $20, but yeah.","offset":745,"duration":4},{"text":"Evgeny: Yeah, exactly, yes. So and to me, to me like freedom of speech is just impossible if you cannot say say the truth without revealing who you are, right? So privacy is not about hiding, I think it's like it's in cipher from cypherpunk manifesto, right? You privacy is about selectively revealing yourself to the world, right? It's not about hiding, right? And depending on what you say, you may want to say it under your name or you may want to say it under a pseudonym, and it's essential to ability to criticize powers, it's essential to ability to share some uncomfortable truths, and that's what it all was about. But when we designed the protocol for private for for publishing that's resistant to attacks on individuals, we said oh, that's a messaging protocol clearly what we did, so why don't we make a messenger first?","offset":749,"duration":27},{"text":"Evgeny: Right. And we're just now approaching to the piece of the technology that we always originally wanted to build is effectively a publishing channels, large communities that can scale. We're like weeks away from launching the first version of scalable channels on on SimpleX network.","offset":776,"duration":34},{"text":"Host: Like a a better version of Telegram channels or Telegram groups, right?","offset":810,"duration":5},{"text":"Evgeny: Yeah, we had like large Telegram communities that literally tried to migrate to SimpleX network. Obviously, that didn't work because the current implementation scales to maybe thousands of members reasonably well after all the improvements, but not to tens of thousands as many Telegrams communities have. So yes, so we have a lot of interest from Telegram communities to use the network because because they would own it, right? We develop it in a way that each community can run on multiple relays, so in a way it's a it's a similar design to Nostr with regards to censorship resistance, but it's very different design with regards to privacy because to publish on Nostr you have to connect to relay, to publish on SimpleX channel, there would not be no direct connection, the connection to relay will be through the messaging network which means that privacy is preserved on a transport layer.","offset":815,"duration":51},{"text":"Host: Well, yeah, I mean, let's dive in here a little bit because to me, I've always considered the two protocols you... I mean, it is interesting how that worked out, right? That they both get birthed around the same time. That they're more complementary than competitive in terms of their feature set and use case. I mean, specifically Nostr is kind of trying to solve this one-to-many problem, it's a broadcast protocol first. If I want to broadcast to the world my thoughts, something like Twitter, right? Uh would be a comparison, that you know that's the kind of use case Nostr is trying to solve. And then also on top of that, kind of goes hand-in-hand, is an associated fixed identity that can be as public as you want it to be, right? You can be, you know, it doesn't it doesn't require permission to create these identities. You can have many disposable identities, but most people are using it in a way that they're connecting it to some elements of their real-world life and their real-world identity and then they're using it as a broadcast medium and discovery protocol.","offset":866,"duration":62},{"text":"Host: And then with SimpleX, you know, you have rotating identities, maybe you use different identities in fluid in-app with different people and different groups. And it's more like... I would compare it like if Nostr's like the soapbox that you're standing on the corner broadcasting your thoughts to the world, SimpleX is maybe the dark pub where you're with your local community having a beer and talking about really important things that maybe you don't want to be on the record about, but you just want to have free-flowing conversation.","offset":928,"duration":30},{"text":"Host: Now, when you start getting into the channels and stuff, it gets a little bit different, right? Telegram channels, I would say, Telegram's the behemoth in the room, that's why we're going to probably keep bringing them up, you know, they have two billion users at this point and they make a lot of privacy claims that technically are bullshit. Um so there's a a decent amount of overlap in the communities. But Telegram channels, so Telegram first started as DMs, then they had group chats, group chats I would say I would put more in the pub kind of scenario until they get bigger. Sometimes group chats get big, they're like a thousand-person group, then you're in like an auditorium maybe or something. But then Telegram channels are like more of a competitor to broadcast media, whether that's Twitter or Nostr or something like that, where the actual participants are not able to interact more so than maybe there's a comment box or maybe there's emojis, but it's really one person broadcasting to a bunch of people.","offset":958,"duration":58},{"text":"Host: And the reason I bring this up is because net-net you want those Telegram channels or large groups, I think you can kind of put them in the same... small groups and and personal messages, DMs, I think could be in the same group, and then large large groups and large channels can kind of be in the same group. Net-net, you want them to be end-to-end encrypted, but you always historically have the problem of all it takes is one person out of 2,000 people to be compromised uh or their their phone compromised or themselves be against whatever the group is, and they can be recording everything that's happening in there. So as you move into that feature set, how are you thinking how are you thinking about privacy in that scenario, right? Because like if if there's a thousand-person group, once again I think it's important that it's end-to-end encrypted regardless, it's the basis that everything's built on, but uh all if one journalist is in there or whatever just writing it up in the Wall Street Journal, then how much, you know, how you dealing with that? How you thinking about that?","offset":1016,"duration":64},{"text":"Evgeny: I think I think, Matt, you we all have tendency to conflate what what privacy means and here we're talking about two different aspects of privacy. I 100% agree with you that once group is free to join, right? And anybody can join, then it's unrealistic to expect any degree of content privacy in such group. And it's just dangerous to rely that there is a content privacy, because if you if you expect privacy but there is no privacy, then you may be saying something as if it is private conversation but like beyond thousand peop... that's, by the way, the basis of my scathing criticism of MLS specification, right? You know this message layer secrecy, I wrote...","offset":1080,"duration":41},{"text":"Host: I was gonna bring that up. By the way, it's not a surprise that you came out of publishing because your blog is one of the best blogs in tech to follow, by the way.","offset":1121,"duration":9},{"text":"Evgeny: Thank you.","offset":1130,"duration":1},{"text":"Host: But yeah, continue. You have a blog about MLS, which is what Signal wants to move to.","offset":1131,"duration":5},{"text":"Evgeny: Look, I think it's no, actually what Nostr what what was implemented on top of Nostr with White Noise is a different thing, right? Because they correctly identified the weak spot of MLS design and they completely side-stepped it because Nostr identity is the key so effectively authentication is bundled with identity. But that's a that's an I would even say it's almost like an edge case because in majority of systems people don't see key as identity, right? People don't are not hard-wired to to kind of equate identity to the key. I mean, Bitcoin community's very hard-wired to equate those things, right? Or just generally cryptocurrency community. But in normal world, identity is a name, right? And how do you know that this name...","offset":1136,"duration":41},{"text":"Host: Or a phone number.","offset":1177,"duration":1},{"text":"Evgeny: Exactly, so something secondary, something which is not cryptographically strong, and how do you equate this identity to something... so MLS MLS tries to solve the problem of key agreement in large groups, but it's kind of futile because it all depends on authentication service, which is still depends on provider, right? And the whole point of end-to-end encryption is to provide protect from provider. So effectively we need a trust to provider to protect from provider and to me it's like a logical impossibility. I only wrote this post because I was asked by like 20 different times members of our users were chasing me and asking me to explain why we're not adopting MLS at like after I explained it like 20 times I said all right, it's time I write something about this. So it's not like I had some kind of vested interest into into criticizing MLS. But the point is like once the group goes beyond thousands of members, there are two possibilities: it's a public group, it's publicly available and content is impossible to protect and there is no point trying in a strong to expect that it's protected.","offset":1178,"duration":61},{"text":"Evgeny: Another possibility: it's a corporate group, right? It's hosted on corporate servers, right? So however much we may all hate corporations, they exist, right? And if it's on their servers again, there's about protecting their servers and not end-to-end encryption.","offset":1239,"duration":14},{"text":"Host: Yeah, and to be clear here, Google has 190,000 employees, right? So you can easily imagine a 5,000 corporate group.","offset":1253,"duration":6},{"text":"Evgeny: Exactly, yeah, yeah. Exactly right, yes. So but why do they need MLS for this case, right? So they who are they who are they protecting it from, right? They they just need security of infrastructure, they need discipline, they need proper OpSec in Google, right? So they don't need MLS for that. So they may use it for some cases, but it's still it's still unclear why would they use it. So but reality the main thing about privacy is participation privacy I think, right? Because we've seen it all over and again that not only publishers are being like de-platformed, de-banked, high- fired from jobs, right? Or or worse, right? So like it doesn't matter that like the like if you're being dragged to court for whatever you said in public, right? It doesn't I mean, it's kind of great that legal system is not completely broken and eventually you are released without verdict, right? But the problem is that the whole process is the punishment, right? You're being dragged through interrogation, you're being dragged through court process, you have to waste money on lawyers, you have to engage with all that.","offset":1259,"duration":65},{"text":"Host: Time.","offset":1324,"duration":1},{"text":"Evgeny: Yeah, so so the process becomes the punishment, and that's the problem. So publishers kind of learned: if they publish something controversial, they have to do it behind a pseudonym, they have to do some reasonable OpSec to protect their identity, right? And and rather even if they say legal things, there are some strong and powerful people who don't like those legal things to be said, so they protect themselves. But their audiences may not do that, right? And we've already seen people in in various countries, it happens in some even European countries unfortunately, and it happens in in Russia, right? You like some thing and the next thing that happens...","offset":1325,"duration":37},{"text":"Host: You don't even comment on that.","offset":1362,"duration":2},{"text":"Evgeny: You don't even comment on that, you simply like something controversial and then you're being riddled with some fine for liking thing which in...","offset":1364,"duration":7},{"text":"Host: Or maybe you're not even liking it, I mean, we you can pull out this as an example... yeah, you're in a far- you're in a you're in a certain politician's Telegram channel and they're just taking a full list of who's in the group and using it against you.","offset":1371,"duration":10},{"text":"Evgeny: Exactly right, yes. And that's that's what's critically important. Privacy of participation is very... so so we currently live in a world when when some powers believe that they have to regulate not just what's being said, but also what's being listened to, and it's even more dangerous, right? So people want... and there is no law for that, right? There is no it's a completely outside of legal process, so it's completely outside of any precedent we've we've seen in history. So people reasonably want to protect their identities and they don't want to conflate their identities so the in Telegram if you follow 20 different channels then everybody knows all the channels you follow, right? There is a picture. The next thing that happens, you're branded as a conspiracy theorist and it's not the worst outcome.","offset":1381,"duration":43},{"text":"Evgeny: So and unfortunately Nostr has similar thing, right? So either I have to have a discipline and create multiple profiles, and it's just inconvenient, right? I have to think about it and I have to go through the hoops and like all the applications don't really make it simple to create alternative identities just for participating, right? So you end up just joining with the same identity and now everybody knows what what you're reading, what you're listening, what you're engaging with. So what SimpleX protocol achieves is that every time you join a community, it's a next set of keys, it's a next set of addresses, it's a next set of credentials, and your participation remains private.","offset":1424,"duration":44},{"text":"Host: If you want to. It's a new identity by default.","offset":1468,"duration":4},{"text":"Evgeny: It's not even a new identity, network doesn't operate on a concept of identity. I think I think, Matt, let me explain. I think I think it's important to understand that we didn't really build one thing. People think that we build one thing, but even if you take our earliest white paper, like written in 2021, even before the business was started, so it says very clearly: so we build a network for delivering packets between applications because this is was the missing bit in the World Wide Web, right? I was web developer, I just wanted a channel on my website.","offset":1472,"duration":38},{"text":"Host: Right.","offset":1510,"duration":1},{"text":"Evgeny: Right, so how do you do it? You need a messaging protocol to achieve this. To do publishing you need messaging. So we created a transport network that allows to deliver packets between the endpoints. And this transport network today already used beyond SimpleX chat application. It's used by low-end devices, people experiment with IoT devices using SimpleX network. Uh one substantial distinction of this transport network was if you if you look at the internet, internet is a transport network. What internet does: it it has endpoints, like devices, right? And it deliver packets to the endpoints, right? And internet uses what's called endpoint addressing, right? Each network each endpoint is assigned an address, right?","offset":1511,"duration":45},{"text":"Evgeny: We flipped it upside down this design and we said all right, we're not going to assign addresses to endpoints for various reasons. It compromises their security, it also compromises their battery consumption because if you think about mobile devices, right? They don't have fixed address. They keep switching between networks, they are assigned dynamic addresses. So the problem that network initial internet was quite symmetric, right? All net point all endpoints had addresses, right? Fixed addresses. And now internet evolved to the point that some kind of nodes, we call servers, they have fixed address, but all other nodes and user devices, they don't have fixed address, they have variable addresses. And that makes addressing really hard, it makes asynchronous communication really hard, it makes all application really hard, because in order to receive messages you now have to poll, you have to go to the server and ask keep asking do I have messages, do I have messages, do I have messages? People believe that's how SimpleX network works, but that's not how it works. The problem with this asking is that you lose power every time you ask.","offset":1556,"duration":56},{"text":"Host: Right.","offset":1612,"duration":1},{"text":"Evgeny: So we said okay, what if we design transport network in a very different way and instead of assigning identities to the endpoint addresses, we assign identity addresses to connections between the endpoints. And that's how SimpleX network is built. We simply built a packet routing network when address is assigned to connections between endpoints. So every time you want to connect endpoints, you create a connector and slap an address on this connector, and that's it. That's all the innovation was about, just flip the addressing scheme upside down and instead of assigning addresses to endpoint... you said the audience is quite technical, so I hope I'm not going too deep, but you tell me if I'm going too deep. So that's that's the whole idea, right? Assign addresses to connectors between the endpoints. And it solves two problem. It solves problem of endpoint security because the second endpoint address is known to the network, it can be attacked, and it solves problem of power consumption because if endpoint cannot have fixed internet address, it becomes problematic how to connect.","offset":1613,"duration":65},{"text":"Evgeny: And what SimpleX nodes are is routers that route packets between endpoints. So endpoints use these routers or rooters however, depending on which country you are in I guess, so to to deliver packets between endpoints. That's what we built. And then we said all right, I have experience of building open-source applications and I know that if you build a component that's not used by end users, it's really hard to make it valuable, it's really hard to make it into a everyday business, it's hard to get adoption because you're effectively build technological cog in a large wheel and you have to convince people to use... I'm talking about my library for data validation, right? I built like starting from 2015, I built a JavaScript library that now has close to a billion downloads every month because it's used probably by like, I don't know, most JavaScript applications depend on it...","offset":1678,"duration":51},{"text":"Host: Which one?","offset":1729,"duration":1},{"text":"Evgeny: It is, right? It's it's one of the biggest used libraries because it's in a dependency chain of many applications, but most people don't know it exists because it's a it's a little cog well, not so little, it's a highly reliable cog in the wheel that's surviving AI-led attacks right now, people try to find highly reliable, it's been highly supported, used by lots of people. My kind of thinking when we designed this transport network is we'll have to build application in parallel, we we cannot just build transport network and hope that it somehow used, we have to build some application that uses this transport network.","offset":1730,"duration":36},{"text":"Host: You're proving the use case.","offset":1766,"duration":2},{"text":"Evgeny: Effectively. So we build SimpleX chat. And what is SimpleX chat? SimpleX chat is a peer-to-peer messenger that uses this transport network. And the fact that SimpleX chat doesn't need identities for the end users is a direct consequences of transport network not having endpoint addresses and instead having connector addresses. So and these two things have been evolving in parallel. They live in different code repositories, they obviously SimpleX chat application uses library provided by SimpleX network software, but for us it's always been like two things are evolving in parallel and try to make this whole ecosystem work but together, right? But and that's that's the foundation of technology we built.","offset":1768,"duration":53},{"text":"Host: That makes a lot of sense to me. I mean, so the dream is that you have that there'll be many different applications and use cases on top of this protocol, but SimpleX is the first one and it's paving the way and proving how it works and how how resilient it is, right?","offset":1821,"duration":19},{"text":"Evgeny: Correct. SimpleX yes, correct, yes. We see SimpleX chat platform also as potentially a platform for applications similar to a browser, right? We're already playing with the idea of adopting programming language that will enable to have widgets in a chat that have some custom interactivity, etc., etc. So SimpleX chat in itself is also like a platform you can develop on, and people already develop chatbots, right? So there was like I was very excited to see that guys from Unstoppable, you you know this Unstoppable wallet people probably, right? So they developed a chatbot that allows to do swaps via SimpleX chat chatbot.","offset":1840,"duration":38},{"text":"Host: Yeah.","offset":1878,"duration":1},{"text":"Evgeny: And the good thing is like you're doing swap without connecting to any server, without exposing your IP address, without sharing your transport information, you're effectively... yeah, there is it's not completely trustless, of course. Yes, you you trust some swap providers...","offset":1879,"duration":14},{"text":"Host: Right.","offset":1893,"duration":1},{"text":"Evgeny: But SimpleX chat itself is rather trustless, right? And you can...","offset":1894,"duration":4},{"text":"Host: The communication protocol is is trust-minimized.","offset":1898,"duration":4},{"text":"Evgeny: Yeah, and private. Yeah. So so we and I mean, it makes sense because I do think, you know, I think the truth is somewhere in the middle and there's a lot of hype, but I do think the UX of how people interact with a lot of these things is moving to like that AI chat interface. We're like going from we're going away from the world of point-and-click and more to the world of ask and get, you know, where you're like just asking an agent for something. And then it's the question becomes and we've seen it with the OpenCola movement, which is the fastest growing open-source project, end-user open-source project of all time, and everyone's using Telegram or Discord, centralized and not private at all, right?","offset":1902,"duration":50},{"text":"Evgeny: 100%. And I I I agree with you. You know I was a CTO at startup that was selling fashion via WhatsApp, right? To me, commerce moving to messaging environment, all interaction with services moving to messaging environment, was like inevitable future of technology because this whole kind of point-and-click interface, they requires a lot of like thinking about what to point and what to click, right? And sometimes just want to ask, and the the constraint was always an intelligence of or or like some ability to interpret our requests if they are said in plain language, right? And we certainly past the point when we can get very valuable responses from LLMs, right? But the problem now is that the whole kind of communication pipes around LLMs are extremely insecure. Not just LLM provider can read what we say, but like all the transport environment around it is not quite secure, plus we are not private with that. So I think I think what we're building can be an interesting transport layer for interacting with LLM models.","offset":1952,"duration":71},{"text":"Host: Yeah, I mean, you especially see it the commerce as messenger in the developing world. Like whenever I'm in Latin America, it's very obvious. Um and I mean, to tie it back to Bitcoin again, the number one way that people do p2p Bitcoin trades is through WhatsApp, is through existing messengers. Not through like application interfaces. They're going they're going into WhatsApp, they have their broker-dealer or whatever and they're just messaging them directly there and exchanging information.","offset":2023,"duration":33},{"text":"Host: I uh so I want to pull it back for a second. The so the key here the the SimpleX servers, right? Anyone can run a SimpleX server. The they are they're routers, they're routing the communication between each other. Um how heavy is that burden and what trust is being put in the server by the users?","offset":2056,"duration":36},{"text":"Evgeny: The burden that router holds is very much dependent on the traffic. If you're just running a set of routers for a small group, you can have single core virtual machine with like half gigabyte of RAM or even less.","offset":2092,"duration":16},{"text":"Host: Super minimal.","offset":2108,"duration":2},{"text":"Evgeny: Yes, yes. It's it's extremely low uh resource consumption because all it does it receives a message. We our default implementation doesn't use any database layers. It can run on like it's just single executable that keeps the state in memory with a fall-back state in a append-only logs, so effectively it wouldn't lose the connections even on hard reset. It may lose some messages on hard reset, but if it if it terminates normally, it wouldn't lose any messages, it will persist them on stop. So we don't we don't run these in memory servers anymore for those that are processing up, we use Postgres uh database for that and we know quite a few people who migrated to Postgres database as well who run them in their companies or in their working groups, so they use use those routers with with Postgres database with high traffic. It's more efficient, but still we're talking about relatively low power uh machines or virtual environments that can transform millions of messages.","offset":2110,"duration":68},{"text":"Host: So I'm just trying to like I'm trying to key in here on what you perceive as... yeah, go on.","offset":2178,"duration":8},{"text":"Evgeny: You said you asked the second question was trust, right? The level of trust.","offset":2186,"duration":3},{"text":"Host: Yes.","offset":2189,"duration":2},{"text":"Evgeny: I think I think we probably thanks to our advisor, we have been very explicit about trust model. It's in our white paper. So servers obviously can routers disrupt communications, right? So we trust routers not to do it. But what they cannot do is important: they cannot compromise end-to-end encryption because they do not participate in key exchange, key exchange happens out-of-band. They cannot drop messages undetectably, they cannot insert messages undetectably. So the best the server can do is just delay communications or like send lots of spam traffic to the end-user device.","offset":2191,"duration":45},{"text":"Host: It's like reliability and uptime is the trust basically, right?","offset":2236,"duration":5},{"text":"Evgeny: Yes, yes, effectively yeah. And with server with the routers that we run we had very we had no much problem, right? I had like very funny situation when somebody who I connected like on a day of the first mobile app launch for years ago, recently messaged me and said hello, I said okay this is like four years ago, the connection somehow survived through all this time. So yes, so we we aim to minimize the trust and also if initial design had a single router in a message passing chain and obviously even though on a SimpleX protocol layer servers don't have identities there is IP protocol layer, right? And if server can if router can observe IP address of one party and IP address of another party...","offset":2241,"duration":46},{"text":"Host: My next question. Yep.","offset":2287,"duration":3},{"text":"Evgeny: Then they can see who talks to home. So on IP address level, right? So we changed the routing protocol so now messages are passed always through two routers, so even though the first router in a message passing path... okay, so each conversation we use four routers, right? When I say two routers, it's a one-way communication, right?","offset":2290,"duration":19},{"text":"Host: Okay.","offset":2309,"duration":2},{"text":"Evgeny: So I can be messaging you through one router and using anour another router to connects to yours, and when you're replying, you also would be using two routers. So effectively you choose the routers to receive messages from and I choose the routers to forward the messages to your router.","offset":2311,"duration":18},{"text":"Host: And they would all have to collude to connect the IP addresses.","offset":2329,"duration":3},{"text":"Evgeny: It's really hard, yes. They'll have to and it's really hard because it means they'll have to do some coordinated protocol changes and introduce some additional metadata in the message envelopes. So I would say it's not impossible, of course, if routers collude they can do timing correlation and compare those things. But the technical bar is quite high. And the clients are already programmed to use router not just different routers but routers of different operators. We introduced the concept of router operator, app understands that, and it will already has two preset operators right now, there will be more, so and if you add your routers then there will be third operator. So app knows this concept of not just router but of router operator and it chooses different operators, so different entities.","offset":2332,"duration":70},{"text":"Evgeny: That was my biggest criticism of Tor by the way, because Tor network is built on the idea that you choose three relays on on a packet passing path, right? But you don't control the relay choice, or you have limited control of relay choice, right? And we know that there are large entities operating those relays on Tor network, right? And we know that there are entities who sell traffic data as well, so effectively this whole kind of idea that different servers, different relays means that they don't collude is kind of questionable, right?","offset":2402,"duration":32},{"text":"Host: Right. the whole model is based on at least one honest actor in the route, but if it's all the same actor, then the the assumption breaks down.","offset":2434,"duration":8},{"text":"Evgeny: Exactly, yeah, and given that you have limited control of those again, there are some advanced settings, but by default you don't choose and it means that it means that you potentially don't don't have privacy of of the circuit. I think it's important thing for SimpleX protocols like if you compare with Tor, right? On Tor you create a persistent circuit. So you build a circuit and then all the packets come through this circuit and then this circuit can see all the packets on they understand they all understand that's the same circuit, it's persistent circuit, right? Uh so even though like for example it's a session design, right? So you may message different people through this network, but uh who the the server that receives your messages would know that they come from the same person, because they come through the same circuit. And you understand, right? Like because the session is the same, different packets come out of the same session, it means that you know at least that it's the same person communicating all these different contacts, right? With SimpleX network we designed it differently, we do the same as mixnet do, effectively there's no circuit, there is a packet level anonymity and the recipient router it doesn't know whether packets come from the same session or from different session, so it only knows that they come to different recipients, right? And the forwarding router again it doesn't know how many addresses would be because there is end-to-end encryption between sender and the receiving router, going deeper into technical details. So effectively they cannot establish who talks to home on a cryptographic level because the each each packet is anonymous in this message passing.","offset":2442,"duration":110},{"text":"Host: That's awesome. Yeah, makes collusion significantly more difficult by default, which is key because defaults are what matter, most people are not going to actually be changing things. How do you how do you handle the like the discovery problem? And by discovery problem I mean it can mean a bunch of different things. What I mean is: you message me and I'm connected to a different router than you are. How does the path get determined? Like how does it how does it get to me? Right? You know what I mean?","offset":2552,"duration":107},{"text":"Evgeny: Your address, you publish an address, right? So we don't have have anything in the protocol or in the app to help me discover your address. That's the future uh...","offset":2659,"duration":12},{"text":"Host: That's that's a separate discovery problem, that's not what I'm talking about here. You went to my website and there was a there was my my address was there. So we just used a traditional website for that part of the discovery problem.","offset":2671,"duration":14},{"text":"Evgeny: Correct. The address... the way it works now, the way it worked before, the address itself contained the router address.","offset":2685,"duration":8},{"text":"Host: Okay.","offset":2693,"duration":1},{"text":"Evgeny: The way it works now, the address contains a a reference to an encrypted piece of data which contains the reference to the address which I have to message. So the address itself cryptographically bound to the point I have to forward my messages to. So your your router is determined by your address, and the router I choose to forward messages to this address packets is randomly chosen from my configuration from my client configuration. So my client says, okay, I will choose any router, but it will try to use router of another operator than you use.","offset":2694,"duration":40},{"text":"Host: Right.","offset":2734,"duration":1},{"text":"Evgeny: And when I send the first message to your address, when the client sends the first message, it includes the reply address end-to-end encrypted.","offset":2735,"duration":29},{"text":"Host: Got it. So it gives you a discovery path basically to get...","offset":2764,"duration":4},{"text":"Evgeny: Yeah, yeah, your client learns where it can reach me. When I message you, it's all it's all works rather seamlessly and on a technical level discovery is not a problem. Obviously, the whole idea is like for for us, right? We have a support team member who answers users' request. The most common request is how do I connect to people? Like where do I where do I type the name? Where do I type the phone number? How the hell like how is it even working, right? So the whole idea that you have to create a link and then share the link with somebody else in order to connect is is alien to absolute majority of people. We're doing a lot of redesign of this initial connecting experience right now to to make it easier to understand. We don't change anything in...","offset":2768,"duration":39},{"text":"Host: I will say the in-person is more intuitive than not because in-person you just scan a QR code boom.","offset":2807,"duration":6},{"text":"Evgeny: Yes, yes, yes, yes. But that was like literally version one of the app had nothing else, right? It you could scan a QR code and you could start sending text messages, that was what we released four years ago.","offset":2813,"duration":15},{"text":"Host: But yeah, that makes sense to me. Okay, so one of the things that MLS does attempt to solve is uh is this idea of groups scaling poorly in encrypted chat. So a lot of times the most basic and you know you can correct me where I'm wrong here, my most basic interpretation of how standard encrypted group chats work, whether it's Signal or Matrix or any of the existing ones, is I'm basically if there's 50 people in the group I'm sending 50 individual encrypted messages every time I'm sending a group text, but the UI is making it look like it's just one message in a group text. But in the background what's really happening is every message has to be sent to every group member and private you know encrypted separately. My understanding is part of the MLS spec is trying to solve that scaling limitation because maybe it works at like 20 people, maybe it works at 50, but once you get to like 2,000, 5,000 people, it's insane, you're like basically DDOSing each other. Um and then the servers would obviously have a lot more overhead attached to them. So how are you thinking about that? Is that a real limitation? Is that and how are you mitigating it?","offset":2828,"duration":82},{"text":"Evgeny: Okay, so there are several questions, I'll try to answer all of them. So first, let's not that's not that's not exactly how Signal works, right? You're not sending messages to each member. What you do is you generate a random key for this message, and then you encrypt the key itself for 50 people, but the message is encrypted only once. So for example if your message is like 200 characters, but your key is rather small, you don't need to send message 50 times and you don't need to send message to 50 people in Signal. You encrypt message with the same key and then you encrypt key with different...","offset":2910,"duration":26},{"text":"Evgeny: I think realistically, to me, pairwise ratchets, like pairwise double ratchet, so for each member you encrypt separate key, it scales to quite large numbers. It scales reasonably well to even 5,000 recipients, and that's how we see large groups with end-to-end encryption in future. Not MLS spec, but effectively what Signal does. So Signal works... Signal limited it with 1,000 because they have like tens of millions of users and some of them are on really bad internet and they don't want to have and very low power devices, so they don't want to go beyond 1,000 with end-to-end encrypted groups. But I think even 5, 10,000 is a tractable approach if you only encrypt keys and not the whole message. But beyond that it's just like, it feels like you're not... you cannot remember 10,000 people. You don't know who's in a groups, you don't know who reads it, like what's the point of end-to-end encryption?","offset":2936,"duration":61},{"text":"Host: Right. So then we're moving into the channels, right?","offset":2997,"duration":2},{"text":"Evgeny: Yeah, effectively.","offset":2999,"duration":1},{"text":"Host: So then how are you envisioning the channels set up and what does that... what does that look like in practice?","offset":3000,"duration":6},{"text":"Evgeny: From user experience point of view, you just it works in a same way. You scan the link, you join the channel, you start receiving messages. The difference is that if you have right to send messages to the channel, then instead of sending it to whatever number of subscribers—1, 10, 1,000, 50,000 subscribers—you send it only to chat relays and they do rebroadcast.","offset":3006,"duration":25},{"text":"Host: The server.","offset":3031,"duration":1},{"text":"Evgeny: It is not exactly the server. It is again, it's some sort of a message... it uses client-side technology because you are not connecting to this chat relay over the internet. Effectively chat relay is a messaging client that cosplays or roleplays as a server, right? That is a router, right? So it receives your message as a SimpleX client, right? And it has... it's a special kind of client because you're never connecting to it directly. You don't know its IP address, you don't you only have its SimpleX address, forwards your messages through SimpleX network. You connect to it via SimpleX network and it forwards the messages to SimpleX network. So unlike Nostr relays, you never build direct internet connection to this relay.","offset":3032,"duration":47},{"text":"Host: Okay, I mean to help me understand, maybe it's more helpful because if I don't understand it then it's less likely other people understand it. Let's say, I don't know, some politician wants to has a 100,000 person channel, right? Wants to broadcast to his audience 100,000 people big. What does that look like? Is he running his own chat server and who's running the chat relays and how does that all fit together?","offset":3079,"duration":31},{"text":"Evgeny: It's not different from who runs SimpleX network routers. It can be... there will be some chat relays that run by third parties pre-installed in the app. He can run his own. And each channel can have multiple. Our idea is that you want more than one chat relay in each channel for redundancy, for censorship resistance, for mitigating any trust issues. So the way we designed the protocol and already implements it is that some critical messages are signed by senders so they cannot be faked. Most messages are not signed, but they are kind of delivered redundantly and recipient clients can simply see if some relay decides to invent messages or change messages or... so we've like, that's in case they are not end-to-end encrypted, right? We're talking about public channels at this point.","offset":3110,"duration":53},{"text":"Host: Right. The big thing with public channels is not is not necessarily encryption of the content. It's verifiability of the content that it hasn't been changed in transit and privacy of the participants. Correct?","offset":3163,"duration":15},{"text":"Evgeny: Correct, yes. And end-to-end encryption between this relay and the participant helps privacy, right? Because there is end-to-end encryption between relay and participant all the traffic information is not uniform so transport network cannot observe the content, it cannot correlate the content, it cannot understand which groups you are receiving content from for the same reason it's end-to-end encrypted. So end-to-end encrypted and end-to-end between these broadcasting relay and the members helps privacy of the members. Because without end-to-end encryption transport network could see content, right? And if transport network could see content they know what you're reading, right? So this end-to-end encryption is very important to provide participation privacy.","offset":3178,"duration":51},{"text":"Host: Right, and then the members are known.","offset":3229,"duration":2},{"text":"Evgeny: Exactly, yeah. But and with end-to-end encryption transport network can see nothing, and chat relays don't see your IP address so they kind of protect you from each other.","offset":3231,"duration":11},{"text":"Host: And then from the... what why aren't all you mentioned so the broadcaster, let's call him the broadcaster in this in this scenario, the guy who owns the channel that's sending out the messages to people. You said every message isn't signed. Why isn't every message signed? Is it a is it an efficiency thing or...","offset":3242,"duration":23},{"text":"Evgeny: No, there is no cost in signing messages, but it's always a double-edged sword, right? So like one of the qualities in communication is deniability, right? So the double ratchet protocol has this quality called repudiation, which means that it's not possible to prove to a third party that you actually ever sent this message because the message is is encrypted by the key that the recipient also possesses. The second you start signing the message you're effectively putting your signature on the message saying \"I actually said that\" so you lose the deniability.","offset":3265,"duration":40},{"text":"Host: Because it's verifiable.","offset":3305,"duration":2},{"text":"Evgeny: Yeah, it's not just it's not just verifiable it's also non-repudiable. So you cannot no longer say \"I've no idea where this message come from, I never sent it\" like...","offset":3307,"duration":11},{"text":"Host: We see that issue with a separate rabbit hole that I've dove down in the past, which is the idea of of of more modern voting techniques that would involve a signed receipt, and that issue there is you could have an employer or a husband or a government come to you and be able to with with no doubt whatsoever know how you voted and then pressure you accordingly. Because on the surface it seems like such a great idea. It's like, oh, I should have a verifiable receipt so I can make sure they're not faking the votes. But then all of a sudden you realize why votes are supposed to be private in democracies.","offset":3318,"duration":40},{"text":"Evgeny: Exactly right. So we we effectively saying \"okay so some critical like for example if the command you are sending to chat relay is to remove a member it should be signed, right? because the consequences of of relay removing a member are irreversible so you have or for example you say I want to delete a channel, right? This action requires your signature because it's irreversible and it's destructive, right? So everything irreversible and destructive we add signature by default as a requirement and receiving clients will simply refuse to process the message if it's not properly signed. And your key is cryptographically bound to the channel link. So this is like we we build this whole kind of cryptographic trust chain with the channel owner that when the member when the subscriber just joins your channel they already get the key from the link, it cannot be faked, so effectively they know your credentials for this channel from the get-go from them joining, right? Relays can't fake it.","offset":3358,"duration":66},{"text":"Host: And they have that locally.","offset":3424,"duration":1},{"text":"Evgeny: Exactly, yeah. But for messages we want to make it an opt-in. If you really want to sign important messages then maybe we would provide it as as an option or as a feature, but we I believe it's wrong to make it a default. Because think about that. Let's say you already have five relays in a group, right? These five relays are operated by different entities, right? If one of them decides to substitute the message the recipient client will see it and say \"wait what's going on here?\" right? \"So there is some kind of trust violation here.\" Four said one thing and one said a different thing. Exactly. And I think it's actually better than signature because that gives them similar degree of trust right probability of four relays colluding if they are run by different parties, right, is low. Right? And especially if the politician himself runs the relay, right? So then then what's the chances of it being replaced? But at the same time the message cannot be used as you said as a signed receipt which kind of which can be used as a proof of of doing that, right? So like it...","offset":3425,"duration":74},{"text":"Host: That kind of makes sense to me. It it still solves the main underlying problem which I think is going to become a bigger concern is as digital communications become the main way people digest information, there are serious real-world consequences on what influential people say and we've seen this. Trump sends out a Truth Social post and military is moved and markets react and meanwhile there's zero way for me to know that Trump actually sent the Truth Social post, right? There's a bunch of men in the middle that could can fake that. And we haven't seen a large-scale repercussion yet of that type of attack, but I assume it's going to happen sooner rather than later and so it's important that there is at least some level of verifiability or trust here, and I see how you're kind of trying to there's trade-offs on both sides.","offset":3499,"duration":65},{"text":"Evgeny: Exactly. You know there is a value in being able to sign important messages 100%. But I believe it's wrong to make it default and rather than opt-in because like, okay, so we are like imagine this situation, right? You talk to me and we record this conversation people can listen it and obviously nobody of us can deny that this conversation happened, right? Imagine a different situation, we meet in a cafe we have a private conversation we really don't want this conversation to be public, right? Who knows what we may be discussing, right? It doesn't necessarily we're conspiring we can be just having a private conversation about our lives, right? And if any one later quotes that \"he said that\" it's unprovable. We have we have plausible deniability. Now imagine if it happens in encrypted messenger. If you use Signal you also have plausible deniability because or SimpleX because messages even though are end-to-end encrypted they are repudiable. So there is no way to prove that you actually sent this message. And we haven't seen what I hear the criticism I hear from technologists is that nobody has ever used this concept in courts, it has no legal standing and so on and so on, right? But reality is Signal is the first widely used messenger that pioneered repudiation as a as a cryptographic quality in message sending, and it only happened like 10 years ago.","offset":3564,"duration":97},{"text":"Host: Right.","offset":3661,"duration":1},{"text":"Evgeny: And before anything becomes understood by legal systems we usually observe like many many of decades of not understanding what it is and how it can be used and what legal consequences of this is. So yes, there I don't know any precedence of this concept being used but it doesn't mean it's not valuable potentially. So we we like to stick with repudiation as a cryptographic quality of the protocol.","offset":3662,"duration":28},{"text":"Host: Yeah, I mean it's it's the difference between like building the technical foundations versus real-world repercussions and the real-world repercussions always happen later. I mean this is the first administration that I know of where we've seen official business happen on Signal and there was that leak of that group chat, right? And I'm sure a bunch of those group members are grateful that at least they can technically say that they didn't send a message in there whether anyone believes that they didn't send the message is a different thing because you kind of have to modify some things in Signal to do that.","offset":3690,"duration":41},{"text":"Evgeny: Yes.","offset":3731,"duration":1},{"text":"Host: I mean and to your earlier point about different types of conversations I mean this is a perfect example right because we had a conversation on SimpleX that was off the record and then this one I will be hashing and signing with my Nostr key because as someone who has spent a lot of time broadcasting my thoughts and having candid conversations like this on the podcast it does frighten me that we could have AI deepfakes and basically me saying anything without no verifiability. So I really take that verifiability piece very seriously when it comes to these types of conversations. Like I want there to be for this conversation I want there to be a historical record of truth that if some AI in 5 years makes us say whatever it wants us to make us say you can go back and see that hash-signed version of the MP3 and know that it hasn't been changed and that's what was originally said, right?","offset":3732,"duration":67},{"text":"Evgeny: Yes.","offset":3799,"duration":1},{"text":"Host: Okay, this is all fascinating to me. I'm really enjoying this conversation. Uh, the the big one that will come up next is, which I mean I see all the time in distributed systems, is okay, so the system relies on people running servers and relays and whatnot. Ideally the system works best when there's many many operators doing that. And this is something that Tor for instance, I think on a widespread scale, has had a lot of issues with, right? Having more independent operators running these things. Bitcoin we've as it's a it's a major contention point on Bitcoin making sure that Bitcoin nodes are easy and accessible to run so people can use it without relying on a trusted third party. We see it in Nostr with relays. So how are you thinking about this like fundamental problem, right? Which is you need as many people running servers as possible. More the better, the more the better servers and so how do you see that scaling?","offset":3800,"duration":71},{"text":"Evgeny: Right now we see lots of communities running their own routers in SimpleX network. It's I think there are some Bitcoin communities, I think there are some Monero communities that do. There are some discussion groups that run around servers they advertise it on their website. We we cannot know exact number but I think conservatively there are over 1,000 routers in SimpleX network at this point. So and that's fine and it works and people get their own sovereignty and autonomy and independence of anything that that we may be doing or anybody else can be doing which is great. The downside of this model is that your your router because it has fixed endpoint address, right? Like the whole point of SimpleX network is protect your endpoint address, right? But if you run a router this router becomes effectively your address, right? So like if if if it... if it if it is run on public network then obviously anybody knows the IP address they somehow can link it to your identity and maybe that's not what everybody wants. If you run it on Tor then it's potentially not very usable. Even though we build internet-to-Tor routing capabilities. So for example if you send messages to Tor router it will be delivered even if you don't use Tor because SimpleX routers would they can they can connect to Tor routers. Right? So even if a router is only on Tor network then SimpleX router that has internet address will be able to forward message to Tor network. That's how that's why network remains interconnected, right? So you don't have to use Tor to deliver messages to Tor-only routers. And it's all great. But I think long-term this is not really scaling because I don't know you probably seen Moxie Marlinspike Marlinspike said once that people don't want to run their own infrastructure.","offset":3871,"duration":110},{"text":"Host: Yeah, the founder of Signal.","offset":3981,"duration":2},{"text":"Evgeny: Yes, yes. So my my view was always if we want privacy to be a norm then we have to be building technology that everybody can use, right? People who don't want to run their own server, people who don't want to think, who want to use just default software out of the box and get this privacy. And that's the only way it can be normalized, right? And I think it kind of resonates with what Cypherpunk manifesto author was writing later, right? So for just writing code is not enough. It was his later letter not the manifesto. That we have to have acceptance in the society, we have to have wide usage of those technologies. We effectively see adoption as a as a privacy feature. So so this whole idea is that in order to be autonomous you have to run the server it it is not it is not it is not scaling to the future. So so that's why we want to build a network when hundreds of commercially incentivized operators can run routers and be making more money from doing that from the network than they are spending money running this infrastructure. Bitcoin obviously has in-built monetization solution, right? You run the node it potentially can mine Bitcoin and it kind of at least covers the cost of operation.","offset":3983,"duration":86},{"text":"Host: Well, we kind of lost that to be honest. I mean most nodes are not mining nodes now.","offset":4069,"duration":5},{"text":"Evgeny: Yes, I understand that yeah, but at least you get indirect benefit that you can you can use the network without trust which is kind of what we're holding on to at this point. And then also if you hold the money the money tends to increase with purchasing power so we have that going for us.","offset":4074,"duration":18},{"text":"Evgeny: I'm I'm not quite I've I've seen some talk a couple years ago at a conference when somebody was talking about running Bitcoin miner at home and his idea was that \"okay, we can't make profit from running the miner but we can convert electricity costs to non-KYC Bitcoin and it's a great thing and let's do that.\" Right? So effectively you're...","offset":4092,"duration":22},{"text":"Host: No, we do have that aspect going well for us. And there actually is a company called Futurebit that like puts the node and the miner together in one convenient package that you can run at home. But a lot of those miners just to be clear here, and it's, you know, it's kind of a tangent it doesn't really matter that much for our conversation, a lot of those miners are they have the heater in their home but then they're connecting to someone else's node, right? So it's not their node they're not running the actual node infrastructure. More are, which is awesome to see. But yeah, fair enough.","offset":4114,"duration":90},{"text":"Evgeny: So for for SimpleX network we see the imperative to create a commercial model when anybody who wants to provide infrastructure can make more money from providing this infrastructure than running this infrastructure cost.","offset":4204,"duration":15},{"text":"Host: A financial incentive.","offset":4219,"duration":1},{"text":"Evgeny: Yes, 100%. And we don't want to create any blockchains to do it. We don't want to do any mining operation. we don't want to create any... but we still need a solution and we've been discussing it with the community for quite some time. So the idea is that to answer how servers are paid we have to answer first the question is what what in the network itself is paid, right? When we were just starting developing this we were thinking okay maybe some premium features can do that maybe something else can do that, right? But then we've seen what happens with Telegram Premium. We keep talking about Telegram, right? To me Telegram...","offset":4220,"duration":33},{"text":"Host: Everyone's favorite.","offset":4253,"duration":1},{"text":"Evgeny: To me Telegram Premium is is a proof that premium model for messaging application is a dead end. Because yes you may be generating revenues and yes you may be developing the nice features but reality what happens is you're fragmenting your network, right? You very quickly as a provider of this application realize that in order to make profit you have to make your application unusable.","offset":4254,"duration":24},{"text":"Host: Yeah, the best features need to be behind the paywall basically.","offset":4278,"duration":3},{"text":"Evgeny: Uh pretty much all of them. So you already there already features when I can't message people until I have or I can't make call to this people and it's just like not because they choose to but it's just like it's just fun, right? So and to me that's kind of very much a dead end for communication network. Imagine like a web browser, right? We what we built we take lots of inspirations from the web. We we say often that what we built is a missing part of the web, the messaging part. We say a next web, right? Because web has never created messaging solution as part of it. So if you look at the web, how web is monetized? Users don't pay for the browsers, right? At all, at all. Users don't pay for using the web, at all. Uh, people may say \"oh yes we pay ISPs\" but it's different story. ISP is not the web, right? It's simply a transport network that connects you to the website. But the web itself like all the DNS systems, all the infrastructure that allows web to function, it's free, right? So who pays for all that? The answer is very simple: websites pay. People who want to host the websites they pay and because every content distribution network has this distribution when 5% of websites generate 90% of traffic.","offset":4281,"duration":77},{"text":"Host: Right.","offset":4358,"duration":1},{"text":"Evgeny: What it actually means is that it's enough to charge this 5% of websites and everybody else can be free. Right? You don't need to pay to host a small website today, right? You just go you create account you can pay either $1 a month or nothing or...","offset":4359,"duration":16},{"text":"Host: Right, it's subsidized by the big guys.","offset":4375,"duration":2},{"text":"Evgeny: Exactly, yeah. So the whole web is subsidized by the big websites, so 5% of websites create all the carry or maybe 20% of the websites carry all the costs of the web. And that's why we see channels as so important because we see channel on SimpleX network as equivalent of the website. And we believe as this part of the network grows, the the traffic distribution, the cost distribution will be similar. So uh, 10% of large channels will generate 90% of the traffic. Right? And that's who they should that's who should be paying. And they'll be paying, right? because if you say \"I'm a politician I want 100,000 100,000 people audience,\" right?","offset":4377,"duration":31},{"text":"Host: Yeah.","offset":4408,"duration":1},{"text":"Evgeny: If your choice is to be on the platform that can shut you down because the current administration doesn't like what you say, right? We've just seen it happening with Trump before.","offset":4409,"duration":12},{"text":"Host: Yep.","offset":4421,"duration":1},{"text":"Evgeny: Right, so before Twitter acquisition before...","offset":4422,"duration":3},{"text":"Host: Sitting President of the United States gets banned from Twitter and Facebook.","offset":4425,"duration":4},{"text":"Evgeny: Which is ridiculous, right? So and one of the...","offset":4429,"duration":2},{"text":"Host: And he ended up buying and building his own social media network.","offset":4431,"duration":4},{"text":"Evgeny: Exactly, yes. So what what we see is a much cheaper solution. So if you want a channel that's sovereign, that you actually own, you have to pay for it. You have to cover infrastructure costs, you have to cover discovery costs, you have to cover some costs. And that's the business model that we see for the whole SimpleX network. So messaging will remains free forever as a as a add-on service effectively, and small channels and communities can exist for free, but large channels and communities carry the whole cost. And we just need to find a solution that allows to transfer value from those channel owners to the infrastructure owners in a way that kind of preserves privacy and security of all all participants within within what's possible. So so that's our view. So our view is not... our view for the network is not that it's enthusiast-run network, but it's a professionally run network, but it's run by so many independent facility and infrastructure providers that trust is minimal because it's distributed, right? If each conversation you uses four different companies, right? And those companies are rotated on a weekly basis then your dependence on each particular company is extremely low. They get profits from doing that but they have no control over your conversation.","offset":4435,"duration":85},{"text":"Host: I love that. I mean look, I love from I wear two different hats. I wear my charity hat with OpenSats and I wear my for-profit hat with 1031 where we invest in for-profit businesses that are often built on top of open-source stacks. And so I see both both worlds in the greater open-source movement, the foundation-led, charity-led and then, you know, and then the opposite side, which is the for-profit-led. And oftentimes you see foundations get spun up and run donationware. I mean we've seen that with Signal is probably the best example. And it's probably the easier path for these type of things in the short term. I think long term they scale much worse. Uh, they're not sustainable. You have to go out and constantly seek donations. And the incentives aren't necessarily aligned that well. I think one of the issues you start to see is longer term it's like, okay, the employees or the stakeholders of the foundation don't necessarily need to see the thing grow significantly. And the reality is in the truth is in the reality, which is Signal is probably one of the most successful nonprofit privacy, freedom-focused projects and it's found massive success but it's at about 100 million users, maybe less. And then you have things like WhatsApp that are in, you know, 3 billion plus, you have Telegram that's 2 billion plus. And those are for-profit ventures. and I don't think it's a coincidence that those for-profit ventures tend to have significantly bigger user bases. I think it's an incentive alignment thing. So I do I have a lot of respect that you've tried you're trying to go this for-profit ethical for-profit sustainable approach. And I kind of want to dive a little bit deeper in here.","offset":4520,"duration":105},{"text":"Evgeny: Look, I think I think the challenge is that I I I can go philosophical here, Frank. I think it all comes from people seeing most choices as binary.","offset":4625,"duration":10},{"text":"Host: Right.","offset":4635,"duration":1},{"text":"Evgeny: So I have heard this in my life million times: you have to pick a lane. Right? And I refuse to pick a lane. Right? When I was building my you know, I was building like I will go again to this library that nobody knows about but it's a good example because when I was starting this library there was like 12 different competing libraries and they all were either super fast and really badly complying with the specification, or very very slow and somewhat better complying with specification. So I said, alright, how how about I just build one library that is fastest and also best in compliance with the specification? And everybody was laughing at me saying \"this is the classic also XKCD comic, right? There are 14 better frameworks, let's make one more framework.\"","offset":4636,"duration":45},{"text":"Host: Here was the 15th.","offset":4681,"duration":1},{"text":"Evgeny: Now we have 15 better frameworks. Like I was sent this comic by like 10 different people in my life. Right? But reality what I learned from this kind of retrospectively again, right? So if you refuse to compromise on important trade-off, because trade-off is artificial, right? The choice between fast and standard-compliant wasn't the real choice. It was just easy path, right? It's just harder to build something that is both fast and standard-compliant, but it's not impossible. So I built a library that came to be the only library that people use today for data validation in JavaScript world because the choice was eliminated. And again, same between like private messenger versus convenient messenger, right? So people have been trying to pigeonhole what we're building into like like some people say \"oh you're building a private messenger you shouldn't worry about convenience really you should add more privacy features,\" right? That's half of our user base what says. And some other half of user base says \"you're focusing on privacy too much you should compromise on privacy...\"","offset":4682,"duration":62},{"text":"Host: It's not convenient enough.","offset":4744,"duration":2},{"text":"Evgeny: Yeah, and instead like for example the fact how you discover people some of the hurdles, or for example that we still don't have multi-device in the messenger. I say, whatever, compromise on privacy build multi-device everybody wants multi-device. I don't know, I think my brain is wired against making such compromises and we instead find proper solution that deliver both without compromise. And it's obviously slower. The the downside is like what you compromise on is time to to working product. That's that's what have to go, right? But I think reality is by taking this slow... right, I mean...","offset":4746,"duration":33},{"text":"Host: Yeah.","offset":4779,"duration":1},{"text":"Evgeny: Signal's the perfect example here, right? Because the easy path was saying, \"okay, let's just use phone numbers as discovery.\" That's what WhatsApp does, that's what Telegram does, we can do that, my grandmother can use it. And then you're stuck.","offset":4780,"duration":14},{"text":"Host: Yeah.","offset":4794,"duration":1},{"text":"Evgeny: You took the easy path and then you're stuck with that building block. Exactly, yes. It's not something that you can revise later, it becomes a foundation of your architecture. It's used everywhere, it's pervasive, it's not removable. So I think what we're trying to build is a communication protocol and product and transport network that's used by everybody. And yeah, it may take decades to get there, but I I still have time. So and talking about private like for-profit versus non-profit, going back to your question, right? I also see it as a false trade-off, right? I was when we took venture capital money, we took it like without any control provisions. It's a proper Y Combinator SAFE agreement, there are no board seats, no control, right? I have to chase my investors for advice and they are very busy people, right? But reality is we run our business however we want. And they just trust because, you know, I think venture capital has changed dramatically after some major successes when most venture capitalists arrived to conclusion that they have to let founders do things they disagree with. Because that's the only way founders... I mean Facebook was a big one. I mean obviously it's kind of a weird example to use here because they turned into one of the most evil companies.","offset":4795,"duration":74},{"text":"Evgeny: Yes.","offset":4869,"duration":1},{"text":"Host: But Facebook early days was, \"we trust,\" you know, the investors were like, \"we trust Mark, Mark is the leader of the ship, we're not going to take any control.\" But before that historically it was like VCs would come in and they would just take full control of a company and then push the founder out.","offset":4870,"duration":16},{"text":"Evgeny: Yeah, Apple would be a classic example, right? And in this pushing the founder out pushed the Apple to the brink of bankruptcy so they had to bring the founder back, right? So so yeah, so we see world has changed. investment doesn't mean control. And yet we've been like vilified by everybody like that we did it, right? So I had to write a blog post.","offset":4886,"duration":20},{"text":"Host: For-profit capital.","offset":4906,"duration":2},{"text":"Evgeny: Yeah, I had to write a blog post about why privacy becoming a norm requires venture funding. Because to me, privacy becoming a norm requires building a mass-market, widely adopted product. The problem with this premise is that it is the costs are exponential. It's like getting like 10x more adoption is not necessarily... you know what I mean, right? So you simply cannot build a mass-market, widely adopted product on a grassroot movement. And that's what Signal observes, right? Foundation model doesn't scale, donation model doesn't scale. So either you build at some point the model that allows it to be a business that generates profit, right? And again when people say \"oh you're for-profit company it's a bad thing,\" my response was always like, what is profit, right? It's either it's independence, right? That's what I think Bitcoin community, privacy community believes in is in independence, right, in sovereignty, in ability to make their own choices. But nothing of this is impossible if you are existing handouts, right? Because you're dependent on whoever gives you handouts, right? Children are dependent on parent until they start earning their own money, right? People who get whatever social security benefits they are dependent on government to tell them what to do. And it's not a good thing. So any organization that wants to be independent has to make profit. Otherwise it becomes dependent on whoever gives its money. And that's another dark side of the kind of for-profit model non-profit model because not only you can't scale it really well, you become dependent on your donors. And those donors may have not necessarily like good motives, right? We've seen non-profits who were have been like you've seen this chat control legislation, right? The biggest lobby effort for chat control over legislation was coming from non-profits funded by big tech. So talking about non-profit being a good thing. So I honestly I honestly think that morality and integrity of what happens doesn't depend on the organization form. I think it depends on people behind this organization in the first place, right? We've seen companies doing moral things and we've seen non-profits doing immoral things. Right. And I think, yeah, so so what what we are doing right now. So we kind of understand we're building network that nobody should own. We don't want to own it, right? We want a general-purpose transport network that is run by community, operated by community, which means that the model when we control the protocol, the model we control all the licensing on the software is not sustainable long term, right? So what we are doing right now, we are we already announced to the community that we will be transitioning the governance we are transitioning the governance to consortium model, which is similar to how the web was governed until recently. It's interesting by the way I didn't know about that I only learned when was reading. So World Wide Web was governed by consortium, not an entity. like it's effectively an agreement between four different entities in different countries. Worldwide Web was governed by consortium from Netscape shut down in I think 2004 and until 2023 when W3C became a US non-profit, a single entity. Which is fun. Which means the Worldwide Web that we all believe is decentralized now have a centralized governance model. Even though it's by non-profit it's still centralized.","offset":4908,"duration":191},{"text":"Host: Right.","offset":5099,"duration":1},{"text":"Evgeny: So what we did we worked with one exceptional open-source lawyer, Heather Meeker. She has authored multiple open-source licenses such as Mozilla license, Elastic license. She participated in some exciting works. She helped us draft this agreement for consortium for SimpleX network and we are in a process of setting up the entity that will be in a consortium agreement with SimpleX the company and then we'll be setting up additional non-profits in different jurisdiction so this multiple entities will be able to run network together and this way avoid like jurisdictional pressures or risks and avoid any kind of corruption from any centralized governance model.","offset":5100,"duration":50},{"text":"Host: Like corporate capture and whatnot.","offset":5150,"duration":1},{"text":"Evgeny: Exactly, yeah. Because we've seen we've seen corporate captures happen in non-profits a lot, right? The whole Linux like look at this, you're probably observing this noise about California law of like...","offset":5151,"duration":11},{"text":"Host: Yep.","offset":5162,"duration":1},{"text":"Evgeny: ...requiring KYC to flesh Linux. This is insane. I made a tweet yesterday it resonates with lots of people. It's effectively they tell you \"you no longer own your computer,\" right? Just like we're going to break and enter into your computer and demand it's a violation of like multiple constitutional amendments like certainly First Constitution and Fourth and Fifth and god knows what else is violated and they say it's okay. What what I find completely ridiculous is that all those open-source foundations developing Linux software are just quiet. They don't say anything, right? They don't the only open-source the only privacy foundation is EFF. EFF is campaigning against this law. Linux Foundation says nothing, right? All these kind of foundations developing Linux software are saying nothing. They already commit code that implements this age control into open-source code which is just ridiculous to me.","offset":5163,"duration":56},{"text":"Host: Why do you think that is?","offset":5219,"duration":2},{"text":"Evgeny: Because they are captured. I think.","offset":5221,"duration":2},{"text":"Host: Right.","offset":5223,"duration":1},{"text":"Evgeny: Because we've seen a lot of decisions in those foundations that don't necessarily they they they have been pressuring creators of software to leave, they have been pressuring... so that's not that's not good.","offset":5224,"duration":13},{"text":"Host: They're reliant on their donors to pay their rent basically.","offset":5237,"duration":2},{"text":"Evgeny: I don't know, Matt. I I cannot say why it happens. But to me it was always like always the I don't want to go into there. But the reason I bring it up the reason I bring it up is because I'm neck-deep in this with OpenSats. You know, OpenSats we saw a concern of very centralized funding options for open-source developers building non-profit stuff in the Bitcoin ecosystem. And to be clear here, there's a bunch of foundational open-source stuff that can't be monetized. It just it cannot be monetized. It would it would ruin the value prop for something like Bitcoin protocol software to be to be monetized directly. And so we built OpenSats in a way to resist that. And I think one of the biggest thing is we're a volunteer board. We're a nine-person board that's all volunteers we make money doing other things. And it's because of that concern. You know, the concern that you get captured by your donors because you're making $500,000. Some of these non-profit boards it's insane how much money they're making. And if that donor if that donor base disappears then they lose that. If my donor base disappears, directly financially there's zero impact to me, right? And I think that's a key piece but it doesn't completely solve it. Obviously if the donors disappear OpenSats is gone. And so then I I do agree to your point that it does come down to the people in a lot of ways, right? It's like I would rather OpenSats be gone than ever take direction from a donor.","offset":5239,"duration":90},{"text":"Evgeny: Exactly, because you because you are independent because you personally making profit in your life and you wouldn't let other people run your life. That that comes to who should be on a board which is also very important question, right? We still didn't form the board but we are reaching out to various people who we believe can create value for for for governance and also it would be helpful to them as well. So yeah, so we but I think it's still important given that jurisdictional law changes quite rapidly sometimes, I think it's important to have multiple layers of decentralization of governance decision. So my initial thinking was that we should have shared ownership of IP, right? But intellectual property. The legal advice from from from our lawyer was that it's not possible really because there is no such thing, right? So shared ownership of intellectual property means that any owner can dispose of it, not just some consensus is needed. So what is going on happening is that the company will be remain the owner of IP but it will be licensed to all consortium members irreversibly. So there is a specific clause in open-source licensing when there is a lien attached. So even if the company stops existing or sold license still survives this. So effectively we will transfer licensing to multiple consortium members in a way that we can't revoke it and then bit by bit we want to transfer governance of the key protocol in the same way. Again, like Netscape has always been an inspiration to me as a company, right? Netscape built web as we know it, right? Because Netscape pick up web protocol when it was embryonic, right? Nobody like you know, who who knew about the web in 199 1995? Right? Nobody knew about the web. But they picked it up they built a browser, they added JavaScript, they added cookies, they added SSL, they added like, people think cookie is a bad thing, but cookie is a foundational piece that allows you Facebook know to you is you, right? It's verifiability, right? So without cookies Facebook doesn't know who you are. Or Twitter or whatever. They created web as we know and then they shut down in 2004. W3C took over abruptly and what happened is that all the innovation stalled completely, right? Took them like seven years to get CSS to next version.","offset":5329,"duration":159},{"text":"Host: Right.","offset":5488,"duration":1},{"text":"Evgeny: The industry was so frustrated with W3C governance so they had to hold their own working group, if you remember this WHATWG. So and they had to take matters in their own hand and it was like super frustrated for everybody, right? And that's exactly what the abrupt and that's what unfortunately we see I think with many decentralized protocol because they want to be decentralized, right? But they don't understand that from the point of early enthusiasts using this protocol to the point everybody else can use this protocol it's not just time and adoption, it's radical changes in the protocol. Yep. And these radical changes require speed, commercial incentive, funding, centralized decision-making. So you simply cannot get a protocol to mass adoption without running things as a venture-funded company would run things. That's what Netscape did, right? Netscape was doing Netscape browser at a time there like 30 other competing browsers also trying to do browsers with venture funding. It didn't occur to Netscape to ask other browsers what they think about protocol changes. They honestly didn't care.","offset":5489,"duration":62},{"text":"Host: Right.","offset":5551,"duration":1},{"text":"Evgeny: If they did, we wouldn't have the web. So that's how I see the whole kind of decentralized governance. There are some stable parts of the network and changing them should require consortium vote, right? But there are some evolving part of the network that kind of on the boundary require adoption, require radical changes, and they are not ready for decentralized governance yet.","offset":5552,"duration":21},{"text":"Host: You need to be able to move fast and adopt and...","offset":5573,"duration":3},{"text":"Evgeny: Exactly. Yes. And that's what we lost with...","offset":5576,"duration":13},{"text":"Matt: Agreed.","offset":5589,"duration":1},{"text":"Evgeny: Yes, so that's what we want, that's what we're trying to achieve.","offset":5590,"duration":2},{"text":"Matt: That's why I always use like Signal as an example, because they - once again, not perfect, but very pragmatic trade-off balance that they went with. They've had - it's funny, right, because you can look at it from both perspectives.","offset":5592,"duration":11},{"text":"Matt: You can be like, \"Oh, they're a massive success for a privacy project because it's 100 million people,\" and then you can look at it from the opposite side - \"That's nobody,\" right? Like it's still 2%, right? 100 million people is 2%, if I can count... yeah.","offset":5603,"duration":15},{"text":"Matt: Evgeny, I want to dive in just before we wrap here, I think it's important that like high-level the monetization makes sense to me. In practice, everything's harder to execute on in practice.","offset":5618,"duration":15},{"text":"Matt: So I want to dive a little bit more into the details because there was some controversy around it, about how you're thinking about implementing it. And the big one is, okay, so the main operators that are doing, you know, 90% of the traffic, these big channels, are going to be paying for things.","offset":5633,"duration":17},{"text":"Matt: You basically got flack - you know you're doing well when you get flack from everyone that has all different conflicting interests and everyone is mad at you. But the two big ones that I noticed was the Bitcoin and Monero communities, respectively.","offset":5650,"duration":15},{"text":"Matt: The Bitcoin community being saying, \"Why aren't we using Bitcoin for this?\" And the Monero community being like, \"Why aren't we using Monero for this?\" So my question to you is rather simple: why aren't you using Bitcoin for this, and what's the alternative, and why is that being chosen?","offset":5665,"duration":16},{"text":"Evgeny: Okay, so one thing at a time. To have network pay, to have network function, we need to - we don't need to just pay for servers, right? We need to have mechanism how governance layer can be paid, how software developers can be paid, and how channels can make profit.","offset":5681,"duration":17},{"text":"Evgeny: And that requires some mechanism of revenue sharing and distribution between those parties. We cannot tell channel owners, say, you have to pay this and this and this, right? So we have to create some codified approach for revenue distribution.","offset":5698,"duration":16},{"text":"Evgeny: And not just that. So we also need to solve problem of server discoverability, right? So how will people learn where the service exists? How they find them out? Right? Okay, they want to use paid service, how they find it out?","offset":5714,"duration":14},{"text":"Matt: Right.","offset":5728,"duration":1},{"text":"Evgeny: Or they want to have channel names, because again, if we're talking about usability, you need to have a name for the channel, right? Nostr keys are great, SimpleX addresses are all great, they're 100 characters of gibberish. Normal people will never ever use it.","offset":5729,"duration":17},{"text":"Evgeny: They want to type \"music\" and go to the channel with music, or they want to type \"sport\" and go to the channel with sport.","offset":5746,"duration":67},{"text":"Matt: For the same reason we don't go to direct IP addresses, we type in a domain.","offset":5813,"duration":4},{"text":"Evgeny: Exactly, we type domain names, right. So how do we do it? We need some mechanism to agree on what this address means. Because if we simply give this address to a server and say, \"Okay, I will tell you music, you will tell me the address,\" the problem with that is the server can give you any address. They can execute man-in-the-middle attack on your connection, right?","offset":5817,"duration":-38},{"text":"Evgeny: So you need some way to get trust to the information you're getting. And how internet solved this problem and world wide web solved this problem? They created like hierarchy of trust, right? Certificate authorities and domain name systems, when your trust is built ultimately because you have an authority.","offset":5779,"duration":20},{"text":"Evgeny: But that's antithetical to both Bitcoin, Monero, and to us. Because the second there is an authority, this authority will be corrupted, right? And we've already seen attacks on certificates via major certificate authorities, right?","offset":5799,"duration":15},{"text":"Matt: It's a mess.","offset":5814,"duration":1},{"text":"Evgeny: Yeah, it's a complete mess, right. So we cannot build a system based on trust or on authority. We have to build a system that's properly decentralized when any information you get about the network is trusted without having authority that you trust.","offset":5815,"duration":16},{"text":"Evgeny: And the solution exists, it's called blockchains, right? So, but I think the way I see blockchain - and that was the root cause of this misunderstanding, and the way many people see blockchain is very different.","offset":5831,"duration":14},{"text":"Evgeny: Because people see blockchain as a way to transfer value between participants, as a ledger that records transactions. But that's just one use case. Like since a lot of technology has evolved, and blockchain can act as a global distributed computer that can perform arbitrary computations and arrive to consensus about things, not just transactions, any consensus.","offset":5845,"duration":26},{"text":"Evgeny: Can execute arbitrary logic in a way that it's trusted without having a single party that you need to trust. That's what smart contracts do.","offset":5871,"duration":9},{"text":"Evgeny: Because people think contract is some sort of agreement that you sign or it's some sort of an asset, or - it's not. It's just a code, right? So when you go to the server, you run some code, it gives you some result, you have to trust the server.","offset":5880,"duration":15},{"text":"Evgeny: If you go to smart contract enabled blockchain, then you can run computation and get the result, and then your trust in this result is not based on a particular node of this blockchain, it's based on the whole decentralized blockchain.","offset":5895,"duration":14},{"text":"Matt: Yeah, the best example of that at scale, in my opinion, right now is Polymarket.","offset":5909,"duration":4},{"text":"Evgeny: Potentially, yes, I'm not that familiar with that. I know what Polymarket is.","offset":5913,"duration":3},{"text":"Matt: Well, I mean, they have a similar - I mean, they have a similar problem, right? The problem is if, you know, they can't have a centralized entity taking custody of funds and handling arbitrary code, like settling of the markets, right? If a missile strike hits or not, like it can't be a single company doing that.","offset":5916,"duration":15},{"text":"Evgeny: Correct. So when we say we need - so several things should happen for SimpleX network for it to be usable and sustainable, right? We need to have a registry of servers that can receive money and trust this registry, right?","offset":5931,"duration":18},{"text":"Evgeny: We need to have a registry of names so we can discover channels. And we also have design for private names when you can discuss people without anybody knowing their addresses. We have design for that too already.","offset":5949,"duration":15},{"text":"Evgeny: And we also have to have a way to transfer value as well, but not just transfer value, but also distribute the revenues in somewhat agreed way. So depending on - it's like programmatic value transfer, right? It's like an auto split that's going to multiple...","offset":5964,"duration":11},{"text":"Evgeny: Exactly, yeah, exactly right. So because otherwise, transfer value is a simple problem and yes, Bitcoin is the best at solving this problem and the first solved this problem. And if transferring the value would be the only problem that we needed to use, then Bitcoin is a viable solution, and likewise Monero is a viable solution, right?","offset":5975,"duration":14},{"text":"Evgeny: But that's not the problem that we need to solve. We need to have a distributed computer that we can trust that will solve all the problems that require network-wide state. Because today SimpleX network has no network-wide state. No registry of servers, there is no list of participants.","offset":5989,"duration":13},{"text":"Matt: No global state.","offset":6002,"duration":1},{"text":"Evgeny: Exactly, it's fragmented. And when people say, \"Oh, we have to bring the whole messaging on blockchain,\" that doesn't work because messaging has to be fragmented, right? Communities have to be fragmented, network - but if you want to have a global namespace that is recognized by all clients, then you suddenly want a network-wide state, right?","offset":6003,"duration":21},{"text":"Evgeny: If you want to have a server registry to which you can pay money, you want a network-wide state. And if you want an agreement with those servers that you can trust and everybody is paid who is doing the work for the network, you need some programmatic way to split revenues and distribute money. That requires smart contracts.","offset":6024,"duration":17},{"text":"Evgeny: So our whole idea is behind that to program all this logic effectively on the blockchain and have server operators and network users interface with smart contracts so that payments can be transferred from the channel owners to the servers with whatever revenue sharing agreements that can be put in place as code.","offset":6041,"duration":21},{"text":"Evgeny: Specifically, we're going to build a proof of concept quite soon on some blockchain so people can have a feel of how it's going to work. But imagine you're an operator, you're going to smart contract via some service, dApp hosted on IPFS for example, and you say, \"I want to be an operator.\" You will be asked to give your details, you will be asked to like, what are your server addresses and what not.","offset":6062,"duration":19},{"text":"Evgeny: You will be asked to sign a deed. So I believe that technical guarantees have to be supplemented by contractual guarantees. So let's say, if you want to run a server on SimpleX network, you have to guarantee the users that you're not going to sell the data, that you're not going to collude, that you're not going to - so there have to be legal remedies if you do.","offset":6081,"duration":19},{"text":"Evgeny: I think that's a big missing bit in networks like Tor, because they only - maybe because they are technologists, maybe they just don't think about it like this. But I think if I'm using the server on the network, I want not just technical guarantees, I also want contractual guarantees as well.","offset":6100,"duration":19},{"text":"Evgeny: And we want blockchain to deliver it all. So participation in network would require providing contractual guarantee in exchange for making the money, which I think is reasonable. So that requires programming, that requires writing code, that requires deploying code in a way that it's executed not on a particular computer but on a distributed network of computers.","offset":6119,"duration":18},{"text":"Matt: Independently.","offset":6137,"duration":2},{"text":"Evgeny: Yeah, and there is not a single - there are choices, right? There are multiple networks that can do it. I think it would benefit Bitcoin a lot to evolve into this direction, but it's not there yet.","offset":6139,"duration":13},{"text":"Matt: I mean, why does Bitcoin have to do all the things? I'm in the camp that like if you use - I mean, because the problem is adding that functionality reduces the robustness of whatever blockchain it has that functionality. That's always been the trade-off from Bitcoin protocol point of view.","offset":6152,"duration":22},{"text":"Matt: So like if you use like for instance - and I've gotten some shit for this and this is why I used Polymarket as an example - like Polymarket runs on I think like an Ethereum Layer 2 called Polygon, right? From a user point of view, I just need to be able to deposit Bitcoin.","offset":6174,"duration":14},{"text":"Matt: Yes.","offset":6188,"duration":1},{"text":"Matt: Like if it runs on a different tech stack, that's in a lot of ways a benefit to Bitcoin holders because it's not burdening Bitcoin with that tech stack. You just need to be able to send Bitcoin to it.","offset":6189,"duration":15},{"text":"Evgeny: 100%. And that's actually solved problem, right? The whole idea of like foreign assets have been executed in a trustless way by other blockchains. For example, I think Polkadot did it, StarkNet did it, there are some other blockchains that did it, that you can hold asset on a Bitcoin blockchain but in a way that you operate on this asset on another blockchain.","offset":6204,"duration":20},{"text":"Evgeny: So it's kind of - it's nearly non-trustless.","offset":6224,"duration":3},{"text":"Matt: No, no, there are trustless - there are trustless solutions as well.","offset":6227,"duration":2},{"text":"Evgeny: I question - I question if that's the case. There's a lot of hype around it. Look, I think it's important that you minimize the trust as much as possible for that cross-chain situation. There are atomic swaps that can handle it. You know, Boltz just released an atomic swap that moves you from, for instance, Bitcoin to Tron Tether, and in between there's no custody. But you know, trust is a hard thing.","offset":6229,"duration":34},{"text":"Evgeny: I agree that it's hard to do a completely non-trustless way. But I think they are doing something reasonable with that. But that's not the point. So what we want to do is to just have ability to transact with any currency on the entry, Bitcoin of course as well, but ultimately to have a mechanism of revenue sharing between participants that enable - like, you're using web browser, right? You're not paying to the web browser.","offset":6263,"duration":29},{"text":"Evgeny: It doesn't mean that the web browsers are not paid, right? Ultimately web browsers find a way to make revenue. So we believe that companies developing client software for networks should earn revenue from the network for doing that, right?","offset":6292,"duration":15},{"text":"Evgeny: And it's not just our company, any company that develops software should earn money proportional to the usage that they are able to generate for the network, right?","offset":6307,"duration":8},{"text":"Matt: Yeah, I mean the web browser's an interesting example, right? Because it wasn't built in a programmatic way of revenue sharing and stuff, they have to find revenue streams that are very convoluted and oftentimes have warring incentives. The best example being Chrome, which Google figured out was the way you monetize it is with search and mining data of people.","offset":6315,"duration":21},{"text":"Matt: Exactly.","offset":6336,"duration":1},{"text":"Matt: While like Internet Explorer was monetized basically through Windows and Windows lock-in and Safari is Apple's ecosystem. And as a result, we just don't have many different web browsers we can use.","offset":6337,"duration":12},{"text":"Evgeny: Exactly, exactly. So it stifles competition because there is no mechanism to get revenue for making a browser from the network that requires browser to access, right? And also all sort of perverse incentives, right? When privacy gets compromised, when security gets compromised, when users' data is being sold, and that's just corrupt model.","offset":6349,"duration":22},{"text":"Evgeny: And the only proper solution is to just build in this revenue sharing model in the network so browser developer - or whatever software developers get some share of the revenue proportionally to the value they create for the network.","offset":6371,"duration":14},{"text":"Evgeny: And likewise governance of the network, right? When we say we're establishing consortium, governance carries legal costs, right? It carries documentation costs. It may be not cost a lot of money, it may be whatever $100,000 a year, $10,000, it doesn't matter. It's still money that somebody has to pay ultimately, right?","offset":6385,"duration":23},{"text":"Evgeny: And until some point it's okay to sustain on donations, right? But beyond some point it may be hard to sustain on donations and it may require explicit revenue sharing agreement with the network. So we really - I really see it's important to have foundation that would allow it.","offset":6408,"duration":12},{"text":"Evgeny: I think it's fundamentally the vision of Tim Berners-Lee around the web, right? That's why we say that what we're building is potentially next web, because he was talking about micropayments powering the websites and generally web ecosystem from day one, right?","offset":6420,"duration":18},{"text":"Evgeny: It was way ahead of like blockchains or cryptocurrencies or even understanding what this micropayments means. But I think like he was talking about the future for which we today have technology.","offset":6438,"duration":12},{"text":"Matt: Fair enough.","offset":6450,"duration":1},{"text":"Evgeny: So, so yeah. So that's, that's, that's why we, we didn't, we didn't make a final decision. We're still iterating in which, which is the blockchain, what smart contracts. But fundamentally we're looking for solution with smart contracts.","offset":6451,"duration":16},{"text":"Matt: I am - and this, I'm trying to be mindful of time because this was supposed to be a tight hour and I know time is scarce, and no, don't apologize, I was apologizing to you. But this conversation has been so fascinating that we're almost at two hours. But I still, I mean I still want to just go a little bit deeper on this before we wrap. If you have a little bit more time?","offset":6467,"duration":11},{"text":"Evgeny: I have all the time you have.","offset":6478,"duration":2},{"text":"Matt: Okay, great. Uh what thought have you given - I mean, the big concern, right? I would say, is we haven't seen - so basically there's two pieces here, right? And I think the first is the reason the community's gut reaction was outrage is because most of the time when a proprietary token scheme or credit scheme gets presented, it's very scammy.","offset":6480,"duration":35},{"text":"Matt: I don't think it inherently needs to be scammy, I just think that 99% of the time it is scammy and there aren't many examples of it not being. So people default to that. I understand why you would choose this path and I don't think it's necessarily unethical or anything.","offset":6515,"duration":16},{"text":"Evgeny: It's not even that, Matt. We're not going to do any tokens or emission for that. We see a smart contract as a holder of the existing value. We're not going to create any digital asset class.","offset":6531,"duration":12},{"text":"Matt: Okay.","offset":6543,"duration":1},{"text":"Evgeny: All we want is a scheme that allows people to deposit some existing asset - there is no final decision on what this asset is.","offset":6544,"duration":6},{"text":"Matt: But it can be multiple different assets, right? I mean...","offset":6550,"duration":2},{"text":"Evgeny: Exactly, exactly. They deposit it on smart contract simply holds it. We're not interested in emitting digital assets at all and we're not planning to issue any tokens. What we want is a autonomous smart contract on the chain when you deposit existing asset that we didn't create and then you assign it to a community using zero-knowledge proof, which already decouples your purchase from assignment.","offset":6552,"duration":21},{"text":"Evgeny: And then once community has assigned credits - and credit is existing assets, it's not our token, it's not something we created - then they can redeem it to the server and then when revenue gets distributed.","offset":6573,"duration":13},{"text":"Evgeny: What we achieve with this scheme is that privacy is preserved because it's effectively you're - think about it like prepaid telephone card, right? You go into the store, you pay cash and you get the card, and then you use the card to pay for your phone, or you may give it to your friend and your friend will pay for his phone or for her phone.","offset":6586,"duration":20},{"text":"Evgeny: So that's fundamentally what we want to develop: prepaid scheme allowing you to use existing digital assets on a blockchain to prepay server capacity and do it in a way that preserves your privacy.","offset":6606,"duration":12},{"text":"Matt: Right, but then to programmatically split it between...","offset":6618,"duration":3},{"text":"Evgeny: And programmatically split revenue. Right. So we have no interest in issuing tokens, we have no interest in creating any digital asset class. We have interest in creating a mechanism that allows people to transact in a way that protects their privacy.","offset":6621,"duration":16},{"text":"Evgeny: Because you cannot really - like yes, people go through all the hoops to have privacy, they have to think about how they connect to blockchain nodes, how they do this, how they do that. So privacy is possible with blockchain, but it's not possible for mass market users realistically, right?","offset":6637,"duration":15},{"text":"Matt: Yeah, it's quite difficult. It's been a major focus of mine.","offset":6652,"duration":4},{"text":"Evgeny: Exactly. So what we want to develop is a layer that is built on top of blockchain, uses existing blockchain primitives, existing blockchain assets, and that allows people to pay for infrastructure in the same way they would pay for telephone buying telephone prepaid card.","offset":6656,"duration":18},{"text":"Evgeny: We didn't, like if I tell you that we're doing a prepaid telephone card it doesn't mean we're printing cash. We're not printing cash, we're just doing prepaid telephone card. So we don't want to do any token that would hold value. We simply do effectively treasury contract which will hold some other tokens that already exist. We didn't know - it may be USDC, it may be some other token, it may be something that people recognize as a value and use it as a transient value store to pay for the servers.","offset":6674,"duration":30},{"text":"Matt: Well that brings me to my second piece, which I would just say as someone who is pretty excited about what you're building and understands the need for it, and I don't want you to make any bad decisions that you regret later - is you know the way Bitcoin is designed and the trade-offs Bitcoin has made make it very resistant to centralized capture.","offset":6704,"duration":24},{"text":"Matt: Both on the protocol level and then also the token itself is a native asset, right? When you're thinking about how you're going actually execute on this and build it out, I think it would - and I'm sure you're already thinking about it - there's two pieces, right? First of all, the protocol you decide to build on is going to have varying levels of centralization, right?","offset":6728,"duration":22},{"text":"Matt: So Tron for instance is an example I constantly use. Tron has $10 billion worth of Tether on it, but at the end of the day it's just Justin Sun has full control. Now regulators perceive it as federated control and he doesn't have full control, and maybe that's enough for him in his use case or whatever.","offset":6750,"duration":18},{"text":"Matt: But when it comes to something as important as SimpleX, I could easily see censorship happen on that chain. Now you could - now there's varying levels of this throughout the ecosystem, right? With I would say Bitcoin being by far the most secure but not programmatic for your use case or whatever.","offset":6768,"duration":18},{"text":"Matt: And then things like Tron being incredibly centralized but a lot of people are using them as a result. And then the second piece is the actual assets themselves, right? USDC, you know, is controlled by a centralized group of regulated institutions, right? It gets frozen all the time, so does Tether, right?","offset":6786,"duration":13},{"text":"Evgeny: We understand it.","offset":6799,"duration":1},{"text":"Matt: So you got to think through these because ultimately I mean I could imagine a world where you build this all out and then if that layer gets broken, everything starts to break around it, right? Like people it would hurt the robustness of the protocol itself. So these are things I'm sure - are you thinking about this? I assume you are.","offset":6800,"duration":24},{"text":"Evgeny: 100%. Yes. Matt, you know one of the reasons why we announced our strategy and technology direction long before we have answers is exactly that. Because we usually iterate ideas internally and then when we think, okay, we don't know how to make it better, at this point we announce.","offset":6824,"duration":15},{"text":"Evgeny: It sometimes happens months or even more than a year before we actually start building. We didn't start building it yet. We only - we only arrived recently to a cryptographic design that hits all the goals, right?","offset":6839,"duration":15},{"text":"Evgeny: We didn't even - we only recently running the review of all the blockchains that can be used for that. And Tron is disqualified, right, same as many other centralized blockchains. We absolutely don't consider high degree of decentralization.","offset":6854,"duration":16},{"text":"Evgeny: I understand that downside of so choice between USDC or Tether and other tokens is effectively volatility versus centralization. So it's a - it's very - it's a very hard choice, right? So and for many - so I would say in the same way I like reject false trade-offs and false binaries, right? Some choices are just not real, right? You just invent them and you say you cannot have both. In many cases you can have both.","offset":6870,"duration":29},{"text":"Evgeny: But sometimes there are some genuine trade-offs and they're really hard to take. And with this kind of specific technology, there are a lot of hard trade-offs. That's true. What I think - what I think is important though, we're still in enthusiast territory. I think it would be correct to see what we're building right now as a - as a prototype, right?","offset":6899,"duration":17},{"text":"Evgeny: In the same way as SimpleX v1 was a prototype. And if you compare SimpleX design on the day of launch with SimpleX network design today, it's like almost like two different products, right? We have completely different layer of security, we have completely different - and we managed to evolve it all kind of with backwards compatibility so people were effectively using a different network without changing the client without having being disrupted etc etc.","offset":6916,"duration":27},{"text":"Evgeny: So I think we can do the same with payments. So whatever we build in the first instance is likely to be a prototype we learn on and that will evolve dramatically as it gets adopted, as it gets tested.","offset":6943,"duration":15},{"text":"Evgeny: Because I think the biggest test for the product is not technology, it's market, right? We kind of hypothesized that channels will pay for servers, servers will want to participate. We hypothesized a lot about the market. And you, you know it better than anybody else, you're a VC, right? Products don't fail because technology fails. Products fail because nobody cares.","offset":6958,"duration":18},{"text":"Matt: Yep.","offset":6976,"duration":1},{"text":"Evgeny: Nobody cares to use them, nobody cares to build them. And I think at this point it's much more important to prove that our hypothesis about the world - that people will pay, that servers will want to sell - are correct, right? That there is actually a market.","offset":6977,"duration":15},{"text":"Evgeny: I think to prove this is much more important than to avoid like centralization - you understand what I mean, right? So like it's much more important to - and once we see, okay, yes there is a market, it can grow, we'll just rebuild the technology in a way to avoid the capture.","offset":6992,"duration":14},{"text":"Evgeny: You can see it's the same way as we were building SimpleX network. People were telling me from day one, \"You should create a foundation and should run protocol evolution.\" But my response was look, we don't know if anybody needs it, number one. We, we don't know what people need. It's not just we don't know. Even if we know that people need something, it's almost like you know, like your trade has an expression \"product-market fit,\" right?","offset":7006,"duration":23},{"text":"Evgeny: We've been running product-market fit experiment for four years and now we kind of have understanding of what people need in terms of messaging, right? What people need in terms of payment for infrastructure capacity, we're just in the beginning of running this experiment, right? We hypothesized, we learn, we talk to people, we believe we - it's putting the cart before the horse otherwise.","offset":7029,"duration":19},{"text":"Evgeny: Exactly, yes. So, so I think, I think it's important for community not to overvalue technology choices. Of course we'll make the best job, of course we'll do decent technology choice, of course we'll avoid obviously bad - like Tron is obvious bad choice, right? There is no way - there is no world in which we use Tron or Base or something else centralized, right? So it's literally not even on the table, right?","offset":7048,"duration":20},{"text":"Evgeny: But within reasonable choices, I think I wouldn't overindex the importance of doing it right on the first try, but rather doing something that's kind of usable - we're trying to do a good job, I think we're trying to do a good job with Version 1. But that's still...","offset":7068,"duration":13},{"text":"Matt: Directionally correct and learn from it is how I think you're thinking about it.","offset":7081,"duration":3},{"text":"Evgeny: Exactly. I think that, that's how we've been evolving the product from day one, right? We built something and then it was pulled by users into some direction and we pushed in some other, it was kind of a combined effort. And I think that's why people use it, because we tell people early what we do, we listen what they say, we learn, we do something that we think - we're building it for people, right?","offset":7084,"duration":20},{"text":"Evgeny: I'm too old to do it to be rich, right? I personally - no, come on, it's like you're not doing what you're doing to be rich, right? If you wanted to be rich you would be doing different things, I think.","offset":7104,"duration":11},{"text":"Matt: I agree with that. That is correct.","offset":7115,"duration":2},{"text":"Evgeny: Yeah, there are simple ways today to get rich, right? We really think what kind of is common between us is that you kind of dislike the place where this world arrived, right? And you do what you can in your place with your resources, with your abilities, to make this world a little bit better.","offset":7117,"duration":19},{"text":"Evgeny: I think that's why we're building communication technology because I, I care about communications, right? I experimented with page- you know, pagers like I had some was dabbling with those things so like I really care about people being able to connect to other people. There is nothing more important.","offset":7136,"duration":14},{"text":"Evgeny: And me seeing like the whole world is converted into some kind of a surveillance panopticon when like you can't really talk to anybody anymore, that's just not right. And trying to do something...","offset":7150,"duration":13},{"text":"Matt: Yeah, someone has to do something.","offset":7163,"duration":1},{"text":"Evgeny: Exactly. I was saying that something has to do something for the last 12 years. 15 years now, right? So like 4 years ago I say, alright, nobody does anything I have to do something, right?","offset":7164,"duration":12},{"text":"Matt: Yeah, that's what compels me too. I look, I think you're thinking about it the right way. I think it's the right perspective. Obviously you have my contact now, so if I can be helpful as you try and figure things out, don't hesitate to reach out.","offset":7176,"duration":12},{"text":"Matt: But yeah, I think it's the right perspective. I think it's I mean just really well set across the board. Evgeny, this was a great, really great conversation. I enjoyed it. Maybe we'll do a follow-up in the future like in a year or something, I don't want to like take too much of your time, but I think it'd be cool to have you know kind of like a timeline as, as you build all this out. It'd be fun.","offset":7188,"duration":24},{"text":"Evgeny: That would be fantastic, yes. So we kind of...","offset":7212,"duration":4},{"text":"Matt: Just try and make it work.","offset":7216,"duration":2},{"text":"Matt: Yeah we're past the two hour mark now. This was an epic, epic conversation. Do you have any final thoughts for the audience before we wrap? How they can be helpful? I'm going obviously link to all the important links in the show notes.","offset":7218,"duration":13},{"text":"Evgeny: We didn't do a formal announcement yet. And what we're planning this year is effectively transfer and give people more ownership of SimpleX network across multiple dimensions. So this consortium governance is one thing. Another big thing we're planning for this year is crowdfunding. It's not formally launched yet, we're kind of in testing the water phase so we're not accepting any money, we're not doing that.","offset":7231,"duration":23},{"text":"Evgeny: But we will be doing it this year. We've been criticized a lot by our users for taking private investors' money and we think it's like - I think our users have to own a piece in this network and have a say in where this network evolves and not only via non-profit governance but also via having shares in, in a company that builds this network.","offset":7254,"duration":23},{"text":"Evgeny: So we're creating this opportunity right now. It'll probably launch in like three months or so, but there will be announcement soon in the blog post, on Twitter, so yeah that's a big thing. So I really wish to see community supporting and benefiting from, from what we're building.","offset":7277,"duration":21},{"text":"Evgeny: Because we're not trying to be just non-profit entity. We believe like if what we're building is the next web and we're the company building the next web, then it may be really large business and our early investors can benefit a lot from participating in that. And I really want to see community members in their numbers.","offset":7298,"duration":16},{"text":"Matt: And I don't know if you're comfortable with sharing how that's going to be set up or like was that just a traditional equity sale or...","offset":7314,"duration":5},{"text":"Evgeny: Yes. We don't believe in tokens. We will sell company equity, it will be some sort of modified SAFE agreement. We can't use YC SAFE as is for crowdfunding. It's not decided, it's premature, it's currently what we're working with, with lawyers, but fundamentally yes it will be the community who can participate will own company equity.","offset":7319,"duration":23},{"text":"Matt: Awesome, got it.","offset":7342,"duration":2},{"text":"Evgeny: That's, that's our big news for this year. So...","offset":7344,"duration":3},{"text":"Matt: I'll keep an eye out for that.","offset":7347,"duration":1},{"text":"Evgeny: Yeah. And that's, that's - I have to say what my lawyers keep saying me: we have to say a disclaimer that this is not an investment offering and we cannot accept any money at this stage. This is just us testing the interest.","offset":7348,"duration":12},{"text":"Matt: I think that was good legal advice that you received, I'm glad you said it. Sir, it was a pleasure, thank you for joining us.","offset":7360,"duration":8},{"text":"Evgeny: It was a privilege, Matt. I really appreciate you doing that with me, thank you so much.","offset":7368,"duration":6},{"text":"Matt: Thank you. Freaks, thank you for joining us. I hope you found the show helpful or fascinating. I enjoyed it. As always, share with friends and family, search \"Citadel Dispatch\" in your favorite podcast app. All relevant links at CitadelDispatch.com. Love you all. Stay humble, stack sats. Peace.","offset":7374,"duration":15}],"logs":[{"elapsed":"0.0","message":"Downloading podcast episode...","detail":null},{"elapsed":"11.0","message":"Episode downloaded (112.8 MB) in 11.0s","detail":"File size: 112.8 MB"},{"elapsed":"11.0","message":"Episode: CD196: EVGENY POBEREZKIN - SIMPLEX PRIVATE CHAT","detail":null},{"elapsed":"11.1","message":"Audio duration: 2:03:12 (123.2 min)","detail":null},{"elapsed":"11.1","message":"Very long audio (123.2 min) — will use chunked transcription with gemini-3-flash-preview","detail":null},{"elapsed":"11.1","message":"Skipping full-file attempt — using chunked transcription for 123.2 min audio","detail":null},{"elapsed":"11.9","message":"Split audio into 3 chunks for transcription","detail":null},{"elapsed":"11.9","message":"Transcribing chunk 1/3 (starts at 0:00)...","detail":null},{"elapsed":"11.9","message":"Uploading audio to Gemini File API...","detail":null},{"elapsed":"17.0","message":"Audio uploaded in 5.1s","detail":"File ref: files/yph8gb1v3n1u"},{"elapsed":"17.0","message":"Audio processed in 0.0s. Transcribing with gemini-3-flash-preview...","detail":null},{"elapsed":"78.7","message":"Chunk 1: 101 segments, last timestamp 48:30","detail":null},{"elapsed":"78.7","message":"Transcribing chunk 2/3 (starts at 45:00)...","detail":null},{"elapsed":"78.7","message":"Uploading audio (offset 45:00) to Gemini File API...","detail":null},{"elapsed":"83.7","message":"Audio uploaded in 4.9s","detail":"File ref: files/mixavn9f5lbq"},{"elapsed":"83.7","message":"Audio processed in 0.0s. Transcribing with gemini-3-flash-preview...","detail":null},{"elapsed":"141.0","message":"Chunk 2: 99 segments, last timestamp 1:32:56","detail":null},{"elapsed":"141.0","message":"Transcribing chunk 3/3 (starts at 1:30:00)...","detail":null},{"elapsed":"141.0","message":"Uploading audio (offset 1:30:00) to Gemini File API...","detail":null},{"elapsed":"145.4","message":"Audio uploaded in 4.4s","detail":"File ref: files/8f8az6w940zb"},{"elapsed":"145.4","message":"Audio processed in 0.0s. Transcribing with gemini-3-flash-preview...","detail":null},{"elapsed":"198.0","message":"Chunk 3: 147 segments, last timestamp 2:02:54","detail":null},{"elapsed":"198.0","message":"Chunked transcription complete: 325 total segments","detail":null},{"elapsed":"198.0","message":"Total cost: 185,608 in / 31,646 out — cost: $0.1877","detail":null},{"elapsed":"198.0","message":"Total transcription time: 186.9s — 325 segments","detail":null},{"elapsed":"198.0","message":"Analyzing topics across 325 segments with gemini-3.1-pro-preview...","detail":null},{"elapsed":"306.9","message":"Topic analysis complete in 108.9s — found 19 topics","detail":null},{"elapsed":"306.9","message":"Analysis tokens: 31,343 in / 1,542 out / 4,254 thinking — cost: $0.1322","detail":null},{"elapsed":"306.9","message":"Pipeline finished in 306.9s — total cost: $0.3200 (254,393 tokens)","detail":null}]}