“Permissionless, permissionless, permissionless.”
Yo & Gigi take a walk in Madeira. Recorded during SEC-07.
Listen on sovereignengineering.io
In this dialogue:
- Gigi’s AI setup: voice prompts via vibeline to brainstorm, brainstorm to implementation plan, cron job that tackles one to-do every 20 minutes, builds overnight
- One agent per project: dergigi.com/projects, each agent spins up with an nsec and gets to work
- Nihao: Gigi’s skill for spinning up Nostr identities from the terminal
- Claude Code “Mythos” codewords leaked – swearing at your models actually helps
- Planner vs developer vs tester: three distinct personas, separation of powers for AI-assisted development
- Separate sessions for questions vs implementation, like separation of powers
- “Are you human?” vs “Are you useful?” – the only question that matters
- PoW + WoT = useful. “Sats are just difficulty-adjusted PoW.”
- Dialogical development – Vervaeke on why dialogue, not monologue, is how you actually think
- Opponent processing – Vervaeke: competing forces sharpen each other
- DiaLogos and the importance of walking dialogue
- Opus maximalism ended yesterday: Anthropic cutting off OpenClaw, now broke, looking at cheaper models and local hardware
- Routing models: OpenRouter and Routstr now route between thinking and simple models automatically
- Yo’s Sovereign Engineering journey: showed up to SEC-04 with no programming experience, three weeks’ notice, on a climbing trip visa
- SEC-04 was the vibe coding big bang: Paul showed the way, Calle tried to build a Cashu client live, Paul beat him to it
- Got offered to join the team because “you are the one who would actually be crazy enough to move to Madeira”
- “Safe return doubtful”: the Shackleton ad as a model for SovEng recruitment. No pay, no wages, but glory. Read Endurance by Alfred Lansing.
- High barrier to entry, no option to leave, “in it for the right reasons” – the SovEng filter
- “Make the internet a better place.” The actual mission statement.
- Demoing on Demo Day is not optional
- The Weekly Loop: Monday Movement, Tuesday Talks, Wednesday Workshops, Thursday build day, Friday Demo Day
- Nuns Valley – where the walks happen
- SEC-06 was about identity and signers. Agentic identity: spin up an nsec, now you can talk. The problem of identity in the age of OpenClaw.
- Fabian’s NIP-17 plugin for OpenClaw: Nostr DMs as a transport layer for agents
- Yo’s Zig NIP-17 plugin: building the same from scratch in Zig
- MLS, Pika, and pika for OpenClaw: encrypted group messaging for agent fleets
- The “social media intern” problem: you gave the keys to someone who doesn’t know what they’re doing
- Social attestation vs cryptographic proof: Yo’s combined approach where clients only display migration events and users decide out-of-band
- Gzuuus’s identity continuation proposal: simpler, no key management, just OTS timestamps and preimage commitments. Don’t migrate old notes, just continue
- Pip’s Vertex demo: purely social web-of-trust metrics already handle identity migration in practice
- “Identity is a social thing” – Vitor was right about that part
- PortalSDK & the portal team joining SEC-06: hardware signers meeting agentic identity
- Nostr, Blossom, nsites, Cashu – everything you need without permission
- “Permissionless, permissionless, permissionless” – we need a new Steve Ballmer
- SEC-06 was three weeks only. Learned that three weeks is not enough, just a warm-up. Minimum four, six is the sweet spot.
- But SEC-06’s energy spilled into SEC-07: first week was one of the most energetic ever, hit the ground running
- “The gray beards and the big brains actually came!”
- From Tollgate to NoDNS to fuckips to FIPS: the naming history of the Free Internetworking Peering System
- FIPS parties, not LAN parties: running on ESP32 radios, TCP, UDP, VPNs, Tor
- Jonathan came out of retirement, built FIPS from November to February, and now everyone’s building on top of it
- “DNS is a shitcoin” – direct quote from Jonathan
- Martti migrating Nostr VPN onto FIPS, Thomas showed a collaborative drawing board running on FIPS + Tor
- Quake III server running on FIPS
- nsites becoming the default deployment target for demos
- Blossom, nsites, NIP-60/61 – all came out of SovEng cohorts and are now in the wild
- BTC++ coming to Madeira after the summer cohort, first public demo day since SEC-01
- Tollgate on balloons: a gorilla Starlink, “we are all choked by the fiber optic cables”
- Rob’s silent payments over Nostr getting picked up by Sparrow: prototype gist
- L402 + nginx: Paygress – pay-per-request HTTP monetization
- “The most awesome thing is everyone has this project in the back of their head they always wanted to build. Once you’re at Sovereign Engineering, there’s no excuse.”
- Doom deployed on an nsite
- “After not shitcoining for so long, now I’m addicted to tokens.”
- “No Solutions, only trade-offs.”
People mentioned:
- Pablo (TENEX, Highlighter, SEC co-founder)
- Martti Malmi (Nostr VPN, migrating to FIPS)
- Paul (showed the vibe coding way at SEC-04)
- Calle (Cashu, live coding at SEC-04)
- Justin (browser, separate sessions for questions)
- Jonathan Corgan (FIPS creator, came out of retirement)
- Gzuuus (identity continuation proposal)
- Vitor Pamplona (social-only identity migration)
- Pip (Vertex, web-of-trust identity demo)
- Arjen (Tollgate, noDNS origins)
- Pete (Pete’s kid doing games on Nostr)
- Cobrador (TollGate on balloons)
- Sir Sleepy (multiple npub power user)
- Sandwich (nsites resurgence)
- Thomas (collaborative drawing board on FIPS + Tor)
- Rob (silent payments over Nostr, picked up by Sparrow)
- hodlbod (key rotation proposal)
- Ben from LNbits (hardware Nostr signer)
- Fabian (NIP-17 plugin for OpenClaw)
Projects & tech mentioned:
- FIPS (Free Internetworking Peering System)
- Sovereign Engineering (the program itself)
- OpenClaw / ZeroClaw (agent harnesses, rapid prototyping vs security trade-off)
- Codex (OpenAI’s coding agent)
- Routstr (model routing with Cashu payments)
- Tollgate (mesh network toll gates, now on balloons)
- Vertex (web-of-trust tools, identity migration demo)
- Nostr VPN (migrating to FIPS)
- nsites (Nostr-based web hosting, default demo deployment)
- Blossom (content-addressed blob storage)
- Cashu (eCash on Bitcoin)
- Nihao (skill for spinning up Nostr identities)
- Pika (MLS-based encrypted messaging for OpenClaw)
- Paygress (L402 nginx, pay-per-request HTTP monetization)
- Fabian’s NIP-17 plugin for OpenClaw
- NIP-17 plugin PR for nullclaw
- NIP-17 (encrypted DMs)
- NIP-29 (relay-based groups)
- NIP-60 / NIP-61 (Cashu wallets on Nostr)
- Amber (Android Nostr signer)
- Portal (hardware Nostr signer cards)
- Primal (signing abilities release)
- Sparrow (silent payments integration from Rob’s work)
- BPD5 (key management proposal)
- Endurance (Shackleton’s expedition, Alfred Lansing)
- BTC++ (coming to Madeira after summer cohort)
Recorded at 943,743.