Latest news with #Nostr
Forbes
2 hours ago
- Business
- Forbes
Can "Bitchat" Build A Free Internet With Bitcoin?
Jack Dorsey has spent the last decade searching for ways to strip intermediaries out of communication and finance. He has maintained that Twitter would have been better conceived as a protocol than an app; since then he has supported the development of Nostr, an open-source, permissionless, and censorship-resistant social network. Now he and a team of collaborators have developed Bitchat, a Bluetooth‑only messaging app that quietly appeared in the Apple App Store earlier this month. The software knits phones that are within close-range of each other into a low‑energy mesh so that text can hop from device to device without ever touching a cell tower, router, or remote server. It works like an offline version of Signal, and that alone would be newsworthy, but the real breakthrough emerges when Bitchat pairs its mesh with ecash, a recently resurrected concept that wolud allow bitcoin to be transmitted from phone to phone in the same way. Ecash vs. Bitcoin Bluetooth was not designed for payments, but by combining it with Bitchat and ecash, an offline digital bearer instrument can be created. A bitcoin developer known as Calle, best known for Cashu, an open‑source implementation of ecash, recently filmed two phones beaming satoshis back and forth over a Bitchat mesh. No internet connection was required for this transaction to take place. Later, the ecash tokens can be finally settled when they are converted to on-chain bitcoin. Ecash dates from David Chaum's 1982 paper on blind signatures, a cryptographic primitive that lets a bank vouch for a coin without learning who spends it. It was a solution to maintaining the privacy of cash while solving the double-spending problem of digital money (being able to spend the same money multiple times). Chaum launched the idea commercially in the 1990s, but it failed to achieve traction. Bitcoin solved the double‑spending problem with a global ledger that is independently verified by all nodes on the network. However, to achieve this, Satoshi's solution traded off the speed and privacy offered by physical cash. Chaumian ecash grafted onto bitcoin reverses that trade‑off. An ecash mint handles double‑spend detection, while users regain instant, local finality along with the option to collapse the token back into money whenever connectivity returns. Many who hear about Chaumian ecash for the first time might assume it must be an altcoin because the tokens circulate outside the public bitcoin ledger. In fact, every token is a bearer claim on real bitcoin held inside a mint that offers one-for-one redemption. The mint cannot create more claims than the bitcoin it controls, so the ecash tokens inherit bitcoin's fixed 21-million supply. Everything in digital money is a tradeoff; by providing speed, ecash introduces counterparty risk at the layer of the mint. In other words, ecash trades off self-custody of the underlying coins in order to gain the ability to move a digital bearer token instantly. Bitchat shows that this can be done without devices even touching the internet. Clearing vs. Settlement To further illustrate how ecash differs from bitcoin, we can draw upon the distinction between clearing and settlement in conventional finance. Clearing is the provisional accounting step that records who owes what, while settlement is the later, irreversible transfer of reserves. One payment network called the Clearing House Interbank Payments Systems, or CHIPS, clears dollar wires during the business day. Another payment network, Fedwire, settles the net positions at the Federal Reserve. Ownership can change during clearing, but finality arrives only with settlement. Bitchat's Bluetooth mesh plays the role of CHIPS. When two phones trade an ecash token offline, the sender relinquishes the claim and the receiver can immediately spend it again; the local ledger has cleared. True settlement happens only when the current holder reconnects and redeems the note with the mint, which then burns the token and pushes the corresponding bitcoin onto the base layer of the network (bitcoin's time chain). Until that redemption, the payment is cleared but not settled; once the mint writes to the time chain, it enjoys the same global, irreversible finality as any on-chain transfer. Last-Mile Sovereignty The Bitchat-plus-ecash model widens bitcoin's surface area without tampering with its monetary policy, showing that hard money can be used in contexts where payment speed is important and internet connectivity may or may not be available. All the while, the ecash tokens used for payment are bearer instruments that remain anchored to an incorruptible base. To get there, mint implementations need rigorous reputation management features and proof-of-reserve functionality so that users can understand how much counterparty risk is introduced by the mint. The end-user app itself must present ecash payments in a familiar interface, turning ecash payments and bitcoin redemptions into ordinary taps and swipes. If the user experience of this technology can be developed to the degree that it can be readily used by non-experts, it could do for payments what Nostr aims to do for speech: extend the reach of permissionless systems all the way to the physical edges of daily life.
Engadget
17-07-2025
- Business
- Engadget
Jack Dorsey backs an open-source development collective with $10 million
Jack Dorsey has been back in the news lately after unveiling a pair of new apps he worked on, Bluetooth-based messenager Bitchat and UV exposure tracker Sun Day . The Block CEO put those together under the auspices of a new development collective called "and Other Stuff," a nonprofit that he is backing with a $10 million cash injection through his StartSmall foundation , as TechCrunch reports. The group plans to work on open-source projects, including ones that could become consumer social media apps, along with app-development tools. The developers met on Nostr, a social networking protocol Dorsey has also backed financially. The "and Other Stuff" collective aims to support Nostr's "transition from an experimental protocol to a widely adopted, sustainable ecosystem through collaborative growth and funding." In addition to Nostr projects, the collaborators plan to experiment with building tools based on the likes of ActivityPub — which powers Mastodon — and Cashu. That e-cash platform's creator, dubbed Calle, is part of the "and other Stuff" team alongside Twitter's first employee, Evan Henshaw-Plath. The projects that "and Other Stuff" has worked on so far include voice note app heynow, a private messenger app called White Noise and social community +chorus. They have also created Shakespeare, which is designed to help developers build Nostr-based social apps with AI. Dorsey has long fostered an interest in open-source protocols. In 2019, during his second stint as Twitter CEO, the company set up a team that was tasked with forming an open, decentralized standard for social media. Dorsey had hoped to eventually shift Twitter onto that protocol, but of course that didn't pan out. Instead, Twitter spun out that project — Bluesky — as a public benefit corporation in 2022. Last year, after leaving Bluesky's board, Dorsey claimed that the team there was "literally repeating all the mistakes" he made while running Twitter such as, uh, setting up moderation tools (which are, in reality, a critically important aspect of any successful social platform). On an episode of Henshaw-Plath's new podcast , Dorsey reiterated a point he had made previously, that Twitter was beholden to advertisers (an issue that X is contending with under Elon Musk's ownership ). "It's hard for something like [Twitter] to be a company, because you have corporate incentives when it wants to be a protocol," Dorsey said. "If [Twitter] were an open protocol, if it were truly an open project, you could build a business on top of it, and you could build a very healthy business on top of it." He was also once again critical of Bluesky's structure, adding that, "I want to push the energy in a different direction... which is more like Bitcoin, which is completely open and not owned by anyone from a protocol layer. That's what I see in Nostr as well. That's where I want to push my energy... rather into the more corporate direction, even if it is a public benefit corporation."
Yahoo
17-07-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
Jack Dorsey pumps $10 million into a nonprofit focused on open-source social media
Twitter co-founder and Block CEO Jack Dorsey isn't just vibe-coding new social apps, like Bitchat and Sun Day, he has invested $10 million in an effort to fund experimental open source projects and other tools that could ultimately transform the social media landscape. These efforts are funneled through an online collective called 'and Other Stuff,' formed in May, whose team includes Dorsey; Twitter's first employee, Evan Henshaw-Plath; 'Calle,' creator of the e-cash platform Cashu; Alex Gleason, former engineering head at Truth Social; and Jeff Gardner, the fourth employee at Intercom. The group originally met through collaborating on Nostr, an open, 'apolitical' social networking protocol that has been receiving the bulk of Dorsey's attention since Twitter's sale to Elon Musk and his stepping down from social network Bluesky's board. However, the team will experiment with other tools, too, like ActivityPub, the protocol that powers the decentralized app Mastodon and others, as well as Cashu. In recent years, Dorsey has been more critical of how social media platforms have evolved, saying that Twitter should have never been a company and that Bluesky seemed to be repeating the mistakes he and others made at Twitter. As a result, the team at 'and Other Stuff' is determined not to build a company but is instead operating like a 'community of hackers,' explains Henshaw-Plath. Together, they're working to create technologies that could include new consumer social apps as well as various experiments, like developer tools or libraries, that would allow others to build apps for themselves. For instance, the team is behind an app called Shakespeare, which is like the app-building platform Lovable, but specifically for building Nostr-based social apps with AI assistance. The group is also behind heynow, a voice note app built on Nostr; Cashu wallet; private messenger White Noise; and the Nostr-based social community +chorus, in addition to the apps Dorsey has already released. Developments in AI-based coding have made this type of experimentation possible, Henshaw-Plath points out, in the same way that technologies like Ruby on Rails, Django, and JSON helped to fuel an earlier version of the web, dubbed Web 2.0. Related to these efforts, Henshaw-Plath sat down with Dorsey for the debut episode of his new podcast, with @rabble. (Henshaw-Plath's handle on X is @rabble.) Since Dorsey lives in Costa Rica and Henshaw-Plath lives in New Zealand, the two met up at a hackathon in Switzerland for the chat. In the nearly hour-long episode, Dorsey delves into Twitter's history as well as his philosophies around where social media went wrong and how it can be fixed. 'It took me a long time to realize this…I didn't really put it into words until I came back as CEO the second time. But it's hard for something like [Twitter] to be a company, because you have corporate incentives when it wants to be a protocol,' Dorsey says. He notes that Twitter was at the mercy of its advertisers — something Musk also faces despite taking Twitter, now called X, private. Musk has even threatened advertisers with lawsuits over ad boycotts driven by their concerns over X's lack of moderation and controversial comments Musk himself has made. While Dorsey understands that catering to advertisers was correct for the business and for Twitter's stock price, it was the 'wrong thing for the internet.' 'They can just remove the money — your money — and your revenue goes down completely,' Dorsey says of advertisers' power. 'So if [Twitter] were an open protocol, if it were truly an open project, you could build a business on top of it, and you could build a very healthy business on top of it.' Dorsey eventually funded an effort to build an open protocol inside Twitter, which later spun out to become Bluesky. But Dorsey believes Bluesky faces the same challenges as traditional social media because of its structure — it's funded by VCs, like other startups. Already, it has had to bow to government requests and faced moderation challenges, he points out. 'I think [Bluesky CEO] Jay [Graber] is great. I think the team is great,' Dorsey told Henshaw-Plath, 'but the structure is what I disagree with…I want to push the energy in a different direction, which is more like Bitcoin, which is completely open and not owned by anyone from a protocol layer. That's what I see in Nostr as well,' he says. 'That's where I want to push my energy…rather into the more corporate direction, even if it is a public benefit corporation,' Dorsey adds. In later episodes, Henshaw-Plath will interview others who have insight into how social media and tech have evolved, including journalists like Kara Swisher and Taylor Lorenz, former Twitter head of Trust & Safety Yoel Roth, Substack co-founder Chris Best, Medium CEO Tony Stubblebine, Cory Doctorow (who coined the term 'enshittification' to describe the state of much of the current web), and renowned misinformation researcher Renée DiResta. The team at 'and Other Stuff' is also working on a social media 'Bill of Rights,' says Henshaw-Plath, which spells out what social media platforms need to provide in areas like privacy, security, interoperability, transparency, identity, self-governance, and portability. This, they believe, will help platforms, including Bluesky and others, remain accountable to their users despite any outside pressure. Dorsey's initial investment has gotten the new nonprofit up and running, and he worked on some of its initial iOS apps. Meanwhile, others are contributing their time to build Android versions, developer tools, and different social media experiments. More is still in the works, says Henshaw-Plath. 'There are things that we're not ready to talk about yet that'll be very exciting,' he teases.
TechCrunch
17-07-2025
- Business
- TechCrunch
Jack Dorsey pumps $10 million into a nonprofit focused on open-source social media
Twitter co-founder and Block CEO Jack Dorsey isn't just vibe-coding new social apps, like Bitchat and Sun Day, he has invested $10 million in an effort to fund experimental open source projects and other tools that could ultimately transform the social media landscape. These efforts are funneled through an online collective called 'and Other Stuff,' formed in May, whose team includes Dorsey; Twitter's first employee, Evan Henshaw-Plath; 'Calle,' creator of the e-cash platform Cashu; Alex Gleason, former engineering head at Truth Social; and Jeff Gardner, the fourth employee at Intercom. Image Credits:and Other Stuff The group originally met through collaborating on Nostr, an open, 'apolitical' social networking protocol that has been receiving the bulk of Dorsey's attention since Twitter's sale to Elon Musk and his stepping down from social network Bluesky's board. However, the team will experiment with other tools, too, like ActivityPub, the protocol that powers the decentralized app Mastodon and others, as well as Cashu. Image Credits:Cashu In recent years, Dorsey has been more critical of how social media platforms have evolved, saying that Twitter should have never been a company and that Bluesky seemed to be repeating the mistakes he and others made at Twitter. As a result, the team at 'and Other Stuff' is determined not to build a company but is instead operating like a 'community of hackers,' explains Henshaw-Plath. Together, they're working to create technologies that could include new consumer social apps as well as various experiments, like developer tools or libraries, that would allow others to build apps for themselves. For instance, the team is behind an app called Shakespeare, which is like the app-building platform Lovable, but specifically for building Nostr-based social apps with AI assistance. Image Credits:shakespeare The group is also behind heynow, a voice note app built on Nostr; Cashu wallet; private messenger White Noise; and the Nostr-based social community +chorus, in addition to the apps Dorsey has already released. Techcrunch event Tech and VC heavyweights join the Disrupt 2025 agenda Netflix, ElevenLabs, Wayve, Sequoia Capital — just a few of the heavy hitters joining the Disrupt 2025 agenda. They're here to deliver the insights that fuel startup growth and sharpen your edge. Don't miss the 20th anniversary of TechCrunch Disrupt, and a chance to learn from the top voices in tech — grab your ticket now and save up to $675 before prices rise. Tech and VC heavyweights join the Disrupt 2025 agenda Netflix, ElevenLabs, Wayve, Sequoia Capital — just a few of the heavy hitters joining the Disrupt 2025 agenda. They're here to deliver the insights that fuel startup growth and sharpen your edge. Don't miss the 20th anniversary of TechCrunch Disrupt, and a chance to learn from the top voices in tech — grab your ticket now and save up to $675 before prices rise. San Francisco | REGISTER NOW Developments in AI-based coding have made this type of experimentation possible, Henshaw-Plath points out, in the same way that technologies like Ruby on Rails, Django, and JSON helped to fuel an earlier version of the web, dubbed Web 2.0. Related to these efforts, Henshaw-Plath sat down with Dorsey for the debut episode of his new podcast, with @rabble. (Henshaw-Plath's handle on X is @rabble.) Since Dorsey lives in Costa Rica and Henshaw-Plath lives in New Zealand, the two met up at a hackathon in Switzerland for the chat. In the nearly hour-long episode, Dorsey delves into Twitter's history as well as his philosophies around where social media went wrong and how it can be fixed. 'It took me a long time to realize this…I didn't really put it into words until I came back as CEO the second time. But it's hard for something like [Twitter] to be a company, because you have corporate incentives when it wants to be a protocol,' Dorsey says. He notes that Twitter was at the mercy of its advertisers — something Musk also faces despite taking Twitter, now called X, private. Musk has even threatened advertisers with lawsuits over ad boycotts driven by their concerns over X's lack of moderation and controversial comments Musk himself has made. While Dorsey understands that catering to advertisers was correct for the business and for Twitter's stock price, it was the 'wrong thing for the internet.' 'They can just remove the money — your money — and your revenue goes down completely,' Dorsey says of advertisers' power. 'So if [Twitter] were an open protocol, if it were truly an open project, you could build a business on top of it, and you could build a very healthy business on top of it.' Dorsey eventually funded an effort to build an open protocol inside Twitter, which later spun out to become Bluesky. But Dorsey believes Bluesky faces the same challenges as traditional social media because of its structure — it's funded by VCs, like other startups. Already, it has had to bow to government requests and faced moderation challenges, he points out. 'I think [Bluesky CEO] Jay [Graber] is great. I think the team is great,' Dorsey told Henshaw-Plath, 'but the structure is what I disagree with…I want to push the energy in a different direction, which is more like Bitcoin, which is completely open and not owned by anyone from a protocol layer. That's what I see in Nostr as well,' he says. 'That's where I want to push my energy…rather into the more corporate direction, even if it is a public benefit corporation,' Dorsey adds. In later episodes, Henshaw-Plath will interview others who have insight into how social media and tech have evolved, including journalists like Kara Swisher and Taylor Lorenz, former Twitter head of Trust & Safety Yoel Roth, Substack co-founder Chris Best, Medium CEO Tony Stubblebine, Cory Doctorow (who coined the term 'enshittification' to describe the state of much of the current web), and renowned misinformation researcher Renée DiResta. The team at 'and Other Stuff' is also working on a social media 'Bill of Rights,' says Henshaw-Plath, which spells out what social media platforms need to provide in areas like privacy, security, interoperability, transparency, identity, self-governance, and portability. This, they believe, will help platforms, including Bluesky and others, remain accountable to their users despite any outside pressure. Dorsey's initial investment has gotten the new nonprofit up and running, and he worked on some of its initial iOS apps. Meanwhile, others are contributing their time to build Android versions, developer tools, and different social media experiments. More is still in the works, says Henshaw-Plath. 'There are things that we're not ready to talk about yet that'll be very exciting,' he teases.
Business Mayor
17-05-2025
- Business
- Business Mayor
Nostr In 2025 Is A Lot Like Bitcoin In 2012
I recently sat down with Vitor Pomplona, creator of Nostr client Amethyst, to discuss how Nostr in 2025 is a lot like what Bitcoin was like in 2012 — a bit rough around the edges, but exciting to use. Nostr, a decentralized protocol for social media and other forms of communication, is only four years old, and developers are still figuring out how to create the best possible user experience within the clients they've created. These clients include apps like Primal (which is comparable to X) to Olas (which is like Instagram) to Yakihonne (which is similar to Substack). What's unique about Nostr clients, though, is that users can 'zap' (send small amounts of) bitcoin to one another to show appreciation for the content their fellow users have created. And Pomplona is optimistic that more and more Nostr clients are starting to gain traction, just as Bitcoin began to do so 13 years ago. 'We are starting to see communities being formed and more money being transferred,' Pamplona told Bitcoin Magazine in the interview. Pomplona acknowledged that part of the purpose of social media is to enable means for users to monetize what they create in ways that they can't do in their physical environment. '[Some social media] users want to earn a living,' said Pomplona. 'They have hope that they can achieve more with social media than they can alone or in their cities.' Pamplona believes that Nostr clients can help transform that hope into a reality, and it's his mission to help users do this. 'That is our end goal: If we can get creators to the point where they can earn a living, we will win as a platform.' This potential for users to earn a living with Nostr becomes greater everyday, especially as the Nostr user base expands and it continues to grow as the largest bitcoin circular economy in the world. In creating Amethyst, Pamplona had a vision for a Nostr client that served as an all-in-one app, which was inspired by a plan similar to the one that Elon Musk had for X (formerly Twitter). 'Amethyst came in at the same time that Elon was talking about buying Twitter,' explained Pomplona. 'He was like let's make a mega app out of Twitter, and I went for the same thing.' While Pomplona understands that Amethyst didn't quite achieve this, he's excited that it's come to play a different role. It serves as a lab for people who are developing new Nostr clients. 'Amethyst is helping everybody kickstart their own applications,' he said. 'Olas came from Amethyst.' Pomplona sees Nostr as a great way to onboard people to Bitcoin, though he doesn't think this should be the primary goal of Nostr clients. 'The main goal for [Nostr] apps is to get people to do their thing — to get people to be creative, or to talk to their friends or to have a chat with their family,' explained Pomplona. 'No app should ever talk about either Nostr or Bitcoin. They should just be what they are,' he added. Pamplona believes that, after some time, the app's users will inevitably start to learn about Nostr's self-sovereignty Nostr provides when it comes to users being able to control their own data and about Bitcoin. '[They'll realize that] it just so happens that the platform helps them to manage their own data, and use best payment protocol we have today.' And he highlighted that most new users are coming to Nostr because of the freedom and censorship resistance it offers. 'In the past two years, most of the new Nostr users came in because of freedom, because of some censorship in their country,' said Pomplona. 'And they learned about Bitcoin after that.'
