#17: Organic Tech w/ Arjen

"Nostr is organic tech. Data will flow more naturally instead of going out and fetch, going out and coming back, going out and coming back."

Arjen & Gigi take a long walk. Recorded October 2025.

Projects & tech mentioned:

• Blossom (self-healing links)
• noDNS
• Tollgate (router-to-router payments)
• Wally (Cashu wallet connect)
• innpub (positional audio, innpub.dergigi.com)
• Citrine (Android local relay)
• Amber (Android signer)
• nostr-relay-tray
• Applesauce (code snippets)
• Wingman (remote dev assistant)
• CDK (Cashu dev kit)
• NIP-03 (OpenTimestamps)
• ants (Nostr search)
• OTRTA / Routstr (pay for LLM compute with Cashu)
• Notedeck & nostrdb
• gitworkshop.dev (Nostr-native git collaboration)
• Boris (reading and highlighting)
• Spotstr & Earthly.city (maps on Nostr)

In this dialogue:

• Convincing hzrd to make Blossom more of a protocol
• Self-healing links: content addressing like Nostr but for blobs
• Blossom pacemaker: a tool that monitors your notes and blobs, rebroadcasts and re-uploads as needed
• Local first: local relays, local blossom, local cash, local signers
• "I still get shit for the audio quality"
• Verschlimmbesserung: the German word for making something worse by trying to improve it
• "We should reclaim localhost"
• Every Nostr app should work in airplane mode
• Citrine roadmap: auto-rebroadcast local events once you're online again
• Tollgate v0.2.0: router-to-router payments, released at btc++
• "Some people just hate e-cash" -- "Those people can't be helped"
• Cashu and CDK: making it easy for devs to use e-cash without managing wallets
• Wally: Cashu wallet connect, like NWC but for e-cash, runs local
• Install Wally and you're good to go with everything Nostr
• Special-purpose components that do one thing well
• Zero configuration: if there's a local relay, use it; if there's a local signer, use it
• innpub jukebox: zap the jukebox 200 sats to play a song with positional audio
• Moving away from subscription hell: attach e-cash to your requests
• noDNS deep dive: traditional DNS records published on Nostr instead of Cloudflare
• Self-signed TLS certs verified through Nostr identity
• The human approach: ask around your group of friends vs the authoritarian approach: one central authority
• Pi-hole would be perfectly fine running noDNS
• NIP-03 / OpenTimestamps: indisputable proof of profile existence over time
• "We went back to basically having mainframes and thin clients"
• The vision: everything is a relay, offline or online shouldn't matter
• Damus relay wiped multiple times, nobody cared -- that's resilience
• Data should accumulate in the right places by your pattern of usage
• The Nosterverse: every client is a different lens, there is no global
• "Nostr is organic tech"
• Vibe coding setup: Roo Code, Claude, code snippets from hzrd and Pablo
• "Claude 4.5 is very agreeable -- I could rile it up and start a revolution together"
• The dream flow: just speak voice memos into your phone, code updates 20 minutes later
• Screenless coding: the underutilized interface
• ants search: took npub.world plus nostr.band, crossbred them
• "Software evolution is crossbreeding, not merging back into the original repo"
• Maps on Nostr: the social part is what makes Google Maps useful, Nostr can provide it
• Sovereign Engineering cohort 5: "we really know what we're doing now"
• "The future is already here, we just have a lot of building to do"
• "If you want to build something, the easiest way right now is Nostr"
• We're gonna make torrents great again