Jack Dorsey vibe coded a new app two months ago, and now that app is instrumental in toppling the Nepalese government. Yes, you've been hearing about the protests in Nepal, and they are using an app called BitChat.
Also, isn't this what Dao should have been doing this whole time? Let's kick it off. [upbeat music] So Colin, we've got a fun, crazy, wild story this week of the zoomers.
They are rebelling in Nepal and it's-- We got some wild stories. Yeah. And just an incredible intersection of a lot of different things here.
You've got BitChat, which is like this mesh network messaging app that uses Bluetooth, can also use Nostr, but, um, for the purposes of Nepal and these protests, they needed the Bluetooth messaging.
You've got Discord and v- and apparently votes for the new prime minister or leader. Um, I'm not sure, uh, what- if it's a prime minister in Nepal or what it is, but happening on Discord.
Yeah, and you've got the zoomers rising up and, you know, reworking the state using all of the tech tools that they're so savvy with. So- Yeah... a pr- pretty wild story, honestly.
And as you were saying, and I, I, I was also commenting before we started, it's almost like the, uh, sovereign individual, you know, um, network state, Balaji network state thesis playing out, you know? Yeah.
We'll get it. We'll, we'll get into it, but I actually wanna, I wanna pull up this clip, which I s- stumbled across on YouTube, which is classic. Like, um, the, the revolution will not be televised, it will be vlogged.
This is a vlogger who just was going to Nepal on vacation, and then it like, as the protests, which have been kinda warming up for the past couple weeks, as the protests really ignited, he just happened to be there, like, when they burned the embassy [chuckles] As a tourist.
Yeah. Check it out. So just for some context- The whole building... that building that you're seeing in the back- Yeah... like that's the parliamentary building that was set completely ablaze. Yeah.
[chuckles] Um, so like imagine you're just walking into, uh, on, onto Capitol Hill, and like the House of Representatives is just on fire. Anyway. Yeah. All right. Yeah.
So this is-- Yeah, so it's like crazy to like watch vloggers do this, and it's like in classic vlogger format.
Like, they do the quick cuts at the beginning, and they're like, "Oh, no," and then it gets into the actual story. But, you know, it's some crazy stuff. The whole building is burnt through.
[crowd cheering] [glass breaking] [horn honking] Fuck politician. Fuck MP only. Isn't that classic? It, it cuts, too, for the listeners.
Like, you know, it starts with the, with shit literally hitting the fan and then cuts to six hours earlier, and [chuckles] it's like classic vlogger style. Like, we are getting- Yeah...
first-hand accounts of people who-- Like this guy did not, apparently, 'cause I watched the whole thing, he didn't like, in, and I watched his previous videos, he didn't like come to cover the protests.
He just was like touring Nepal as a travel vlogger and ended up being in the middle of this.
And this is a good, like, setting to give because this is like each, each major like revolution that happens in the world is increasingly online. And
we wrote about this as it, as it pertains to like Bitcoin adjacent stuff, um, this yesterday in the newsletter where, uh, Jack Dorsey this summer
vibe coded an app mostly, which, um, he calls BitChat, which produces a mesh network.
And this, uh, app basically lets people communicate without a having to go through their centralized internet service provider, like your Cox or your Comcast.
And so those things are usually turned off and used by, uh, administrations and regimes to quell protests so they can limit communication. Well, leading up to the Ne- Nepalese like real overthrow, um,
uh, there was, there was a bunch of like posts on the, on the r/nepal subreddit, which were like, "Which apps can we use that are platform agnostic, that are iPhone and Android, open source, and like they just work today?"
And BitChat was like the one. And so we saw downloads of this app go from like thirty thousand to fifty thousand in like a day. Yeah.
And, and let's maybe give some context for why that happened, though, because so part of the reason why the, um, protests were sparked to begin with, and you mentioned, Charlie, that it was kind of a slow burn, hence why this travel vlogger could just [chuckles] go to Nepal for his latest video series and then just find himself, you know, enmeshed in the nationwide government takeover or government ouster.
Um, but so on September fourth, the government in Nepal ordered, uh, the shutdown of twenty-six social media platforms. This included Facebook, X, LinkedIn, YouTube, Reddit, Signal, Snapchat.
And, uh, the reg-- I'm reading this, uh, currently from Wikipedia, uh, quote here, "The registration requirement had been mo- um, uh..." Or so they, they, they banned all of these. Let's back up. Sorry.
They banned all these social media platforms for failing to register under the Ministry of Communication Information Technologies', uh, new rules.
The registration re- requirement had, uh, been m- motivated in part as a way to enable the enforcement of a new digital services tax and like a stricter VAT.
So it's kind of, uh, similar actually to what Canada has been, um, proposing for some of the tech companies in the US, funnily enough. Um- Canada and Nepal, uh, strange bedfellows. Yeah. [chuckles] Canada and Nepal.
Um-However, critics allege the shutdown was prompted by a social media trend highlighting nepotism, focusing on the undue privileges enjoyed by the children and relatives of influential political leaders.
So there seems like there's a lot of stuff kind of boiling under the surface. Social media ban was the last straw, and, um, where do you go when you can't use any of the usual apps?
Well, it turns out that you can use a very obscure app called Bitchat, as Charlie was just saying. Um, and, you know, so Jack Dorsey coded the Apple instance of this, right? And then Calais, I believe, the, uh- Yeah...
synonymous. Notable Bitcoin privacy developer, anonymous, you know, a- Privacy developer out of Europe, uh, did the Android instance of it.
And I have a note here from, um, Javier Bastardo from his, uh, Forbes reporting on this.
Um, according to Calais' own X post, the app saw forty-eight thousand downloads on September eighth from Nepal alone, uh, which represented more than thirty-eight percent of total installs at the time.
The second large-- that's the largest, uh, contingent of users. The second-largest comes from Indonesia, um, also seeing some political strife, which has eleven thousand three hundred downloads.
So just to recap, all the social media shut down, Bitchat allows these people to communicate without relying on the Internet, and to just really hammer that point home, like, I have my phone, Charlie has his phone.
We are in, um, I don't know what the range is. It's pretty modest. It's not crazy.
It's more than you'd think, but it's like- It-- Yeah, it depends, like how hard is your Wi-Fi signal work, or if you've got AirPods in- Yeah... how far can you go from your phone?
And it depends on if you're walking through a house or if you're- Yeah... just like on open land, like that's- Like maybe max thirty meters. Yeah. Right? Like something like that.
But anyway, um, I have Bitchat, Charlie has Bitchat. We connect using our Bluetooth to each other's devices, now we can message each other.
And then so each of our phones acts as a node within the mesh network, and we can connect to different users, and that's how you expand access to it.
So mesh networks are typically used, um, for other, for, for like kind of very stripped down basic levels of communication, right? You can use them for, um, you can... There, there are, um,
o-other ways to do it where you can basically set up like kind of small, uh, radio networks, right?
Um, uh, one of, uh, I don't know if it's still active, but LocaMesh in Venezuela, Randy Brito was running that for a while.
But there have been, um, a lot of places that have had, uh, you know, kinda like spotty connectivity, bad internet, low cell service.
Uh, you'll see some of these kind of pop up, and they're also kind of like, you know, like prepper, like, you know, doomsday scenario- It's big for preppers, yeah... last case, you know. I mean, I bought a bunch of...
I bought and was installing a bunch of what are called GoTennas back during COVID. Oh, yeah, the GoTennas. Yeah. [clears throat] So like mesh network's not a new concept. Like this is a thing that- Right...
a lot of the freedom and like cyberpunk movement people really wanted because you got this big problem of Bitcoin has to operate on really centralized rails, that is your ISP.
And while that's relatively free in the United States, like other countries literally as a playbook turn off the internet. Like, you know, like this is a thing- Right... you always read the news,
and they can turn it off. You-- They can turn off certain social medias or whatever. And so like, it's funny because like, so the mesh network thing is not new.
A lot of us have like experimented or thought or listened or like learned a bit about it, but mesh networks really rely on network effects.
So it's like less about whether you've got the optimal antenna system or the right, like the perfect like cryptography or the perfect U-UI app design.
Like the most important thing is that the, is that more people use it, because mesh networks historically have almost always been limited by just like the fact that they even are adopted in the first place, like.
And so when you have viral sensations such as Bitchat,
uh, you know, f-fifty thousand people in Nepal, a bunch of zoomers with their phones, like this can now actually be an instrumental censorship-resistant communications network, and it's just- Especially in an ur- especially in an urban setting, right?
Yeah. Yeah, urban setting. You know, all those bodies packed in, you can create pretty strong links. Yeah.
And this is like, this is super cool because, um, you know, we don't talk about as much on this show, but like this is really, really close proximity to Bitcoin not, not, uh, you know, notwithstanding just the fact that it's Jack Dorsey, like the biggest Bitcoin guy besides Michael Saylor,
um, who made this app on a weekend actually back in July.
So like this also, this app doesn't just work as a mesh network, it also can plug into Nostr, which is a social network which kind of has a, um, like relays which, which power the network.
It's a little clunkier, but it's like theoretically more censorship resistant as a social, as a, uh, like communications platform.
And so you can like actually, instead of doing the mesh network for your Bitchat, you can connect through Nostr, and you can actually communicate globally or regionally if you wish, but you gotta...
That's where you do have to go over an ISP. But that's fun. I actually wanna like h- pull up some other highlights from the Nepalese protest because we have this other trend which is like the network.
It's the biology network state thesis, which love it or hate it or, you know, same thing with biology. Like this is a, this is a really interesting idea which captures kind of this new thing, this new phenomenon forming,
uh, on the internet-As I was beginning with like the Arab Spring, like the social media, social media era of the Arab Spring to today, where you now have zoomers coordinating, uh, like burning down parliament and like overthrowing a regime on Discord.
So, um, one of the crazy things is I'm going to share my screen here. There's this, uh, tweet, which is this is true.
So if you're going to overthrow a, you know, a government or a regime, you have to figure out who takes the place, who takes the place of this like regime.
And, um, when you don't have like people appointed to like run polling stations or it's not really necessarily like a, um, like an actual, you know, junta or militia, which does it, which kind of self-appoint the next dictator.
You-- this is like the cr-- like this is like this open question, crowdsourcing the next leader of the country. And what they did is they used Discord for all the NFT or crypto degens out there, you know what this is.
It's like a communications app. This, they just held a, a big Discord chat, and they put up a Discord poll where the people in the Discord actually voted for someone.
And what's crazy is the military and police who are on the ground in Nepal are appear to actually be upholding the results of this Discord poll. Like, so- Unreal. Straight up. Unreal. [chuckles] A Discord poll.
It's like if, you know, if you're listening, it's like if you go into Discord and you join like a giant chat room, a video chat, it's like all the people's like cartoon avatars. And they're like,
there are, you know, they're, they're moderators and they're admins, and they're like, "Okay, everybody, poll closes at midnight." [chuckles] This is like some like, you know,
dude with like an ani- an anime chick avatar, just like, like some massive sword and like big titties or something. Yeah. He's like, "I sh- I don't know about his economic policies, actually." Um.
[laughs] Um, one of the avatars is a One Piece avatar for any of the hardcore anime fans, which is like one of like the longest running, like, you know, young teen avatar, uh, uh, young teen, uh, anime movie. Yeah.
Anyway, it's like, it, it's hilarious to watch this. Um, and, uh, yeah, there's, um, an unverified video, which I won't play of, uh, one guy who self...
who says he's one of the Discord moderators on the server in a, like a police getup going through the crowd and like, you know, telling people what to do. [chuckles] So,
um, your, your Discord mod is now, now has real power in the real world.
You know, that's the thing, the Discord aspect of this to me is very fascinating just for the fact that every revolution ends up imposing its own form of tyranny. Obviously, there's a sliding scale.
Sometimes that tyranny is literally like slaughtering millions in the streets, or sometimes it's imposing a softer form of tyranny in terms of speech or other things like that, right? But, um,
the overthrowers always end up bringing some aspect of like their in-group culture to the political process, and like that's what we're seeing with this currently with Discord.
[chuckles] And, you know, if you don't know how to use Discord, I guess you just don't vote.
You know, um, obviously this is th- this is a, um, makeshift, you know, kind of ersatz solution right now for them to get an interim prime minister. But- Yeah...
you know, on the list of what the hell bingo card, you know, uh, options for twenty twenty-five, th- this one's pretty far up there, I have to say.
Not only for the fact that they're using Discord to coordinate certain decisions for a coup, but also because they're actually using a Bitcoin adjacent protocol to coordinate the protest and the, the government ouster, so.
Yeah, and crypto does play a role in here, like, um, some of, you know- There's been a lot of things like this, you know. Yeah, a lot of things like, you know, there...
this is one where crypto and Bitcoin specifically has been used like to, to transact amidst certain financial rails being cut off, like they cut off Stripe. Um, so a lot of people couldn't receive.
And so, you know, crypto was a, an alternative, Bitcoin, uh, obviously the biggest one. Um, but like at the top I said like, isn't this kind of what DAOs imagined themselves to be?
If you were to go back to twenty twenty-one and your favorite like Twitter threader, you know, is talking about how we can give people like the ability to vote using cryptographic systems and these networks.
And, um, note very, you know, conspicuously we're not using a blockchain for this, but this is a validation at the very least of the internetification and, uh, new types of networks that are being leveraged
to like enact real change and mobilize real people. Um, you have to think that, uh, this, this is a trend which will only continue.
You know, maybe people aren't making governance proposals based upon weighted vote staking for, you know, where to allocate allo- where to allocate the rest of your DAO's dwindling shitcoin treasury.
But, you know, at the very least, you can, uh, actually overthrow a, uh, a regime. So. I think it's a good example too of not overthinking what you need to deliver to- Mm-hmm...
especially to, in this case, protesters, um, dis- uh, dissidents and human rights advocates. Um, like they don't need a DAO with some convoluted Rube Goldberg tokenVoting mechanism, right? For how, you know- [laughs]...
it's like how are we gonna decide to execute this next general in the streets, you know?
Like, you don't need to have a, a, a token vote on, you know, whether or not it's gonna be the guillotine or it's gonna be f- the firing squad. Yeah. But, you know, a, um, censorship resistant, you know, uh,
low li- a, a censorship resistant, um, highly resilient chat platform like Bitchat is perfect but probably not something that a lot of people would think to produce because it's so simple and seemingly so inconsequential.
You know, sometimes we try to not just reinvent the wheel, but make the wheel something that it can't be, right? Make it better than it actually can- Or add a, or add a token to the wheel.
So- Yeah, add a token to the wheel. Add a wheel to the wheel. Take the wheel token. Yeah. Give the wheel a wheel. [laughs] But sometimes all you need is Bitchat or, like, good money, right?
Like Bitcoin or stablecoins are a good example of this in terms of, you know, like, "Oh, don't shoot me, stablecoin's good."
Um, but, uh, you know, th- they, they have provided financial tooling and financial platforms for protesters, dissidents and, you know, political exiles all around the world.
People who have been cut off from the financial, um, networking and plumbing of the, uh, world around them. So, and Bitchat is an example of that from the communications layer.
Like, to me, it almost seems like Bitcoin and these crypto systems, it's like, dare I say, and I'm gonna give the third leg of the chair in a second, but the first and obvious...
The first leg and most obvious leg is financial, and that can be everything from saving money to sending remittances to day-to-day payments.
Like, I don't think we need to quibble over, like, the difference between, like, a savings technology and money, and then, like, technology as, like, a spending technology.
[laughs] Um, the second leg would be communications. Nostr is a good example of this.
Bitchat uses Bluetooth, like that's not Bitcoin specific, but I mean, Nostr is just a good example, and even Bitcoin itself, being able to send messages in an opportun- And then the third, uh, leg, dare I say, is, is storage.
Um, it's not big storage, it's not a lot of storage, but that's still potentially very useful, um, for journalists, for, um, whistleblowers, for people who want to leak information and publish it to a database that is incorruptible.
So- I mean, we've had multiple cases of someone posting a half and then later revealing, uh, through revealing the Bitcoin transaction that they had in fact committed to this thing by saying, "I put verifiable proof that this thing existed two years ago."
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Okay, we're gonna pivot towards the end of this, um, to, again, the political and cultural hot topic of the week.
Um, this does, uh, this is, uh, uh, relating to Charlie Kirk, um, who we're not going to talk about the actual incident or the assassination, um, except to, uh, say that we condemn violence of all kinds.
Uh, the relevant thing is that Charlie had historically, and these quotes are being pulled up, talked about Bitcoin, um, and I think this is actually kind of relevant because a lot of people are gonna be hearing this
because of the, you know, obviously the virality of the topic, and, and because it's just, uh, you know, it's relevant today, and it's from a very relevant person.
But he spoke about Bitcoin, and I'd not, I'd not heard this 'cause I didn't really listen to Charlie Kirk that much, nor did I listen to the interviewer of this. But he's got a pretty, like, uh...
He, he had a pretty, like, uh, uh, good grasp in, of Bitcoin, and I'm just gonna play a couple clips from this two-minute interview. I'm a big fan of Bitcoin. Should the US do a Bitcoin reserve? Absolutely, yes.
Yes, the, the United States should, should have a strategic Bitcoin reserve. And who should pay for the Bitcoin reserve? [laughs] That's a good question.
Um, hopefully, I mean, some of the tariff money could pent- potentially do that. The reason why I think we should have a strategic Bitcoin reserve, I know you guys had Michael Saylor on your show- Mm-hmm...
and I, I think he's onto something.
There is something called, like, the mass adoption theory, which is over a period of time, like the English language, US dollar, things just catch on, and they're just kind of volitional, and there's no stopping it.
I think Bitcoin is that. You gotta watch out, though. Quantum computing could potentially crack cryptography.
Like, man goes straight from, like, saying we should buy, you know, strategic reserve Bitcoin to mentioning the quantum issue. They j- yeah. Which I thought was kind of- It's like barbell theory, but for- Yeah...
like, bull and bear f- uh, fuel. Yeah. It's like you've got the strategic reserve bull fuel, and then you've got the quantum bear FUD.
Um, so this actually was, uh, this particular interview was sub-tweeted by Hunter Beast, who I've had on the show previously, who is kind of leading the quantum, uh, discussion.
How do we, how do we mitigate a potential quantum issue?
The second part of this interview with, with Charlie is also interesting because he, he talks to, um, a lot of wealthy people, and he says it's being adopted, uh, uh, very, very rapidly among the wealthy, and here's that clip.
There's only so many penthouses in London and Paris that they could buy. There's only so many ranches in Wyoming that they could buy, and so they... We've had this problem.
So you create all this money, the money goes upwards.To wealth inequality point, to your earlier point, the question is then, well, what do rich people do with money? There's only so many equities they can buy.
There's only so many shares in NVIDIA and Apple and Microsoft they could justify. Well, money needs to find a home, and it's found a home in Bitcoin.
And so once it has mass adoption, and the-- literally, the wealthiest families on the planet are starting to park serious monies in Bitcoin. And because it's scarce, it's easy to transfer, and it's just a winner.
Sometimes there's a mass adoption, and it just rises to the surface, and I think Bit- I think Bitcoin is that.
That's a, that is a clip that a lot of people are gonna hear, um, due to everybody- Yeah...toring up old, old, you know, Charlie quotes, so.
And I think it goes to show you how many proponents Bitcoin has kind of behind the scenes. They're just not [chuckles] as rabid, you know, or dogged as some of the maximalists who kind of make it their entire business.
Uh, I, I didn't know that at all about Charlie. Um, pretty interesting, well-articulated, a few things there. Uh, I think, though, going back to, like, the quantum thing, like, everything's kinda screwed.
Um, [chuckles] you know? We're gonna have to revamp security for everything on the internet once that happens, so, like, Bitcoin's the last of our worries. But, um, overall, like, um, it-- really interesting to hear.
I think you're right, that's gonna probably become one of those posthumous viral videos.
But, um, you know, our, our, our heart goes out to, uh, the, the Kirk family, and as Charlie said, you know, it goes without saying, but we condemn acts of violence like that.
It's very sad, and I, I-- to, to me it's just, you know, not to go too much on a tangent, but it's just, to me it shows that we're at a very sad and critical juncture in, in, in, you know, our nation's development.
Um, political violence is creeping back into the fray and, um, it, and, and it's popular with cert- with some people, is the thing that worries me. But, um, we won't spend too much time on that. Yeah.
We'll have to wait for a bear market when we lose things to talk about and we have to get super political and, uh, reorient ourselves on one of these extreme- Find something else to talk about...
on one of the extreme spectrums. Yeah. It's still, it's still un-unclear which extreme direction we'll take, uh, you know, during next w-which bear market. But that's for another time.
Thank you, listener, for tuning into Bitcoin Season Two. Catch us on all social media platforms, and see you next week. [outro music]