The Kevin Rooke Show

Chase Perkins - 00:00:00:

We are quite literally subjects of digital tyranny. It's feudalism, but it's worse than feudalism. It's authoritarianism. Like I said, the reason it's been difficult to build this is because it's easier to just consolidate everything. The Cypherpunk movement disproportionately empowered individuals on a global scale or universal scale. It transcended any locality. If at the end of the day, it can't interoperate and you can't export your data, you're still stuck in a subnet. We want it to be easy for the masses to reap the benefit of Bitcoin without having to be hypertechnical or entrenched in the camp. It's a self evident winner. It's essentially free. It streams, it's portable, it's permissionless. When you normalize what is organic internet money and you make it a part of the Internet experience, you make a part of every application, I think the numbers become huge, and I think it actually adds utility to the Lightning Network and Bitcoin writ large.

Kevin Rooke - 00:01:08:

Chase Perkins is the founder of Impervious, a peer-to-peer Internet browser with Lightning payments built in that recently launched their alpha version last week. In our conversation, we discussed privacy and censorship on the Internet today, we explored exactly how Impervious works, and we also talked about the importance of peer-to-peer communications, decentralized Identifiers, and the Lightning Network in this browser. Chase is asked to have his chair of today's show-split sent to the Human Rights Foundation. So if you enjoy this episode and if you learned something new, the best way you can show your support for the show and the Human Rights Foundation is by sending in sats over the Lightning Network. You can use any Podcasting 2.0 app, but my favorite to use is Fountain. Quick shout out. Today's show is sponsored by Voltage. Voltage is the industry standard and next generation provider of Lightning Network infrastructure. Today's show is also sponsored by Stakwork. Stakwork is a Lightning powered transcription tool that takes the best of AIs and humans and combines them to make transcripts that are better, faster, and less expensive. We'll have more from Voltage and Stakwork later in the show. Chase, welcome to the show. I am thrilled to discuss all that you're working on, and I know you just released the alpha version of Impervious. I want to get into all that. But first, let's start with a discussion. Tell listeners a little bit more about your background, how you discover Bitcoin, why you decided to build on Lightning.

Chase Perkins - 00:02:41:

Sure, Kevin. Thanks for having me, man. It's great to see you, and it's been a long time coming, so it's going to be a lot of fun. Yeah. So I'm chase perkins, founder of Impervious cofounder. Mark Stites. Amazing dude. I think we're both old school, relatively old school Cypherpunks, but a bit more so than I. Discovered Bitcoin in 2011/ 2012, started Bitcoin mining from an apartment in Chicago during law school. There was no community. It was just magic internet money. I was there when we were transitioning from CPUs to GPUs to ASICs and you're trying to swap out as hash, the hash rates increasing and do all kinds of cool stuff with vanity wallets. But mostly it was just this, you know, you know, absolutely no one, but somehow the network persists. It's this fracturalized distributed compute that actually seemed to work at scale. And I had friends kind of warning me against the magic Internet money, but you know how that worked out.

Kevin Rooke - 00:03:46:

Yeah. And then talk to me about building Impervious and coming up with this idea. What problem did you initially set out to solve?

Chase Perkins - 00:03:56:

Yeah, so a few things over the last 20 years we've seen the great consolidation of the Internet and we've seen each layer of the tech stack kind of consecutively be either exploited, surveyed, censored, but really we've just lost discretion and control at the individual level of what it means to like how you send, store and receive information. The ordinary individual has no idea. I mean, it's gotten to the point where it's essentially untenable. And it's not impossible to run your own Email server because ISPs will basically black flag spam, basically self front Email servers. I'm oversimplifying, but we've just seen this consolidation and loss of control and then you see the attraction from authoritarian actors. We have a perverse incentive structure to attack those in power or perceive to control data and information. So instead of going from me to you to say, hey, I don't like what you said, or if you're a third party actor that's trying to seek information from you, they just go around you, right? They circumvent you. It's like God mode. They go to the server which you're on and it was disheartening. So, Adam Purvius, we've been thinking about these problems for a long time, individually, both from a cryptographic layer or perspective to like Bitcoin and Lightning, what does it mean to send, receive, control information? What is identity? And we saw in the last election, things really come to a head with basically parties were coerced to turn servers and access off. And we knew there was a practical approach and we call it the peer-to-peer Internet standard. If you can send and receive information without a third party, then the future starts to look a lot brighter and it gives discretion and control back to individuals.

Kevin Rooke - 00:06:16:

Why is this an issue now? This is something that has been building up, I guess over the last 20 years where we've become a lot of the apps on the internet are increasingly centralized and we've come down to, you know, there's four or five apps that everyone, all of my friends and family know and use and love and that's their internet. Right? Like it's just a handful of apps. What were the catalysts that led us to this point? Why is it such an important topic today? Because I hear everyday now someone's getting canceled or someone's getting blocked from some platform or someone and I don't really know where it all came from. Like I know what happened, but I don't know what was the catalyst.

Chase Perkins - 00:07:02:

I think if you were to look at I don't know about a bell curve, but like a graph, it points out the ease of use. I think a lot of it started with: it's become easier and easier to start businesses to communicate, to spin up an app because we're relying on existing third party platforms and services. So 10, 15 years ago, just finding a startup would be ridiculously capital intensive and complicated. Now essentially anyone can do it. But because we use services like AWS and Apple and different backend infrastructures that are really consolidated, so what may have started off as simplicity and ease of use has really led to kind of like a crux and centralization of power. And if you go back to how the Internet started, which was like having a fault tolerant federated system in the event of a nuclear incident, it was to ensure communications could persist and modern or modernity could have some semblance outside of like line of sight communication, line of sight radio. And so we went from oh my God, the world's connected to we're connected, but we're so centralized that we're increasingly brittle and fault tolerant or increasingly less fault tolerant. So it's important to have these tools and capabilities. I don't think it was definitely not one actor. It was just for simplicity and aggregation and efficiency and capital intensity. That's another reason Impervious is, I think, pretty significant on our end.

Kevin Rooke - 00:08:46:

Yeah, that's a good analogy. So maybe there's a way to frame this in the context of Lightning. Like we're all connected, but in the Internet today you're all using the same three, like routing nodes to pass every transaction through rather than this collection of some 20,000 nodes we have today. Do you think there is a realization somewhere along the way that by having access to the internet people were given a lot of power and that's now become like a reason to start censoring people that they have too much power?

Chase Perkins - 00:09:24:

Absolutely. Look, the Cypherpunk movement and what has attracted me to really science fiction writ large and I know my cofounder would say the same thing is it disproportionately empowered individuals on a global scale or universal scale. It transcended any locality or jurisdiction. And for that same attraction when it's given to the masses, obviously is noticed by those who have conventional or existing systems in place and it certainly is a threat. And so I think exactly those tools which went from cool and kind of fringe to normalize and standardized, it's become an everyday issue, like a kitchen table issue which 15 years ago would have been incomprehensible.

Kevin Rooke - 00:10:20:

Right. Where do you think the world goes if… before we get into Impervious, I want to think about the current state of things and without peer-to-peer technology, where would this lead? Where are we headed towards if we don't correct?

Chase Perkins - 00:10:36:

Look, man, we've become the creatures of big tech and not just big tech but the proxies that can direct them. We are quite literally like subjects of digital tyranny. It's feudalism, but really it's worse than feudalism, it's authoritarianism. And we're already there, right? If we were to continue that path, if we don't make a diligent effort, I don't say all is lost, but the incentive structure is like there's a reason authoritarianism can work. It's ruthlessly efficient, right? And when you deprive parties of tools, you can coerce and that's the Marxist limitless ways is to coerce others. They don't get a choice, they don't get representation. You coerce them through force. And I see that permeate every aspect of society and frankly, that was a significant motivation for us to find and pursue and dedicate our lives to Impervious. Every different cause is hijacked and we use harm reduction models to say, yeah, but whether it's the ESG movement or others to say, hey, look, you know, there's always a good reason to coerce and use force to compel instead of persuade. And you need tools where when someone's trying to toggle you off in the world or survey or capture or limit, they already exist because once that faucet is turned off, you need that before the cataclysmic event and frankly you need it so they just can't get entrenched and you can readjust the narrative and frame, frame it in a positive way. It might be too early in the conversation to jump into it, but consumer privacy is the foundation for let's just say individual data privacy is the foundation for consumer protection and national security related infrastructure issues. Like without individual data privacy you're never going to protect us from exploits, leaks, hacks, good or naive or negligent third parties. And like there are so many federal and state agencies and departments that exist for consumer protection and infrastructure but they're all retrospective, right? They go after actors after an event has occurred. They try to fine or incur regulatory fees or penalties but we need mechanisms to prevent the exploits, hacks and negative behavior up front. So the peer-to-peer internet standard provides you a capability. It's a foundational thing we'll build from here where if you have for your everyday tools have some control and knowledge of where you're sending, storing access and sharing data with, you can go from there and go, well, what novel or unique value proposition does this third party service provide? And is it sufficient to, instead of exporting a social graph, importing it or providing them your data? Or is it more important to just like separate use that tool and then have off platform communications, data transfer and messaging? So I think it's like a great challenge and it's really important. If we take a step back,that was a diatribe to explain that you can frame these issues in a positive way. It's not just anti-big-tech. It's not anti-government, it's not you have something to hide. It's distributed compute and cryptography. And the Bitcoin Lightning Network can empower protect individuals, and then it has a macroeconomic and societal impact where you secure the base, the atomic level, and then you can protect the whole. And that might be a little bit of a trade off in discomfort for policymakers, but ultimately it's a necessary one. We go a little by kind of bolstering the principles that the United States was founded on individual rights, protection from unreasonable search and seizure, due process. We can restore those and apply them in the digital realm will actually be to the benefit of the nation writ large and to the world. And we can export those values and prevent we don't necessarily have to have hot wars every five minutes if individuals around the world are empowered. So we say we're in the freedom tech business, which is what we're doing.

Kevin Rooke - 00:15:22:

Makes sense.

Chase Perkins - 00:15:23:

Yeah. Empowerment-freedom-tech.

Kevin Rooke - 00:15:26:

So how would you describe the Impervious presence and how it works to someone who maybe is familiar with Bitcoin, maybe has used Lightning but doesn't really have a strong technical understanding of peer-to-peer technology and how it actually differs from what they're using today?

Chase Perkins - 00:15:42:

Sure. So the Impervious browser provides a suite of peer-to-peer tools for communication, data transport, payments, and identity management built into a privacy focused web browser. So it's a way to more easily control your data payments and cons. The reason we chose a web browser is because it's become a de facto virtualized operating system where it's where you spend the majority of your time when you're not on third party apps and services. So it's a natural aggregation place, and also it allows like a building block for you to start these tools. You don't have to every five minutes, go to a Zoom, go to a WhatsApp, go to a Slack, go to a Dropbox, go to a Discord, go to a Telegram. It's built into the browser, it's peer-to-peer. And you can start challenging assumptions, which if you realize, like, hey, if I don't need these third party intermediaries for 80-90% of the technology used for streaming content for gaming, then why are we using them to begin with? And what unique value proposition do they have? So we unify that in the browser, and the browser itself is a privacy preserving browser. We don't collect telemetry data. We don't track and sell users information or data or crash reporting without permission. We don't collect it. But most importantly, it's a way to think, hey, you have these third party… what would typically require third party tools and services, messaging, Email, file transfer payments, all built in. And then you can build out. And we think it's a great vehicle for the future of the internet. And then we can build everything out from VPNs and other complementary services.

Kevin Rooke - 00:17:30:

Very cool. So as I understand, then I can use Impervious as my day to day browser and it's a privacy protecting browser for all of my sites that I want to visit on a daily basis. And then I also have these handful of apps that you guys have built into the browser being, you know, there's chat, there's video, there's live documents and file sharing, I believe, and payments.

Chase Perkins - 00:17:56:

Yeah, exactly. And more to come. I think that's precisely right. And I think you should look, it's open source. It supports all firefox extensions. So if you have a favorite ad blocker, you have like a third party plugin or extension, you're good to go. And now you can start normalizing. And guess what? As the greatest call to action that we've seen in Bitcoin Lightning history is it's the first Bitcoin Lightning native web browser. What does that mean? It doesn't mean that every time you go to a website you're conducting a Lightning transaction. What it means is that you can use the web browser as a command and control and signaling layer for your Lightning node. It can be virtual via voltage or can be like a physical one, like Umbrel. But you can use it not just for sending and receiving of payments, but you can use it to route information and you can use it to traverse asymmetric net and offline storage and all kinds of cool stuff. But it's not an instate, it's a call to action to go well; what would the users like to see? What is the capability? Do you enjoy knowing where your data is stored, how it's routed? Do you enjoy getting around corporate Firewalls? If HTTPS and WebSockets or Web RTC is failing, maybe you should try to provision the call and route it through layers and layers of onion of encrypted networking, which is Lightning Network, almost like an incentivized tour and it can provide additional protections and incentive structure. And then payments are built in the rail. So we're on the browser, which we were doing earlier, we can send and receive payments. We can use either Lightning quick send or you can generate and send and receive an invoice. But it's all peer-to-peer in an encrypted… and it's off platform, off network. So if you're streaming content, if you're giving a seminar, if you're an educator anywhere in the world borderless permissionless, streaming payments attached to information that is the economy. It's like attaching PayPal to Ebay to Twitch to OnlyFans. But it really is. And as we build a marketplace and greater capability and larger multi party rooms and chat, you start to see, my God, what am I using these third parties for when it's no one's business, you don't need permission and it's unlimited. You see some of these fee structures as kind of arbitrary.

Kevin Rooke - 00:20:41:

I guess you launched the alpha version of Impervious last week. Has anything surprised you in either the lead up to the launch and building it out or in that week since launch?

Chase Perkins - 00:20:54:

Yeah, plenty of surprises man from technical to usage. That's a good question because I think the biggest surprise was the proportion of Linux downloads we thought it would be a nod to the security and privacy community. It's like 30, almost 40%. It's been tremendous and very surprising and also it's a great community to circulate an Alpha too because typically not only they're willing but they're able to provide material feedback and to do so in a way that is constructive for us at scale like we get messages all day long. Hundreds and hundreds of messages and some of them are duplicated and others are more unique whether it's an issue or a setup or some version of Linux so it's been really cool and it also reminds you that the world is vast, it's not just a kid at school with a new MacBook Pro sitting in a one on one class but like there are a lot of people around the world that are using… you give someone a tool and I'll tell you another surprise is that like the demand from countries like Brazil, huge! The downloads from Brazil, amazing, and thousands and thousands and I think it just speaks to like you give someone a tool. It's not just a nicety. It's not just a novelty but if there's a value proposition and a use case whether it's a corporate use case or individual privacy or jurisdiction or nation state or whatever it's cool to watch them use it and also allows us to iterate and let the market kind of guide us in the market, in the sense of like what are users, what do they want and wow, did not expect that.

Kevin Rooke - 00:22:43:

Yeah so once a user takes that step and downloads, do you get any visibility into what actions they are taking from that point on?

Chase Perkins - 00:22:52:

Yes so we have GitHub actions so we can see downloads. We can see if you use a VPN. We don't know what region. We just see the location of downloads and that helps us give us some perspective. If you use an Impervious relay we can see that they're being used. We can't see the content or control it and we don't know the party associated but this is why it's an alpha. We need the infrastructure out the way we'd like to see Impervious moving forward is you either use your own relay you use a trusted third party or anonymized one which will just be in the drop down menu or you can just use Lightning and then we can't see any of it and in fact it's an awesome incentive to be like this is an open source – it's FOSS – It's peer-to-peer,it's encrypted and if you're routing your data via the Lightning Network you're minimizing the attack surface but you're also like you're providing yourself greater discretion and control of any record of what you're doing.

Kevin Rooke - 00:24:04:

Right. So you guys wouldn't get any visibility into them, like whether or not users were primarily using messages or videos or any of the percentages?

Chase Perkins - 00:24:16:

Proving to the chagrin of our investors. No, we wouldn't.

Kevin Rooke - 00:24:21:

This is something I'm interested in from a growth standpoint or marketing standpoint and like data analysis standpoint is how do you make decisions when you don't have the same data that your Web 2.0counterparts might have?

Chase Perkins - 00:24:40:

I think it's a great question and it's not a perfectly refined one. We have a huge volume of inbound input, which helps. I think it's different. It depends on whether you're talking about demand for features and functionality or like, future growth. So right now we're kind of just relying on actual direct feedback and downloading in usage. And if people are like, hey, I joined because I wanted to have peer-to-peer group video calls and something's failing, or I want to share a document but the other parties aren't using it, it gives us insight for growth and we're going to model off the existing Internet in the sense of what are the tools we use most often. Like, I was explaining to you when we first linked up and I was like, when you create a cryptographic secure data transmission channel from me to you, it's like a wormhole, it's a tunnel. And via UDP encrypted package, via Web RTC, you go, okay, what data are we passing now? It's just bytes. Is it an audio file or is it streaming video? Is it a payment? Is it content as a message? It's almost arbitrary. I'm oversimplifying, but we had to build backwards. We go, we know we can build peer-to-peer, we know we can create these high speed, high integrity, high resilient data transmission channels, but what applications are we going to use them for? Because that's how Impervious started. We started as a suite of APIs that any developer could add to their application to provide peer-to-peer capabilities. So if you wanted in app messaging peer-to-peer and encrypted, if you wanted video, if you wanted payments, we weren't exactly sure how it was going to be adopted. And then we said, look, we already know how people are using the Internet. They use Slack, they use Zoom, they use Discord, they use Email, they use Dropbox, they use YouTube, they use Twitch. We go, well, there you go. They've already kind of refined that for us.

Kevin Rooke - 00:26:52:

How did you make that decision to make that pivot? From providing developers with those tools to enable peer-to-peer apps, to building the browser yourself and then inviting developers eventually to build their own apps on the browser.

Chase Perkins - 00:27:07:

Totally, I think a genuine answer is we don't see it as a pivot as much as like a building block. Where we go, we can consolidate that in a way… we found ourselves trying to guide people. Going to be really cool if you use it this way or, you know, it would be great. And it doesn't really scale. And I go. Well, let's take our most used APIs. Let's build on and consolidate and then demonstrate and make it open source. And then we also integrated decentralized command and control and decentralized identification or Identifier layers at DIDComm. It's super elegant. It's interoperable. And we said, let's make the browser a vehicle to demonstrate that these tools don't have to be isolated into a subnetwork. And you might have a new tool or app where with great lenient terms of services. But if at the end of the day, it can't interoperate and you can't export your data, you're still stuck in a little subnet and it's almost like moving food around on your plate. You need in a perfect world, and this is why we're so excited to release the Impervious DIDComm standard is, it allows you to interoperate, whether it's files, messaging payments. But I can conduct typically, if we're on a Zoom call, I'd call Zoom, you'd call Zoom. They conduct the media mixing, they issue the encryption keys. And even if they're good actors, you're still depending on the ability to access their servers and that they're up and that they exist and that they're not blocked by your jurisdiction. And on a more practical and privacy preserving aspect, how are they issuing the encryption keys? Who are they shared with? And they most certainly are shared with third parties because they have to comply with every jurisdiction in which they operate. What you want to do is make it so the services or platforms don't have… they're deprived of those tools or abilities. You go: issue it locally, make an open source free software. You can go directly to GitHub and compile it. Some upfront can share it with you. I mean, all we have is like startup insight, but we want to normalize it so it's used in a capacity that others adopt and that we also demonstrate. Hey, look, this should be opening doors and eliminating gatekeepers and not fighting over, it's my standard or nothing. I go interlace of standards. You call in from HTTPS. I'll initiate and provision on my end or receive via Lightning will both sync up via WebRTC or messaging. It could be radio signals or smoke signals. At the end of the day, it's important to provide that capability and all ships rise with the tide. And we're seeing, like I said, if we're fighting data duplication and the great consolidation of the Internet. DIDComm and free open source standards that interoperate are like a great swipe at it. And we actually think it's the right one. And I think demand empirically proves that we're onto something.

Kevin Rooke - 00:30:26:

Interesting, I had on Daniel Buckner at Block a while ago to discuss the DIDs, and it was really interesting. Why did you decide that this was the right approach for identity?

Chase Perkins - 00:30:41:

Daniel's great, by the way. Yeah, I think it was more deduction than prophesying for it. It was, hey, look, essentially like I was giving the Zoom example. If typically you're relying on a third party host to facilitate, to provision, you're not actually like sharing any information with the other party you're counteracting with it's all hosted and facilitated quite literally by… and I go, well, if we're not hosting it, if we're not issuing, if we're not designating and issuing the command and control around it, you need a standard which everyone can… it needs to be interoperable and it needs to be universal. So we support two different types of decentralized identity. We support peer DIDs, which are just locally issued, unpublished, not really a private phone number. But if you go in the imperfect browser, you click Settings, you go to Identity. You see a long machine readable string of text and that has your Lightning node if you connected one, your relay, your port, how you'd like to send a receive information. You can privately share that with anyone. You can connect Twitter and broadcast like, hey, I've cryptographically associated this with an account, so if you know it's me, you can talk to me off platform. Yeah, so that's basically an unpublished, it's called a peer DID. And then there are ION DIDs, which are universally discoverable and resolvable, and we use both and we support both. So it's up to the user on how they'd like to send and receive information. How would they like to broadcast? Maybe they want an ION DID or a publicly published and affiliated DID for X, Y and Z for work, and then they want a private one where only their friends it's like an unpublished phone number. Like only your friends know that username or handle or phone number is yours. And we're excited to support multi DID use moving forward. And it also shows that it's almost arbitrary from a compute perspective to local, you know, to generate an infinite number of local DIDS or identities. You should be able to join a community, participate in a project, use an application, make a payment, and it's a one off. But you can always retroactively associate and cryptographically approve. Actually, that was me. But it's almost like a lift at crypto cryptography itself, where it's a one way thing, where there's a public private key pair. You can't reverse seduce the private key, but you can if you decide to sign, you can always authenticate it after the fact. So you think of bids as like a hierarchy or as isolated. It's up to you how you'd like to weave them. Or you could use decentralized data stores and verifiable credentials to associate. So we hope Block adopts the DID standard as well, specifically our DIDComm standard, because we would love for you to have a decentralized data store. You drop in with some app, you can retrieve it by a different app, or maybe someone knows it exists, maybe only you know it exists but it's all about, it's cryptographically controlled via an individual locally and it can't be toggled on or off.

Kevin Rooke - 00:34:14:

Right. How important do you think it is that users have multiple DIDs or can create them at will? That they're not kind of like locked into one?

Chase Perkins - 00:34:24:

I think it's important for the future. I think it's important so you can always kind of untether and you can carve out identities or personas or aliases or participation. I think it depends on individual use case. I think for certain people it doesn't matter they have one username online and they have open or closed DMs and that's it. And it really depends on it's about discretion and control but we're not going to dictate to parties that this is your one DID forever. We support one right now, you can publish it or not, you can reboot and nuke the browser and be issued a new one in perpetuity and then in the future you'll be able to toggle between them and it's just like a local generation.

Kevin Rooke - 00:35:19:

Makes sense. I want to discuss the term peer-to-peer and I think it's a confusing term and the thing that I think gets a lot of people confused is in payments in fintech. There's also peer-to-peer and there are different things. Right? Like before preparing for this call I was looking up, I tried to figure out what is the biggest peer-to-peer app today, which one has been most widely adopted? And I type like ‘biggest peer-to-peer app’ in Google and I get PayPal and Venmo and Cash App and I'm like, that's not the peer-to-peer I'm talking about. So there's a big misconception or a misunderstanding of these terms and so how do you define the term peer-to-peer, I guess is a good starting point for this section.

Chase Perkins - 00:36:10:

I think Bitcoin did it for us, made it a lot easier. The name of the Bitcoin white paper is a peer-to-peer electronic cash system and when we founded Impervious, I deliberately went on my way to avoid using the word decentralized. Not because it's not and there are aspects of whether it's file storage or retrieval or universal verification that's fine registries, decentralization is a little bit in the eye of the beholder or it can be. Like you said, it means whatever someone wants it to mean. Was it fractalized storage? Is it universal shared value? I don't know but peer-to-peer means cryptographic controlled by individual and when you think of peer-to-peer electronic cash, you think it's Bitcoin. The function of the blockchain, the Bitcoin blockchain and Proof of Work was to make it universally verifiable and permissionless so I can conduct a transaction, we know for certain and we can cryptographically verify both the transaction and then the history and where it is in the chain. It does not require any one trusted third party because the Bitcoin blockchain itself is universal and it's increasingly secured every day as miners continue to hash and node operators, more importantly, keep up to date versions. So I think, you think of peer-to-peer, it doesn't mean it means it's controlled. And then there are always going to be third party ways to authenticate or to verify. peer-to-peer can be as private or public as you want, but it's not permission or controlled by a third party actor.

Kevin Rooke - 00:38:06:

Right. And so I guess to answer my question that I asked Google about, what is the most widely used peer-to-peer app today? Is it Bitcoin?

Chase Perkins - 00:38:17:

It's definitely Bitcoin, absolutely.

Kevin Rooke - 00:38:22:

What was before Bitcoin?.

Chase Perkins - 00:38:26:

Adam did his eCash, HashCash, eGold. It wasn't as widely adopted, but his algorithm is used in Bitcoin mining. I would shy away from any of the other cryptocurrencies just because I wouldn't necessarily consider them peer-to-peer or even decentralized. I don't want to get into that, I'm not trying to. But I do think that whenever censorship… we’re not talking about Proof of Stake, whenever something can be censored and aggregated and consolidated, you then have to ask, is it just been reconsolidated and centralized? Or even if it's distributed, is it only a veneer if a single or a minority or anyone can rewrite the ledger or chain or authentication or access? So maybe Napster before that, I don't know.

Kevin Rooke - 00:39:27:

I hope you're enjoying the show so far. I just want to give a quick shout out to our sponsor, Voltage. Voltage is the industry standard for Lightning Network infrastructure, creating layer two applications and services on top of Bitcoin starts with Voltage, where you can spin up nodes, get access to liquidity, optimize your node, and much more. Voltage is leading away as the next generation provider of Lightning Network infrastructure. And if you want to get a free trial and start using Voltage today, you can do so at Voltage.cloud. Why isn't every app a peer-to-peer app?

Chase Perkins - 00:40:02:

Well, I think two things. I think incentive structures have been off. There's no incentive for Facebook or Google to let you not only control your information, but to limit what can be surveyed, authorized and tracked. I mean, that's the Ads model and even the premium version where you say, okay, well, pay for premium encrypted messenger or Email storage, I think that's fine. It's just been difficult to make those systems, I think, economically viable. And then I genuinely think the other equally, if it's like 50% times A plus 50% times B would be the infrastructure. I think you need a universal, open source, DIDComm infrastructure that has been adopted where identity is a key component and it's cryptographically controlled by the individual. Like you can have peer-to-peer messaging or peer-to-peer file sharing. But if you don't have distributed or decentralized identity or DIDComm system. It's just on a subnet. You need to make things interoperable or else it's only going to scale to the scope of that one use case and application it is going to be able to.

Kevin Rooke - 00:41:21:

How do you convince other people to build on this DIDComm standard or build peer-to-peer apps?

Chase Perkins - 00:41:28:

I think it's a call to action to show that users are fleeing to us or they're fleeing to discretion and control of the censorship and surveillance resistant norm. I think you should be asking them, as we eat market share, it's less about us expanding market share than demonstrating that individuals say, hey, dude, I get 80% - 90% of whatever I'm doing already on this other application. And I don't get the downside. I don't get the arbitrary cut offs. You don't control surveys by data. I don't have to worry about encryption keys. And then you can start saying, I think it's an economic call to action and incentive structure to say, hey, look, like Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, you can pick smaller networks. A Zoom or Email, you can go, hey look, you're losing market share. It's unnecessary. You can have your cake and eat it too. But most importantly, if you don't adopt it, people are just going to like, you need to provide a sufficient value proposition that's so novel that you're not interoperable, you're not free open source, you're not peer-to-peer, not in an encrypted like, why am I stuck on a subnet? And by the way, there are certainly use cases, they're just fringe cases, they're more extreme cases or some wildly efficient or effective application. But even those applications should be, you would think, augmenting everything else. If you're streaming video games, you, hey, look, Steam or Twitch is great, but the messaging, the video streaming, the payments, the marketplace, does that need to be centralized? I think it should just be normalized in the consumers mind to challenge the status quo.

Kevin Rooke - 00:43:23:

Now, I'm going to ask you to take the opposite side of this argument. If you were to steelman the case that we don't need peer-to-peer apps and the Internet is great as it is and centralization is actually a good thing, how would you make that argument?

Chase Perkins - 00:43:39:

Boy, I think it's an upward sell or an uphill battle. I think we've seen the downside of the consolidation of the Internet over the last 20 years, and it's been so significant. Everyone seems to hate big tech for different reasons. I do think there are like I said, the reason it's been difficult to build this is because it's easier to just consolidate everything. It's easier to centralize, it's easier to just spin up servers and to issue ID and to store data and to not provision it locally. Even launching the Impervious app, we've seen parties actually like probably thousands at this point. They'll pin the launcher or the browser and not the launcher to the dock. It's because we have three different executables. Most software is just, hey, look, it's centralized, it's easy, it's pulling from here and that's it. It's difficult. And I think if you were to take the opposite, this is unnecessary, it's too difficult, it doesn't work at scale. It's janky and you go, look, none of those things are necessary. This is like a V one alpha and narrative and vernacular is so important surrounding we want to show people it's robust, it works, it is a viable alternative to these existing tools and it's just the starting, it's the foundation for future tools. But ultimately it's important that people realize like, you know, what are your priorities? If you don't mind being toggled off, you don't mind being tracked and surveyed. You may care if a company goes out of business, you may care if a jurisdiction starts blocking that application. But most importantly, you should be wondering what are you trading off, what's so unique?

Kevin Rooke - 00:45:41:

So you mentioned that it's easier now to just go with the status quo. Is there something fundamental when we look at the laws of physics? Is there some reason why it's easier to centralize these services? Or is it just because we are just now exploring peer-to-peer, we just have a need for it now. We're just building the infrastructure and maybe one day it will be just as easy.

Chase Perkins - 00:46:11:

Yeah, I think to answer your question about laws of physics, yes. And you add to that. Most technology now is layered from, you know, libraries to dependencies to like start to finish. And if you look at the Bitcoin blockchain, if you look at authentication and universal discoverability of transactions, it was the first time it required a ridiculous amount of effort from individuals and early adopters to with unforeseen incentives to prop up, ensure miners and Bitcoin nodes persisted. So you could have a universally discoverable and trustworthy ledger of information and then so yeah, I think it's difficult. I think it's easier to just put a piece of software on centralized servers, whether they're virtual in the cloud or local. It's easier to run dependencies. It's easier to pretty much do everything. I mean, if you look at our Live docs version, there's so much going on, it's difficult to appreciate. Typically with a live doc we're both signed into Google under our Google identities or username. We're just on the servers and I make a change. It reflects on their server. You can go offline, you can just pull from the server and you come back online. We had to reinvent the nature of collaborative documents and there are some things that definitely… that is the feature that has the most maturity. I think it's also the hardest and it has right now the least amount of demand. But when you're using an Impervious shared document, we're actually in real time, we have a WebRTC cryptography secure data transmission channel. We're looking at the same blank state. And then when I make a modification, I drop in an image or start typing, the application detects the change in state, the delta and then overrides your state, and we have to deal with colliding deltas. There's no third party resolver to say… there's no centralized God mode to say actually, this is the document. It's a nimble process where you go if you want to have a live collaborative doc. But you don't want to just override and collide. It's incredibly difficult and we do it. There's a lot of maturity that can be around the features and functionality of it. But it works and you go, God…. You don't even need Google to share a live document. Because that's how I think you should think about this. Decentralized servers, everyone meets up, you meet up, meet up on Zoom, you meet up on Google. Whether it's a doc or it's an Email with attachment, whether it's a video or messaging, whether it's Telegram or even Signal, you're still depending on their servers. So when you're saying, hey, I'm pinging a specific machine that's cryptographically controlled, or a decentralized Identifier, that designates where data is stored, whether it's a decentralized data store or stored locally, that is an incredibly complex problem, and most people don't want to bother. And their threat, I think tax surface level and what they're concerned about is kind of minimized. So you kind of have to make it not dummy easy, but it should be as familiar as possible with existing tools and services. And then you go, okay, it's not that big a lift. It's not just a novelty. Why would I possibly give one more thing to Google to survey, data mine, use for ads and deep learning. By the way, that's where Impervious AI comes from. It's actually tongue-in-cheek. We're mocking artificial intelligence. Who are the individuals making the decisions. So just a little subtle nod there.

Kevin Rooke - 00:50:20:

I like that. Do you see any new types of applications that will become possible when people are widely adopting a peer-to-peer internet browser? Is there anything that we can't do today that we could do in the future?

Chase Perkins - 00:50:35:

I think the mental model to frame that question would be around, like, the application side. It's very possible to have streaming, like, we have streaming video now, streaming YouTube, okay, where is it stored? Is it IPFS, is it locally, is it recorded? Is it just live content? Or is it like a data stream? It's just a view box for like a Twitch service. And then you have to build out all the functionality around it with teams and teams of people and usually billions of dollars of resources. So I would encourage the community to be gracious, or at least forgiving in the sense of it like, that's not the case with Impervious. We don't have thousand employees to just optimize the function of your Twitch stream with like, your credit card payment and all the users. And so I see a whole bunch of things we're going to be taking on Slack, unlimited chat, discussion, file sharing that will be in a universal platform, which I say universal. It's not centralized, it's universalism. Like you can opt in and out of rooms and share the information you would typically share. You know, Slack is so, it was so effective out of the gate, not just from how it was adopted with atomic networks and their growth hacks, but they had so many plugins and extensions, it was easy to add to Slack. And so you have to think about where you can prioritize resources. Is it for slack? Is it for streaming video games? Is it for OnlyFans? Is it for a YouTube? This is where another reason we genuinely want people to build on it is we're going to open up a marketplace, marketplace for services, for paid services, where you go, hey, look, whether you're a coder, you're going to review someone, you're an educator, you're a content creator, you're broadcasting. You can say, hey, look, the rate is so many sats per minute, the other party accepts they can join either a group or individual call. And now you're streaming. You're streaming content with payments in Bitcoin Lightning on the rail. It's censorship, surveillance resistant. But you can create a marketplace that balances, make sure it's legal. We're not going to make anything. We're not going to host that. I say host, we're not going to feature that in the Impervious marketplace. But what we can do is say, hey, look, you have services, you have skills, you have insight. Anyone around the world, most of the world doesn't have access to savings on banking, but they also don't have necessarily easy access to like a marketplace for it's almost like Fiverr, where, hey, if you're a coder or designer or writer or marketer or whatever, you can do that without having so many parties. Not just take a cut, but survey and permission and even know who you are. So we're going to prioritize resources around that. We're going to work towards, like I said, Slack marketplace, chat and incentivize streaming and video games. The other marketplace is for third party developers like, hey, you've got an application? We're not trying to compete with everyone. We're just building what we think from what we can tell has the highest demand out of the gate or what we're capable of building as of today, whether existing time and team and everything else. Here's a marketplace of third party applications. It doesn't have to be an iTunes style or sorry, an Apple App Store or Android marketplace. So it gets interesting quickly.

Kevin Rooke - 00:54:33:

I had a conversation a while ago with Keekie McClellan at Start9. We're talking about personal servers and the ways in which they might get adoption. And his take on it was that because it was starting from scratch and not many people have personal servers. It may be the applications that get the most traction are the ones that you can do alone at first and then the social ones and then the ones that require collaboration. So do you also agree then for Impervious that if you think about what you're, if you look at the funnel of new users, how you get new users is your biggest fire hose of new users coming through apps that someone could do on their own?

Chase Perkins - 00:55:25:

I guess I could see collaborative partnerships and yeah, I see that. And I don't know when you spoke with them, we've spoken to them, we're fans of them. We're always exploring it's too early to announce anything, but always exploring what that looks like. Is it you're running the Impervious daemon on Start9 or is it like the full blown browser or you're using them for relays? It can be a little bit in the eye of the beholder. We have to figure out the best way that makes the most sense for Start9 as well. But I do agree that if you are seeking to be a soft, sovereign, autonomous party that's trying to host and have the greatest amount of control, routing is a basic component of that and you can kind of pick and choose. I would love to be on an Embassy. I see that as a natural fit and I see it as like immediate fused adoption. I see all kinds of cool stuff. When I was talking about the marketplace, we want to make it easy to top off. Say it's a concert or you're a content creator or whatever. We want it to be easier for the content creator to send and receive Bitcoin Lightning sats and also to toggle that into whenever that becomes a US stablecoin or at least withdrawal to a wallet. That makes it easy for them to withdraw their bank account. We want it to be easy for the masses to reap the benefit of Bitcoin without having to be hypertechnical or entrenched in the camp. It's a self evident winner. It's essentially free. It's streams, it's borderless, it’s permissionless. Oh great. I withdrew it to my wallet, now I cashed out or I can top off my wallet and I can pay for services and marketplace. But yeah, to answer your question, I think we're going to have to see a future with Bitrefill where like, hey, you're in the browser and you've got sats, maybe you earn them, maybe you topped it off, but you can stay in this ecosystem of like, hey look, you're on Apple.com, you're on Amazon. Why don't you just generate a virtual visa or a specific gift card at checkout? And now you now have a self sustaining economy, which is a term that's been way overused. But you don't have to leave the ecosystem if you don't want to. Where you've earned a living, you're now spending it. And you know, you can stay in this realm, but you can also on and off ramp, it's up to the individual. So we're really excited about what that future looks like.

Kevin Rooke - 00:58:08:

Nice. When you guys think about your business models and earning money as a company, where's your head at on how Impervious plans to make money?

Chase Perkins - 00:58:19:

Yeah, I think around marketplace, I think facilitating, we have a saying of calling it noncontrived services. So Zoom ends at 40 minutes because they decided it ends at 40 minutes unless you have a premium account and you pay them $90 per seat per month, and you go, wait, what? I'm spending $1,080 a year for what? And then, we think, what are the premium functions that they're not arbitrary entrenchments where you go, hey, this is a premium service because this is a paid content creator. This is a paid service because this is a guy who's charging $100 an hour or 500 sats per minute for his time to give advice, to review your code because you can screen share from previous browsers. So it's like a big private Internet. You need, you know, a copywriter, just like, whatever. And so I see there's a lot of ways for us to make it easier for content creators, for those in the marketplace with professional services. I mean, you look at the after school education and tutoring services in Khan Academy is an obvious example of prerecorded lessons. But there are a lot of people that provide insight and tool and guidance and tutoring, sometimes the group, sometimes individually. I think there are a lot of ways we can work with either existing parties that they're in demand or they have skills or services or content that people are willing to pay for. We can make it easier so it's not a contrived paywall. Well, this is a paid service, and then we can figure out the best models around that, and then we can continue to provide capability as needed to third party like Enterprise or business use case. So we see a whole bunch of ways, whether it's the marketplace, whether it's the App Store, whether it's paid streaming services, whether it's paywall content to do it in a way that's organic because that's what the party is charging, or we are making it we're providing a prepackaged ease of use, like, hey, a turnkey solution that's non technical and non cumbersome. So you have like, a content creator package. I see a lot of stuff like that where you don't have to use it. It's just if you want for an ease of use, it's a prepackaged turnkey solution. So there's a lot of demand for it. We've had from certain paid content providers online a ridiculous amount of demand, and we deliberately have tried not to be like, hey, this is an OnlyFans killer. It's just, look, if you're a content creator, there were a lot of third parties that have their hands in the cookie jar, and they use it both for risk mitigation and for transaction settlement. Less and less goes. It's the age old tale of, like, fewer and fewer goes to the actual content creator to the owner. It's almost like royalties on music. Like, by the time how many views does it take to earn a cent as an artist online? It's a joke, right? Whatever Spotify and YouTube and Pandora's rate is, but you still are stuck because it's the greatest distribution mechanism. So there's a lot of models where you go, hey, look, you know, you're performer, you're content creator, you're a gamer, you're a professional, whatever it is, you go, hey, it's a great way to reach people. It's a great way to do so in a way that you control the content, the privacy, the capacity, the comms. And without so many third parties and permissions to say, like, you know, I think a good example, like 100 years ago, we designated the telecommunications network as a common carrier, as a utility, because we decided forever ago that we wanted the systems to work for us, not against us. And telecom providers can't do... We didn't want Bell South and at and T going, who are you? For what purpose are you conducting this call? Are you in good standing? Have you viewed the system? Who are the parties? We didn't want to condition it. We just wanted to say, hey, look, connect a sender or caller to a receiver. And we've just used the rule of law as instead of prior restraint and we went in prevention, we went to, hey, look, we're a rule based in a law based society. In theory, less so by the day. But you're not immunized for civil or criminal liability because you use the phone. If I can break a whole bunch of more laws and federal laws and people if we were to invent or designate the telephone telecom network today or invent it, I'm hard to press to think that, like, people would be so quick to be like, there are no rules. A sender is connected to receiver, there's no KYC, there's no AML. And I know I'm oversimplifying now because unless you're paying for a phone or in a service on a gift card, it can be difficult to not associate identity. But we have used harm reduction models as I think one of the greatest harms, and it's had one of the greatest deleterious effects on the free world and air quotes, free because we've used it to justify control, surveillance, censorship, permission. It's digital tyranny or used in the form of digital tyranny. So when I think of the tools and services to provide, when I think of the DIDComm standard, people get nothing else from this chat. We are taking the approach of telecommunication network where this is a system that just works. There are laws and rules in place, but it values that the systems and the networks work without prior permission, good standing permission, going through a checklist. These are systems that work others can depend on, because if we don't, if it's that easy to toggle on and off. We're going to have perverse incentive structure, whether it's Marxist, Leninist, communist or just like whatever fad or social pressure or overreaction or just pressure to circumvent due process and just be able to retain someone else's data or information going straight to a third party that's holding it and facilitating it as opposed to you to go through a process. So we would like Twitter and we'd like those… We'll see what it looks like for Elon after the acquisition. I guess on Friday, it's the 25 October, to think hey, what can we move off platform, off network? How can we think of this as and I know Jack just from stuff that was publicly released, had been advising hey, this should be thought about on the protocol level, right? Like this is a systems based issue or else you're just kind of picking your favorite party and hoping they agree with you. You need these tools to work. And I think the telecom approach is not just a hypothetical fringe example. It's what we have built modern society using and we've gotten away from it. There's no reason.

Kevin Rooke - 01:05:55:

Right, I have a question on we're talking about the tools that you use in peer-to-peer communication and on the browser, we've gone through a number of them today. I specifically want to call out Lightning and talk about why is that an important piece of the peer-to-peer browser? Can you build it without Lightning? And if so, what do you lose in that process?

Chase Perkins - 01:06:19:

We are what's known as data transport agnostic, meaning we don't have a preference for the mechanism or pathway in which you send and receive information. So we support as of today, like I was saying earlier, HTTPS,WebSockets, WebRTC and Bitcoin Lightning. Now, if we think about Bitcoin Lightning Network, if we think about Bitcoin, the greatest distributed compute layer of all time, censorship, surveillance resistant and we think of Lightning as a real time liquidity layer for Bitcoin, you get 500 bytes more or less for free in each transaction and your routing information using the Lightning Network. So the call to action and the reason we wanted to support Lightning, not just for the payment side but for the optional routing, we're not dependent on it, it's an additional enabler. Is to say hey, look like if you would like to choose how you route information, if you'd like control, whether because you want layers of onion based routing or you would like payments built on the rails or you want to traverse asymmetric net or firewalls or corporate firewalls or jurisdictions, it's up to the individual. But it's a call to action to go. If you have a Bitcoin Lightning node, just a Lightning node, you don't have to wait, you don't have to just use it for transactions or go out of your way to find a reason you can use it today. Like, when you're sending text messages or provisioning a video call or sharing a file or any of the other services or capabilities, you should say like, hey, maybe this is a good you know what, I prefer to have control over how this is routed, who sees it and for what function. And typically, like I use the example of Zoom. If I make a Zoom call or I call in to Zoom, you call in to Zoom, we can provision that call. When you're using Impervious you might initiate a call via Lightning and I might answer via HTTPS. It's just because that's how you are preferring. You're prioritizing Lightning basically in our list of transport mechanisms. So when you toggle on Lightning, in the bottom left of the browser it says you are now prioritizing the Lightning Network to send and receive messages and that includes for video and for files. So it's almost like a rotary phone where you hey, we support these four mechanisms or data pathways and if you connect to Bitcoin Lightning node you can now preferentially and with complete, not just confidence but assurance, know how that information was routed and also letting parties know that's how you would like information sent to you. So like I said in the beginning, this isn't the final state, this is an eye opener. The greatest system of distributed compute in the history of the world should be used and people should be aware that it's not a finite limit use case. In fact it's a call to action to rethink our existing systems. But at the same time it doesn't have to be this contrived like oh, you need a Lightning node, you need to top it off or you need payment to do it, but you have the option to and now you're providing it's like a two way street where you're providing everyone else in the world optionality. So instead of dictating how they send, receive and store information, they have a choice in anyone in the world with a virtual node or Raspberry Pi or whatever, or in the future of Start9 can route, store and send information how they'd like. So it's the Cypherpunk ethos that we would like to resonate with everyone that has a node and a call to action for others to get one and then to see the value of both that and for payments and go wow, this is pretty sweet. I can now use the marketplace, whether use it to route information or not, but like increase the use cases for it, for sending and spending.

Kevin Rooke - 01:10:47:

I like it. I want to jump into a segment I do at the end of every show. It's called a Lightning round. Are you ready?

Chase Perkins - 01:10:53:

Let's do it.

Kevin Rooke - 01:10:54:

I hope you're enjoying the show so far. I just want to give a quick shout out to our sponsor Stakwork. Stakwork is a Lightning powered platform that generates high quality transcripts from all of your audio or video content. They combine AI engines and hundreds of human workers all over the world who are paid over the Lightning Network to assemble these transcripts. And that's what lets Stakwork create better, faster, and less expensive transcripts than anyone else. I've used Stakwork to transcribe all of my episodes on my personal website. You can check that out. I just get the Stakwork file, copy paste and go. No additional editing required. If you want to learn more about Stakwork, you can visit stakwork.com. That is stakwork.com.

Okay, if you have to guess today, what is the most popular feature on Impervious?

Chase Perkins - 01:11:52:

Oh, video. Easily.

Kevin Rooke - 01:11:54:

Really?

Chase Perkins - 01:11:55:

Yeah, easily. Of the tens of thousands of messages. Maybe over yeah, definitely over 10000 messages. We've received a disproportionate are excited about, ones that don't have feature requests or bugs. Especially leading up to release has been for peer-to-peer video and replacing Zoom. People are very on board with replacing Zoom.

Kevin Rooke - 01:12:18:

Interesting. If you had to guess, how much payment volume do you think will flow through Impervious? Five years out.

Chase Perkins - 01:12:29:

So I'll reframe the question a little bit. It wouldn't flow through us, right? It's just a command and control. Well, with the exception of one of the things we'll be offering in the future, like in the next update in the next week or two is you don't have to connect a Lightning node to have to have a Lightning wallet. So you can still, as a creator or individual, send and receive payments. So I think from that capacity, when you're normalizing, I mean, these are crazy numbers. Like something like 80 or 85% of people under 30, let alone 25, own, quote, cryptocurrency of some kind. Right. Part of that is because there are reasons people use MetaMask and they use these third party cryptocurrencies. When you normalize, what is organic Internet money and you make it a part of the Internet experience, part of every application, I think the numbers become huge. And I think it actually adds utility to the Lightning Network and Bitcoin writ large. Because when more applications support it, when more content creators and digital services and applications accept it, and you, as an individual can, why would you not use it? So I think that number should be huge because I think we should, it's a call to action to normalize the use of Bitcoin and to show it's, like a viable thing. You don't have to rely on credit cards, and you really shouldn't. Whenever possible.

Kevin Rooke - 01:13:59:

Yeah. Are there any books that have changed your life?

Chase Perkins - 01:14:02:

Yeah, there are a bunch of books. Right. On liberty. The Toqueville. I know it's a little older, but Neil Stevenson is probably the biggest. Like, if you're close to me in my life, there's a high probability I have sent you one or many Neil Stevenson books, and I know everyone's like a fanboy, but that's just true. I mean, that's how, you know, you've made the list gosh from Snow Crash to The Rise and Fall of D.O.D.O. to Cryptonomicon to Seveneves, which wasn't necessarily my favorite to Reamde and Fall; or, Dodge in Hell. They're all exceptional books. And I think it's a great framework when he's like, the opposite of an echo chamber. And when you think of how many people, whether it's from the founders of Google, how much of it is self fulfilling and how much did he get right? And I think he's been around so long that there's no way to accurately empirically tell, but he's certainly had many things manifest reality. And, yeah, Neil Stevenson is a safe one.

Kevin Rooke - 01:15:29:

If you could only hold one asset for the next decade, and it could not be Bitcoin, what asset would it be?

Chase Perkins - 01:15:36:

God… asset or digital asset?

Kevin Rooke - 01:15:42:

Any asset, any kind.

Chase Perkins - 01:15:44:

Man it doesn't include software because Bitcoin is so far and away the winner. Well, I think there are two things. I would ensure you have some form of encryption, whether it's Impervious I know it's like software, but like man that's a tough one. I would say software to ensure you can send, receive information. I hope to think that's just Impervious. And then I would say, man, a GPU or an ASICs, not as a cop out. But I think it's important to yeah, I think for processing information and then Bitcoin mining, which is like a tangential answer. I think they're equally important. And I genuinely think in 20 years, ten years, gosh who has a positive outlook after 20 years? Oh, and I have a better answer, by the way. I think it's critical that parties can send and receive information and have distributed compute and universal verification. But I mean, firearms. I think it's equally important because when incentive structures change, you participate in the way that you're allowed or permission or you're able to and whenever it becomes a physical reality, those limits, and it's a great equalizer, and I think it should be viewed as a positive. So, yeah, firearms, cryptography, Bitcoin and Impervious.

Kevin Rooke - 01:17:27:

Interesting. What was the last thing you changed your mind about?

Chase Perkins - 01:17:32:

Jeez every day. Man am I allowed to ask you what you changed your mind about recently?

Kevin Rooke - 01:17:43:

I just thought of that question, so I don't have a prepared answer for you.

Chase Perkins - 01:17:47:

I mean, there's so many little things. It's like without giving greater context, not as a cop out answer, but I have thought from the beginning, this is so far out, but I thought pre a year ago, like in February, that there is, like, a non trivial chance of, like, a nuclear weapon being used. And I think in the world, specifically in Eastern Europe, obviously, Southeast Asia, but I think those probabilities are way higher than I think. It's become acceptable to have that conversation. I think just thinking about big things. I'm increasingly long on liberty. And in the short, I think the opportunity for, if not a new nation state yeah, like a digital sovereign community of control, it becomes a de facto one. If your assets, your information, your participation are defined or is under a new structure or rubric, I think it provides new opportunities, and I think we'll see that sooner than even a year or two ago, I would say. Borders have never been static. They've always been dynamic. It's a farce to say otherwise. Right? And then we started pretending after World War II and the United Nations that borders were this dynamic or fluid. Borders were just like remnants of lesser developed countries or more dangerous regions and jurisdictions and history. There's absolutely no empirical data to support that, whether it's through lesser violent purchasing like the old school, like a lot of the United States, Canada, Europe, a lot of land has been just legitimately purchased and accepted by a counterparty. You can say to the chagrin of people that are there, but whether it's trade or force or a diplomatic agreement, borders change and they're dynamic, and I think we're starting to wake up to that. But I think it can be viewed in a positive. We can think of that as, like, in a layered reality. So I'm excited for the future and the speed of innovation. And honestly, shows like yours. It revitalizes people, but it also gives them a clear, immediate calls to action. And then these things like a time with Neil Stevenson, they become more self fulfilling and the plausibility of them becoming an actuality or reality increase. So keep on doing the great work. Use the browser and let me know, even anyone you've talked to, where they like the capability, whether that's, like, a third party it should tie into or like a feature that's so obvious, like, guide us. We are all ears, man.

Kevin Rooke - 01:21:05:

The thing that I changed my mind about is that I realized how much faster and how much crisper the video is on Impervious. I wasn't sure what to expect, but when we first did a call, we did a call prior to this recording. I was like, seeing you in full HD. It was crazy. No, lag nothing.

Chase Perkins - 01:21:27:

Yeah. Well, I appreciate that. And I think we're talking about self evident technology winning when you're not compressing or throttling. We will always be ahead of Zoom because there's no third party to compress or throttle, and we don't have an additional speed of light issues. With lag, it's exciting. You go, it's not just like a trade off for privacy, but it's a performance boost and you can optimize things that actually matter.

Kevin Rooke - 01:21:58:

Just one quick final question. If you can give a shout out to anyone building in the Lightning space, someone who's doing great work, who do you want to give a shout out to?

Chase Perkins - 01:22:07:

I'll give a shout out to a couple if you don't mind. Sure. You say just one Desiree Dickerson Thunder Games. I'm a big fan of her. She's a close friend of mine in real life. But challenging norms and assumptions and incentivizing gaming with Bitcoin that will catch on faster than people realize. Daniel Buchner and Jack at Block. They're on mission. Love those guys. I think our mission and our build are complimentary in sympathico and I'm very excited to see what it looks like in 1, 6, 12 months. And I think everyone benefits from that. Gram at Voltage, what a dude. Making it easy for people to spin up but control the keys to a node and easier to open channels. I remiss if I didn't say Lightning Labs and Ryan and Elizabeth Stark and Roasbeef and everyone. There are a lot of people there, but I think the community sometimes, I guess sometimes I miss that. Almost like punk rock Cypherpunk ethos. That was a decade ago, which was like, if we don't do it, it's not going to happen. We've become kind of so entitled by economically incentive structure and from a monetary policy perspective that Bitcoin wins that we forgot that we can expedite this process by supporting each other and this collective on mission group of someone was saying recently, it's like herding cats, right? That's the thing. When people are independently minded, it sometimes takes a little bit longer when I'm over, which I totally understand. But in the meantime, we could probably do a better job. So I love that question and to the people I'm missing, there are friends and we work with. I'm sorry. Very excited.

Kevin Rooke - 01:24:04:

There's so many people in Lightning. It's hard to keep track these days. Real quick, before you go, where can listeners go to learn more about you and Impervious?

Chase Perkins - 01:24:12:

Absolutely. So just go to Impervious.ai or to download the browser. Or you can go to our Twitter handle @ImperviousAi, we do a lot of comms on Twitter. I like to think playful, puckish and rye. They're deliberately little provoking at times. But we would love people to kind of follow our day to day conversation and engage in it. And then podcasts like yours. So I'm excited to see where else this gets distributed. And also genuinely to have to revisit this in whatever weeks or months or whatever and gosh, that was day... This is only day six that the browser has been available. So I'm always a little reluctant to share this because what if this is the only impression in three weeks? No, but it's cool. It'll be fine.

Kevin Rooke - 01:25:09:

Yeah, well, I'm excited. It's a long road ahead for you guys, but I'm excited to follow along. And yeah, all the best. Thank you again for taking the time. Thank you for your time.

Chase Perkins - 01:25:19:

All right, talk to you, man.

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