Archipelago with Shadrach

Hello, and welcome back to Freedom Tech Friday, a weekly live and interactive show hosted on the Ungovernable Misfits feeds. We go every Friday at 9AM eastern and 2PM UK time, but you can, of course, catch up later on the Ungovernable podcast feed.

On Freedom Tech Friday, we like to cover the latest news, trends, and topics for anything relating to Freedom Technologies. That could be anything from Bitcoin or Monero, encrypted messengers, privacy tools, and everything in between.

Essentially, if there is a news item, tool, or topic that can help you take back some control in today's digital panopticon, then we wanna talk about it. My name is Q and A, and I'm head of custom foundation.

And as I am joined by my good friends, Max, the head honcho of the Ungovernable Empire, and Seth, who is COO at Cakewallet.

Freedom Tech Friday is live and interactive, and you can help steer the conversation by commenting live, pre submitting questions, boosting the show, sending the tips, or just sharing the show with your friends and family.

Top top support, excuse me, for last week's show with Derek Ross comes from welder Ian, who sent in 2222 sats and said 2222. I'm not sure whether he's trying to troll us there or whether that was just a an error where he double typed the number. Either way, thank you, Ian. Hope you're well.

Yeah. Without further ado, I will bring our guest on very shortly. But, Max, Seth, how's it going, guys? It's going well. It's going well. Yeah. It's been a crazy few weeks as always.

It's good travel. I think we chatted about that a little bit last week, actually. Somehow another week has passed, so we're here again. Looking forward to this one. Yeah. Very good, mate. Excited for today's guest without doing too much of a reveal and spoiler.

He's a long time and core member and a regular at Lake Satoshi. He's also the brains behind the peer to peer mule system, and he's always helping move things around and even move some of our stickers.

So very excited to have him on. Even been known to shill freedom money to the Amish, so a true ungovernable. Can we just take a second to pause and appreciate the T shirt coordination as well?

I'm absolutely loving this. Nice. Anyway yeah. So so let's bring on our esteemed guests. Today, we have a guest who is building what some might argue is the ultimate cypherpunk survival kit.

Shadrach is from the Archipelago Foundation, an organization dedicated to funding and nurturing freedom tech. It protects projects that protect privacy and resist censorship. But the foundation isn't just a grant giving entity. They're actively developing

Archipelago OS, which I'm very excited to to have a poke around with later. We've got a a demo to show, which is a a a sovereign personal server that you can control from your phone. I know Jordan has had his hands on the the demo of this already and was very, very impressed.

I won't spoil the the the the demo with what it includes, but it's it's very, very bullish. And I was taken aback when I saw the user interface. Very, very beautiful. Shadrach, welcome to the show. How are you, sir? Thank you. Thank you. I'm I'm doing great. Well, it's a pleasure to have you on.

And let's just dive straight into it because Jordan, thankfully, has helped me prep for this show, and we've got a lot of things to to talk about. So, obviously, I wanna start with the Archipelago Foundation.

The website says it operates on a simple premise, you know, reclaiming control over data from misaligned corporations and governments, and that it is the defining fight of our time. That's kind of like the tagline, but tell us more where where did it come from, what are your goals, what's the mission, who's behind it.

Give us the the the the longer version of the elevator pitch. I'm keen to hear about it. Yeah. I I would say, it was born of, the the samurai fight. It was born of

certain charitable organizations that want to register as five zero one c threes, sign contracts with the state, and then, you know, donate to Freedom Tech, end up doxing all of the people they're donating to The the the countries where those developers reside get notification of amounts of payment. They have to pay taxes. So

I didn't really wanna keep donating to places that were effectively taking 40% of my donations and sending it to governments for taxes. So, I figured if if we can deal peer to peer, why can't we do peer to peer funding?

Angore.io is a is a great, model, I think, of how I see funding moving, in the future. So so, really, Archipelago Foundation is about interoperability. So if there are two freedom tech projects that could or should be working together,

we want to be able to support that that development, support their ability to become interoperable. A lot of a lot of freedom tech kind of starts with mostly open, but with a bit of a walled garden where they try to, make money off of it, which is totally fair.

But I really see a future where we make our money off of our value. I mean, this is where the the whole value for value proposition comes in. And so if if you wanna have the best, open market on Noster, then you have the best interface. You have the best algorithms to help people find things.

You might have the best access to escrow or insurance or different kind of deliveries, but you don't wanna really get in between the buyer and the seller. You want to help the buyer and the seller. And I think that's in the in in my vision of the future, that's where money is to be made is by really enabling people.

So I think a lot of, IT services for Freedom Tech is is a huge thing. I think every city really should have, like, some kind of a sovereignty workshop where they can help accountants get on Sovereign AI and stop doxing all their customers' data, help lawyers start using sovereign contracts rather than DocuSign,

which you signed an NDA that say or not an NDA. You the the terms of service say their AI are gonna read all of your documents and use them to improve the service. It's like, well, how is that a private document if if an AI is reading it and you don't know what's going on with it? So yeah. And then also really just,

I think we're at the next level where we've we've built a lot of the tools, but it's time to start deploying them. So, Archipelago Foundation wants to work with some pilot cities, create campaigns on Angore.

The the nice thing about Angore is they're they're milestone based. So if we did a a huge mesh rollout in a city, we would have the first milestone would be getting the hardware. The second milestone might be deploying the hardware and some training.

And then the third milestone is continuing support. So it doesn't do any good to get a bit business to accept Bitcoin, and then nobody ever goes. That's the, sowing seeds on grainy soil. Like, the sprout pops up, but if it just dies, like, you've wasted a seed, you've wasted time.

So we really need kind of a continuing, effort to support sovereignty in our communities. So that's probably too long of an intro. But

No. I think that that was really good, and you actually brought up something I'd never heard of. I'd never heard of Angore. Can you tell me a little bit more about, like, about what that is, what people would use that for, and how that fits in with Archipelago?

Like, you mentioned a little bit of how you can see them pairing together, and you you envision Archipelago,

like, helping to make sure that the funding there is is used for something that's long lasting. But that's a that's a new thing to me, so probably is to a lot of our listeners as well. Yeah. Yeah. It's a completely anonymous platform where you can so it's it's similar to Geyser, but I think where they're really going is it's it's,

completely non KYC. You can create a project either as a continuing support for, a software project or a movie or something like that, Or you can set up, a milestone based, system where you'd say you you raise 2 BTC to do some project. If it fails halfway through and you don't meet the milestone,

the investors are able to get the rest of their Bitcoin back. So I think that's been a huge problem where people really wanna see a project happen, but they end up just kind of fall they they raise the money, then they fall flat, and then you're just like, oh, shit. That was, a lot of Bitcoin.

So I I really like the their model where you you can kind of feel more comfortable investing in a project knowing that if they don't actually make it, they will that you will be able to get some of your funding back.

Yeah. It makes a lot of sense. Similar to, like, the Kickstarters and other things where Mhmm. Theoretically,

you're pledging your money, but you're not just Yeah. Losing it one way, which is one of the downsides of of Bitcoin payments generally is they're they're just one way, and you can't get them back unless someone chooses to send them back. So fascinating. Yeah. Thanks for mentioning that. Definitely not heard of that before.

And and with, Angor, how is that enforced then, the the whole kind of, you know, the investors get their money back if the the project fails to to meet its target? That's a good question. You'll have to have, Angor on sometime.

I don't I don't know the the the the specifics behind it, but it's all it's all based on Bitcoin and contracts, and, it's all done on on the main chain. It's, it's it's pretty in a in pretty innovative innovative.

And I don't Presumably funds have gotta be held by

in some sort of multisig or something, and then it's it's got to be released at certain milestones because it can't be that the developers get it all upfront because then it's just it's just trust, isn't it? But, yeah, we we you would look into it, it'd be interesting to have them on. It sounds like a cool project.

So, yeah, the first thing I wanna do is start creating some the the pilot city rollout. So we've got, four cities that we want to roll out, some Wi Fi and mesh projects and including Archipelago and create kind of like a community infrastructure where, the the well, that's that's more back to Archipelago. But the the the goal is that

you wanna keep all of your resources local and, so that if there's any kind of Internet disruption, like, most of what you rely on is cached on local servers, you're using local infrastructure for communication, and you can maintain sovereignty.

Awesome. The the name Archipelago is an unusual one. Like, can you give us the the background there? Was it just by chance? Or where's that where's that originate? Yeah. It was kind of by chance. We had a, we had been operating under a different name for,

about a year. And then, one of the one of the people involved found out that it was actually that project was trademarked in France by Palantir. And we're like, okay. Let's not use that. So, one of the one of the the members of our Austin community, she came up and she was like, what about Archipelago?

And it was just like, that's amazing. It's like the perfect model for islands that are connected in different ways. So, like, one island might have a bridge to it. One island might have a ferry that goes to it. Like, we the the the the mechanism needs to be open to anything, but the island itself is its own sovereign community.

I love it. That makes a lot of sense. So with with Archipelago and the foundation, you mentioned that you're working with Angor, and kind of Angor is the one that's kind of facilitating the payment side of things.

So would it be fair to say that Archipelago Foundation is more kind of of a driving force rather than a kind of fundraising effort, or is it kind of all rolled into one? I'm just trying to gain a better picture of, like, where the efforts are being directed.

Yeah. It's it's all rolled into one. The efforts really are about partnerships. So we're we're working with Tollgate on some things. We're working with Indiehub. They're they were one of our premier partners because, for them, they wanted to tie in Noster,

but, also, we we can host an instance of Indiehub on the node where when you download movies, they're now cached on your local server. And then when the next person watches the movie, it's kind of getting it as a torrent from all the other archipelago nodes that have a copy of it.

And so this is another thing, which is back to, g g asked who will run the nodes. And I remember when I set up my first Lightning node, like, really thinking that I would make

money routing Lightning payments. Like, not a lot, but it was like that was the the thing. It's like, it's no longer an ideological reason to run a node. I'm doing it because I have a a real world incentive to do it.

So we're really focusing on, like, kind of core core pieces where where anybody can run a node and make a little bit of money by running it. So it could be by transferring data, by running, a Blossom server, by reselling your Wi Fi, And and then also, like, this the the Torrent idea. So

when the ISO is first available to be downloaded, you're gonna have to pay, say, 1,000 sats to download the ISO, but it's going to be paying Archipelago nodes that are already running on the network that have that ISO to send you the ISO. So we're trying to get out of the subscription model and more back into the pay as you go model

that I think the the Internet was originally founded on. It like, when you first set up a t one, it was a metered t one. And if you hosted a website, you charged the website based on how much data they used because you were paying for that data.

And because IFPs now are more interested in your metadata and all that kind of stuff, you're you're you might have a $39 a month Internet connection, but that's because all of your I mean, that they're they're basically making money off of you either way.

So we kinda wanna, like, ideally get back to more pay as you go. But also, I think, like, if you can host Wi Fi to three of your neighbors and they turn off their Internet connections, I mean, that's a win for me.

Yeah. That's a really good point, actually. I was wondering as we're looking through there, is there a reason for Bitcoin only? Is that something that will expand, or is it gonna stay that way?

I I want it that's a bit of a a purity test, but as well underneath it, we fund the developers in possibly privacy preserving coins. So the idea is that if if somebody wants to donate to BTC, it's completely anonymous. It goes into the foundation.

They can even reach out and say something like, I I I really want more mesh coverage in our rural area of West Virginia. We know that this is something you do. Here's to BTC. We might then create the project and fund a lot of the people on the ground with Monero.

It's it's it's more about transparency, I think, because it is a it is a foundation trust. It's not we're not registered anywhere. We're we're operating as a sovereign foundation trust. But, I think having a bit of transparency on the incoming and outgoing is is important.

We're not trying to run some kind of a a secret money laundering operation. I will I will caveat. If you do wanna accept Monero, you can publish the Vue key, and anyone can can follow the transactions as well and see when there are donations that come in or go out.

Then yeah. That would be an option if you did wanna accept an error, and you can do it via BTCPay, which I see is what you're already using anyways. So Yeah. That could be a good option. I think there's often a misunderstanding that, like, it's privacy you cannot even opt out of, but that is one nice thing.

So you can publish the view key and the main address. You also have to publish, and then people can follow along and see those those donations at the same time. No. That's a great that's a great suggestion.

I'm I'm, we we have a lot of Monero people involved in this. We're gonna do a big project in Prague that's based a lot more on around Monero. And Awesome. So so, yeah, that's that's awesome.

Yeah. I only mentioned it given that you're aware of Bitcoin at the moment. And when we're talking about funding developers and the the issues with the five zero one c threes and taxes and all that stuff, When you're operating as an ungovernable, you have to use ungovernable tools. And so I think that that makes a lot of sense.

Yeah. Yeah. Definitely planning to fund the developers with with Monero where possible. So but, yeah, I mean, I I it there's no company in charge of Archipelago. There's no we have no, like, investors or VC or or anything.

Our developers are primarily anonymous. And I'm I I just I I want us to to to have the tools we need, you know, to to do what we need to do. And just to so I can it's I need to dish out some, well earned glaze.

Basically, like, everything in archipelago, I learned from you guys. I these are these are ideas that that I had when I first joined the Meshtadel. I I thought it was all about mesh networking, and I quickly found that it was a whole lot more than that, and that was four or five years ago. Mhmm.

But all of as I've been operating, you know, as a Meshtadel mule, as a Freedom Tech developer, like, I I keep kind of peeling back this onion and finding that new areas kind of where we've been captured.

And so it's been a it's been a quite a journey to get to where I think we we really need to be, which is servers running and owning our own data, getting off the cloud, using privacy coins, using all the obvious VPN and tech like that. But I think the more we can operate and build out our own

communications infrastructure, the the more resilient we're gonna be.

Awesome. Yeah. Well, that leads me nicely onto Archipelago OS.

Where does that fit into everything that we've just spoken about? Because somebody, you, the team, whoever's behind it, all these anonymous developers that you're talking about has has clearly spent a lot of time building this thing out. So where does this fit under the archipelago

kind of foundation umbrella before we dive into the details? Yeah. It's it's it's effectively a, a framework for operating a sovereign PC. It's adding a layer of communication to what would what is currently kind of like a a stand alone node.

The the the apps running on an existing node can communicate. I mean, if you put a Bitcoin node on your Start nine or your Umbral, like, this the the Bitcoin nodes are communicating with each other, but the server itself is kind of on its own. So what we've added is decentralized identities, derived NPUBs.

We've added the FIPS networking. I don't know if you've heard of that. We've added a lot of the mesh stuff to it. Right now, it it depending on if you plug in a Meshtastic or Meshcore or a reticulum, it will auto detect which kind of device it is, and then it can use it in conjunction with the existing Internet.

And, sorry. I can't remember the question. Where does it fit in? I kind of see it as as the the easiest way So we're kind of at I don't know how many nodes we're at on the Internet right now, but Bitcoin nodes. But I think that this is a way of really kind of going to the next level with with,

increasing the number of nodes that are running. And the more we increase the number of nodes, the more we're able to do more between the nodes. And and this was really like I mean, I've been kind of working on start nine for many, many years trying to add add some of the stuff to it, but it really felt like

the the operating system itself was was very locked down for for really good reasons. I mean, I still have a start nine lightning node. My archipelago talks to my start nine lightning node, but then the archipelago node itself is able to share files and music with other archipelago nodes.

I'm able to,

over Meshtastic. I can, I can message my node and ask basic questions using local LLMs? We're we'll be expanding it to use community GPUs for AI. So sovereign AI is a is a huge piece of this.

And, yeah, I just I I see it being, like, kind of the the I wanna see one in every home. Personally, mine's plugged into my TV in the living room, and so I can see message pop ups if somebody messages me over Laura.

I can see if someone rings the doorbell. I get a little notification. It'll be integrated into Home Assistant. So you can basically sit in front of your TV. It is your node. You can watch movies. You can earn money.

You're growing the network of nodes. So maybe you your neighbor comes over and sees it. He installs one. Now you've kind of doubled the signal strength of your of your neighborhood. And then at some point, we've like, again, we've got four cities that we're planning to put some actual infrastructure, some

high bandwidth peer to point to point Wi Fi to kind of grow these cells out. Woah. I mean, there there's a lot there. There's there's so many ways I wanna take this. I'm gonna try and try and not just, like, spray it everywhere. Before

before I do that, like, can I just dock my hat to whoever designed this homepage? It's fantastic. It it very much presses my bonds. I think it looks absolutely wonderful. Yeah. I was yeah. Like I said, I've said it at the the top of the show, but I was really taken aback by the the kind of design pass here. And this was another like,

this is a problem with with Freedom Tech is it's hard to use. It's ugly. Like, when I sit in front of my I just wanna sit in front of my TV and just stare at the screen. I mean, it's it's that compelling.

And and so yeah. And so that was that was another big issue is is we wanted to make it super, super easy. There's, like, stupid easy mode. If if you can to set up a a shop, it's got, a, a wizard that says, oh, first, you need to do this, then next you need to yeah. There you go.

Obviously, we can do better as a as a as a community. And I think having people that are focused on UI and UX who are actual designers is a is a huge huge thing that is worth worth spending money on.

Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely. Well, it it's clearly already in in a a fantastic shape. Our listeners will be well versed, and viewers, of course, will be well versed with the likes of of Start Nine and Umbrella. And what I'm gleaming from the the last kind of five minutes of you talking about this is that this is that book kind of on steroids.

So I I've got the screen share up here. So what I wanna do really is you can just point me into, like, all of the different facets of this that that makes this better than a start nine or or or an umbrella or something like that. And I'm not doing that to be you know, to compare.

What I wanna do is, like, show the differences because you guys have clearly put a lot of thought and effort into going to the next step with with things like networking and stuff like that. So maybe just walk us through, like, your your highlights of those sorts of things where

you do more than the other alternatives within the Freedom Tech sphere. Yeah. And and just to to be super focused on this, I mean, and this is why I wanted to do the Archipelago Foundation first, which is we're not competing in any way with Start Nine and Umbral.

They have they they do their own things really well, and I it's just, like, for for the projects I wanted to do within this space, which is, you know, the ungovernable misfits, It's all the people that we have that are that are working on different projects.

We kind of I felt like we needed something like this where if if you're trying to build out a sovereign community or a resilient community, you you don't wanna go shill all your neighbors on running a Bitcoin node. Like, that's just not the path to sovereignty.

Whereas if you go say, hey. I've got this really cool thing we can install. It's it just runs on an old laptop. We stick up an antenna, and now we can organize our CSA deliveries, or we can say we can order raw milk from the countryside, and they'll come bring it into us.

Or we can run our own community message board. We can run a community job board. These are the these are the the ways I want to move forward with our movement, if you say. I I I want it to be not just about Bitcoin nodes and yeah.

So, like, linking it to the real world. Yeah. The sort of mesh mesh to their ideas and, like, raw milk and actually meeting people and getting things moved around the country and all that kind of stuff. This is what you're what you're going for. I mean, the mesh the mesh stuff is really interesting. I don't think any of the other

nodes out there are integrating that, are they? Not that I not that I'm aware of. I'm I'm then now you might be able to add on something. And and I was originally gonna just, like, fork start nine, use their back end, create a new front end for it.

But it it just became apparent that, we wanted more flexibility in in the the the actual OS itself. So it's based on DBN 13. It's, again, fully open source. Anybody can add their own panels into it.

It's it's it's amazing. And I had another thing. Oh, yeah. And and, another like, because you mentioned driving around. Like, one of my early ideas was to have one of these running in my RV, And that allows me to, say, pick up packages along the way. I can just get a notification that says there's a package to be picked up on your route.

It has, you can have an emergency button. Say, I'm getting pulled over, and then it just kind of announces to everyone around you, and maybe you're able to have a couple friends of yours kinda just show up and say, oh, officer, what's going on here? You know?

Just having a way of of of really, really connecting up our community in a way that we we choose so the the the nodes are able to be federated into their own groups. Yeah. So you were saying to to talk you through, though so, yeah, if you if you look at click on some of those mesh notifications,

and then you can see, like, the ones that have the orange circle next to them. So, yeah, so these are, what is that one?

Opening a channel over mesh. So coordinating channel openings is a good use case. The off grid Bitcoin so, like, even while you're downloading the IBD, you can be connecting to your neighbor's node and validating blocks through them or sending transactions through them.

And this mesh stuff, like, for someone like me who doesn't really get the technicals of it, how how many people have gotta be running these things to get these connections, if you know what I mean? Like, if you've got a group of people in a certain town

who had, like, part of a a local meetup and they've all got them, maybe they can communicate. But then, like, me in the North Pole, obviously, I can't

like, how how far do these things spread to be able to get the connection so that I could speak to someone in Europe or whatever? Like, is is there a way is it, like, bounce from one to the next to the next and just pass messages? Or how does it work?

Yeah. So for for the for, like, depending on what what, it's like in your area, I mean, there may already be a Meshkor group that's put up some repeaters. There may be a Meshtastic group that's that's done some stuff.

And then we're playing more with Reticulum. I mean, Reticulum is the one that would it would use whatever path necessary. Maybe, it bounces to your neighbor, and then it goes over the Internet, lands on the other side, and then bounces, over another device.

But I I I I love reticulum. It just doesn't seem like it's heavily used, whereas, like, when I went to Ireland that I I could I could use Meshkor to get all over the I the island, including over to UK, all via Mesh Core. So it's Really? Incredible yeah. It's incredibly built up.

I wouldn't have guessed that. Like, just me maybe it's just me being completely naive. I was like, oh, this is just people in our little groups and, like, most normal people won't have it, and therefore, it won't spread. But if you're saying it's all the whole way across Ireland, you can connect in UK. That's that's pretty impressive.

Yeah. And and I traveled around, trying different different, frequencies and stuff, and, Poland's incredibly connected. Czech Republic is very connected. Switzerland was very connected. So I think as far as Europe I mean, this is kind of why I'm I'm starting with four European cities. I mean, three European cities, and then, we're

gonna do some build out on Madeira because Madeira had nothing, and it makes no sense because it's like it's a perfect area where we can put repeaters up on the ridgeline and the whole city of Funchal can have connectivity.

And so you're saying that Europe is more connected than The States at the moment? And if if that is the case, is that just the sheer size of America and therefore it makes it more difficult? Or I I'm wondering if we are missing out on entire communities of freedom loving sovereign people by being in a a Bitcoin

echo chamber. Oh, for sure. That that's really that's been my observations over the last two years. So I I've made a very concerted effort to, you know, create resiliency salons and try and do more

more of this thing where we we connect with the community. We go to the farmer's markets. We talk to people. We say, you know, what are your pain points when dealing with overreaching government entities and stuff?

And then just telling them, like, no. You can't have a, you know, an anarchist group on Facebook Messenger. I mean, that's insane. Are you actually out of your mind? Like, what there are there there are tools for us out here. You don't have to, like, do this.

Sorry.

Have you have you actually come across that then? Oh, absolutely. Drills. Absolutely. Absolutely. Yeah. Wow. Wow. Wow. We're gonna bring down the state by feeding them. Mhmm. Yeah. Yeah.

I do have, one more technical question. I know it mentions the word mesh. I'm not sure how closely it ties into the other type of mesh network we've we've talked about, but this, FIPS mesh,

fucking IPs mesh, it it stood out to me because it looked very interesting. It uses in pubs for identity. Like, I I wasn't exactly sure what that was when I was digging around the demo, so I'd love to hear a little bit more about that. If it's, like, tail scale like, what exactly it's it's solving there.

Phipps is amazing. So so that came out of the last couple sovereign engineerings. There's some great, it's got a great GitHub repo, and they just released four point o of it. But, basically,

if you if you think about TCP IP, you've got the IP part of it, which is again, back to peeling back this onion, it's like you get all the way to IP addresses when you peel the onion back far enough. And you're like, wait a second.

There's a control mechanism right there. So what FIPS does is it takes the IP off of the TCP IP stack, and it is it can use any transport mechanism to route packets over a spanning tree mesh of of of, endpubs.

So your each Docker container can have its own endpub. Every service can have its own endpub.

And once you connect to the mesh, then the other nodes on the mesh know how to get to your node, your FIPS node. So it is absolutely incredible, and I think it's gonna be a huge part of what makes all this work. So it makes things like Meshtastic and Meshcore. Like, right now, we're having to use all the protocols

built onto those projects. But at some point, we should be able to just use Bluetooth, LoRa, Wi Fi, plugged in Ethernet without having to worry about IPs at all. Basically, it's trans transport independent.

Currently, with with to go over the Internet, it's it's be it's a layer on I p v six. But if you're using Bluetooth, it's just device to to device. So we did a demo. We had things connected over Bluetooth, over Wi Fi, and all of them talking completely independent of Internet IPs.

That's awesome. That's awesome because that does strip away yet another one of the potentially centralizing or controllable pieces of that stack, which is pretty pretty pretty awesome.

And then I I've been messing around with Tollgate, I have this last week, the the Archipelago node actually connects to an OpenWRT router, flashes it, installs Tollgate, configures Tollgate.

And then when people connect connect to your open SSID, they're prompted for a cashew token. And so I sent it a 100 sats and got bought ten minutes of Internet, and then the 100 sats went straight into my Archipelago wallet.

So, like, as a base case example of I mean, you could set this one up set one of these up at your restaurant. You could run all of your payments infrastructure through it. We've already got, point of sales that works on Archipelago.

And then you could say, like, you buy a coffee at the restaurant, and you get ten minutes of of Internet. And then afterwards, you can buy extra Internet. So now there's another revenue stream for a restaurant potentially.

Or you they they their customers get a free one, but then just all through the night, they've got this open SSID running on the street that people can pay for Internet. And then if the bodega across the street creates a archipelago node, same thing. They've got their

payment infrastructure on it, all of their QR scanning for or the UPC scanning, but now they're able to talk to the restaurant. So now if the bodega's Internet connection goes down, they can route their payments through the restaurant.

Okay. Very cool. I I think I've heard about Tallgate. I can't remember who I first heard it on, but it's cool to see that that's, you know, actually making it into into some, you know, production level software that that that looks this good.

The the next thing I wanted you to walk us through is the web five tab on the the OS. Give us an intro to that. What's it for? What might people wanna leverage here and and get the best out of their archipelago node?

Yeah. So that was, Jack Dorsey came up with that back in the the day and then quickly abandoned it. So we just we we kind of at the time and, again, this is I mean, this was in the in the mesh to Dell and everything talking to all of you guys. But, I mean, at the time, it was like, oh, the these are important pieces

that we're missing in our stack to be able to be fully sovereign. And I think that's decentralized IDs. We we did end up with with NPUBs, but they're not perfect. It's verifiable credentials.

So I think that's what is being developed with Web of Trust. And then mesh networks was a big part of it as well, which is I mean, there's obviously, BitChat and stuff like that now. So so, really, the the the web five section is where we have, the the federation of nodes.

So I'll I'll you can you can find nodes on Nostr. So I can broadcast a Nostr note that says my node is available for discovery and then connect to other nodes, And then it's a it's got a handshake thing. So now you've got a a federation of nodes.

It also does under identities. So you can you can create NPUBs for your family under identities, and then you can do things like, when you launch IndieHub on my on my set top box. When I launch IndieHub, it asks me which NPUB am I logging in on.

So it it actually so this is your NSEQ bunker. So it could be used with a remote app, to sign Nostril messages. It can be used on the on the note itself. So I'm I've I've talked to but but, again, like, Archipelago Foundation wants to get the the Noster Kids YouTube program working on Archipelago,

with the with the initial release. And what that would allow you to do is, like, basically, your your kids go. They open up they open up the YouTube app. They sign in with their NPUB, and then you have however you set it up for them to to do their any viewing restrictions and things like that.

Another really cool thing with Tollgate is, we're working closely with a a guy who's who's created a system where your your kids get their Wi Fi screen time based on whether they've earned SATs or not. So they do chores, they earn SATs, and then they're able to use the Internet.

So I thought that was a really neat, use case. Yeah. That's really cool. We did we did a show on this a few months ago on, like, how to, like, have technology around your kids and, like, avoid some of these problems. And as you were saying about the YouTube thing, I was like, oh, yeah. Shit. Like, sometimes I have a YouTube

on for the kids, and then I'm always panicking and worrying. I'm like, oh, you know, it skips to the next thing,

and you have all these weird algorithms and stuff. So I'm like, I better run up quickly, make sure that that they're not going on to something they shouldn't and always worrying about that. So being able to control that would be very nice.

That's pretty cool. Shadrach, we've had a a question from the chat coming from l v ninety nine Slacker, and it's a question on the mesh stuff that you were talking about a few minutes ago.

I'll read it out. I know it's on screen, but for those that are listening, they said, presently, what entry level antenna or gear do you recommend to get into Meshtastic? And then on the other end of the spectrum, what about high powered gear? What would you recommend?

So with with Meshtastic and Meshcore and any of the the standard LoRa radios, I mean, I I would first, you wanna look for local communities. So if there's a Meshcore community, reach out to them, get on their telegram.

Switzerland had an amazing Meshcore telegram group because it it's gonna depend, and, also, you wanna build with what the existing infrastructure is. So there's no need to put up extra repeaters. It creates a lot of chatter.

In in Austin, the mesh Meshtastic is just, like, completely flooded. Like, it I I won't say it's unusable, but it's, it's it's it's nearly unusable. So I would I would get a a a simple handheld radio and try Meshtastic

and Meshcore and just kinda drive around, see what you pick up. Or get a two pack. You can get, like, $60 for two radios on Amazon. For for the high end gear, there's lots of stuff out there. I think the the point to point Wi Fi stuff is amazing. So we we just sketched out, a couple deployments in Warsaw

where we think we can pretty much get, 20 kilometers, a a fairly decent signal for 20 kilometers in in that particular area in Poland. So that's that stuff is is amazing. I mean, it's relatively inexpensive.

I really like Microtech. They're made in Latvia. It's a Riga company, so you're not buying stuff out of China. But that's just my my personal recommendation. And also a lot of the MicroTik stuff is flashable with OpenWRT.

Yeah. All that sort of stuff is is a complete whole new new world to me. I'm completely clueless on it all. Well, everybody that I ever hear speak about it seems so kind of enthusiastic about the the technology and and what it can do. Seems to have, like, a, you know, a a a really kind of emerging community

around that and seems to be quite well aligned with with Bitcoiners and sovereignty and freedom tech and stuff. So another rabbit hole I eventually need to to dive into and drag Max with me.

Yeah. I just have to sorry, mate. Before you move on, you mentioned in Austin that it's unusable. Is that it sounded like you said flooded, I think you said. Does that mean there's so many repeaters that it's somehow a problem, or am I just hearing that wrong? No. That's it's it's in in the nature of Meshtastic,

and and that's a big part of why a lot of people have moved to Meshkor. And, again, I was really happy to see it working so well in Ireland because I just because I I haven't spent a lot of time in in Austin. I grew up there. But the the lately, but the the people who I do know there have

said, like, it it looks like it's great because you see loads of people, but then when it comes to reliably sending a message, it gets over it's it's just yeah. There's too many repeaters, too many devices.

Okay. It's weird. I would have thought it would be the other way around. Like, the more repeaters, the better. But you're saying that that's mesh tastic, mesh core works in a different way maybe? Or Yes. As as as best I understand, mesh core handles handles the hops and the congestion better.

Okay. Okay. Awesome. Well, just going down to the final part of the the the OS user interface, the AI UI. I think it's fairly self explanatory what this is, but, like, is there any, like, cool features or or things that you wanna kind of highlight here as to, you know, how the how you guys have have implemented that within the OS?

So this is not my specialty, but, basically, the there there is built in AI on the node. You you get more performance depending on what your hardware is. So if you get, like, a a $3,500 AI max

or the AMD, whatever it's called, you can there's a lot more sovereign AI you can do, but it comes with basic models to be able to help you use your node. So if you were like, I I I just got a new router. I need to set it up.

The the built in AI can actually go through and perform most of the functions where, currently, you go you maybe you ask, you know, ChatGPT or something like that. How do I fix this thing on my node? And it gives you some instructions, and you paste it back and forth into a terminal.

This would be more you're able to just ask it, you know, my why didn't I receive this payment? Is there a problem? There there you go. You've you've found an example. But, yeah, I I have not I have not played a lot with this. This is, I'm not sure how far we'll get on this before the alpha, but,

there's some really cool functionality already. Like I said, I I love getting on Laura and just asking stupid questions of my node and just getting a message back in in Mesh Core. It it's been fun.

But I wanted and back to the so you went to the the the App Store. And, again, that's we wanna make that like Zap Store. So, basically, their community repositories of apps, their people have attested to them, and, you know, you can zap different apps, things like that. So that's,

hopefully in the works, but we're just basically trying to get this out the door, as a public alpha, which should be fairly soon. If you go to Archipelago Foundation website, there is a sign up for the alpha,

in the upper right hand corner, and we can send out show notes for that. Yep. There you go. So that's a QR code anyone can scan or you can because it's Nostril, you can just start typing your NPUB, and then it should find you.

Love it. But Before we well, as we start to to wrap up, because we're coming close sometimes, there's a couple of other things. Told you I could take this all over the place. And there's a couple of other things that have piqued my interest as I've been clicking around.

The the first and foremost was the dead man switch. Now I can't actually remember where I saw it, but where will I find that? And then let's talk about what it is and and because I don't think any other node has that.

Yeah. So that's in the mesh section. My if yeah. If you go to mesh on the in the right hand panel, there's a few tabs. One is for AI, and that's to allow people to access the AI from the mesh.

But the the dead man switch section, it's it's it can be used in different ways. My real like, what I wanted it for is, you know, if if my electricity and my Internet goes down and I get a message over,

say, Meshkor that my node's gone down, the electricity's gone down, I think it would be I would like to be able to send a message back to my node

to say activate the thermite or something. Because, obviously, if my electric if if if if if my whole house has gone dark like that, there's probably a reason, and I would like to maybe just destroy the evidence.

Luckily, I have a backup of my node that's sharded onto other archipelago nodes. So that's another really important piece of it. Ultimately, you should be able to get another used laptop, boot up off of a USB stick, and restore your node, from your node federation from federation peers.

So that's that's a really important piece of it. But yeah. I mean, it could be used in different ways. Like, if you don't respond to a message, it performs an action. That's kind of the main thing. Or it lets people know that you haven't you haven't checked in in twelve hours.

It's it's to be determined, but I think it's a a huge important piece of the puzzle.

Yeah. This is super cool. The what's the the kind of main intention for how people get hold of this? Is it is it gonna be similar to the likes of Umbrella and and StarOS where you go to a GitHub or to the website, flash it onto a USB drive, and then, you know, you choose the hardware.

And also, as a follow-up question, do you guys plan on kind of selling any hardware for a plug and play option for this? Yeah. So, we did a big thing during South by in March, South by Southwest in Austin.

We had somebody who wanted to work on the hardware side of it. We had a great we were using the framework 13 inch motherboards in a custom housing. It was going great, and then they just completely pulled out, which, again, made me really glad. Like, it's anybody can build a hardware device and sell it with Archipelago.

We were going to help with that, but, you know, that's not gonna happen. So it's basically an ISO. You download, you flash to any devices. I'm it's very, very important that we start collecting used laptop servers, mini PCs, RAM, GPUs,

whatever we can get ahold of. We I feel under attack. Like, whether we are legitimately under attack or not, I don't know. But it certainly feels like Sovereign AI is being pulled out of our hands by a lot of these hardware shortages.

They're increasing the cost so much that where, you know, two years ago, it would've been pretty easy to get a machine with a 128 gigs of RAM and a decent GPU, and that's become nearly impossible now.

Like, literally nearly like, you some systems, like, I think Mac did it, but you could you used to be able to get a 128 gigs of RAM. Now you can only get 64. I'm not happy with that. And so I I a a big part of this is any community should be able to go around a small city, collect enough hardware to stand up 20 archipelago nodes,

create a Fetty Mint, create a local agorist market, have sovereign comms, get things brought in from the rural areas to support your resiliency. We we we need to start doing this. It's it's time to put our boots on the ground and get some of this stuff rolled out.

If only we could three d print RAM. We'd be in a much better place. Oh, yeah. Definitely. I do have, one more quick question for you. I know you briefly mentioned the App Store, and you mentioned that you're working on the OS.

What are like, are there others that are helping you out with the OS? What are kind of, like, your views around how you're gonna make that sustainable and something that has kind of more,

not decentralized because obviously it doesn't it's bad for one person to work on it, but obviously that there's there's other people who can kinda get their hands dirty and and jump in and help out. And then kind of a attached question,

what does it look like for people to actually submit apps? Like, if I wanted to add a Monero note or something, what what does that process look like? Similar to start nine, very different, that sort of thing. It'll be more like what what it is with Zap Store. So I I I I'm I'm not familiar with them, but that's the model I want to use.

It's a it's a community attested, place. I know I know those are APKs that are grabbed from GitHub, so you will have to publish your app somewhere. We we want we don't wanna use Microsoft GitHub.

So right off the bat, we're we're using a private Gitty. I I I would my dream would be when you download the ISO, install Archipelago node, it's got Gitty preinstalled with the Archipelago source code.

That's kinda like how I I think that would be a good place to start. But, eventually, I again, it's I'm waiting more for Nostrget because I don't want it to be a centralized GitHub repository.

This is you can't really get any more open source than Archipelago. I mean, the the idea is that there there are no nobody can be, you know, put in jail. Nobody can be cut off. No part of the service can be terminated.

I've got archipelago foundation as a .org. That's one thing, but there is no archipelago website. Ideally, it would be all insight, Nostrad based. So yeah.

So, yeah, to be determined. But it it'll definitely be community community involved. And back a couple real quick things. I did I've I've talked to the found I I I really wanna integrate, Passport Prime into a lot of aspects of it. I would like to have it the ability to pretty tightly integrate it into Passport Prime.

I'd like to be able to unlock my vehicles by signing a message with my Prime. And, you know, I've got a node in my car that sends a message. It checks over, you know, mesh core whether this isn't allowed access.

And just I I think there's a lot of potential, with, working with Foundation, and I I I had fun showing the node to them in in Prague.

I am if you haven't done so already, like, top into my DMs, I'm all sorts of getting you a developer unit out. I'm more than happy to help facilitate that and get that thing going. My mind's already been already been worrying as you've been chatting. So, yeah, let's let's Yeah. Offline about that.

Yeah. Yeah. Well, I I preordered mine, so I've got I've got mine. I carry it everywhere. Still don't know what to do with it. But but I did just get the, the KeyOS SDK installed and started playing with it. Nice. Well, we definitely wanna get you a developer unit as well so you don't have to worry about breaking your

your main your your main device, your production one while while you're poking around in the in the source code and stuff. So we will definitely make that happen. Obviously, you know, it's fine. We we can get one shipped out to you. We're we're coming up on well, we're already at time. And just really quickly,

quick fire, where do you wanna send people to learn more? When can they get their hands on this beautiful OS? And anything else anywhere else that you wanna direct people to to kind of learn more and help con con contribute?

Just get on Noster. Be on Noster. Say nice things on Noster. Connect to people on Noster. It's a beautiful place. I'm sick of I mean, no no offense to your to your last week's guest, but, the the Twitter apology parade is is driving me nuts. Yeah.

That that just yeah. Just, follow us on Noster. We'll have more and pubs eventually, but, that's pretty much, and then and then, yeah, sign up to the

the wait list. And and I know this is very, very much how long is a piece of string. You know, I know it all too well working in and around hardware and software, but ballpark, when can people get their hands on this?

Yeah. So I I would I mean, I'm gonna go ahead and say a couple weeks. We we should definitely have something out within a couple weeks. Awesome. Well, we'll definitely amplify that through the the ungovernable feeds. Yeah. Absolutely. Thank you for for contributing to Freedom Tech. Thank you for giving us your time today.

I'm very, excited about this project. So keep doing what you're doing and and, you know, encouragement to anybody else who's working behind the scenes as well. It looks fantastic. So looking forward to gonna play in production.

And Yeah. Yeah. Thank you. It wouldn't it literally wouldn't exist without the three people in this room right now. So I I guarantee it. Like, all of you Thank you, mate. So so much so much respect, and thank you.

Well, it's very important to joining us. Yeah. We appreciate it. Alright, guys. I'm gonna wrap this up. Thank you to Shadrach, Seth, Max for joining us. This is a full one. Very excited about this project. And as always, guys, we will be back at the exact same time next week. So thanks for joining us, and we hope you have a great weekend.

Thank you. Bye. Bye. Thank you for listening to Freedom Tech Friday. To everyone who boosted, asked questions, and participated in the show, we appreciate you all. Make sure to join us next week on Friday at 9AM EST and 2PM London.

Thanks to Seth, Max, and Q for keeping it ungovernable. And thank you to Cake Wallet Foundation and my Nim Box for keeping the ungovernable misfits going. Make sure to check out ungovernablemisfits.com to see mister Crown's incredible skills and artwork.

Listen to the other shows in the feed to hear Kareem's world class editing skills. Thanks to expatriotic for keeping us up to date with Boost's XMR chats and sending in topics. John, great name and great guy, never change and never stop keeping us up to date with mining news or

continuing to grow the Meshtadel. Finally, a big thanks to the unsung hero, our Canadian overlord Jordan, for trying to keep the ungovernable in check and for the endless work he puts in behind the scenes.

We love you all. Stay ungovernable.