S17 E51: Martti Malmi on Iris, NostrVPN and Freedom Tech

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We recorded this at Bitcoin Amsterdam, the Bitcoin Magazine conference, with legendary cypherpunk and Satoshi contributor Martti Malmi. This is his second time on the show. Two years ago in Prague we talked about 2009, the forum, and the man who signed his emails Satoshi Nakamoto. This time I had promised we would talk about what he is building now. The conference still put him on a history panel.

Martti would rather talk about Iris, the Nostr client at iris.to, and especially NostrVPN, which he describes as Tailscale without the Tailscale company: your devices find each other on Nostr, with no email login and no coordination server. Underneath is FIPS, an ad-hoc mesh routing protocol. He also walks through Iris Chat, Iris Drive, git.iris.to, Hashtree, and a directory of about 20 apps at apps.iris.to. He is not making money from any of it, and he does not think software is a great business model anymore. Finnish people, he says, tend to be a bit ideological and not great businessmen. Maybe he is the same way.

We talk about Nostr in a bear market, about building for AI agents versus building for humans, and about permissionlessness as the reason an agent might pick Nostr at all. I put my usual heresy to him, that Bitcoin is now a family of projects, and he stays open-minded: if network effects dissolve, funds may gravitate to the best store of value and the best way to pay, and the biggest network may matter less. For him, Bitcoin is still mostly a store of value. He would like to tap to pay and not have to tell the merchant he wants to pay in Bitcoin.

We do break the "no Satoshi" rule twice. Martti is the one who set bitcoin.org up on WordPress, and he still thinks the man who struggled with that setup was "just a guy," unless you prefer the joke that the integer overflow bug was planted to make a time-travelling AI look human. And he remembers Satoshi paying him for the website work in US dollars, in an envelope, sent to his father's address so it would not sit on a dorm floor. He does not have the original envelope. His grandfather, in 2009, thought this could become a global reserve currency, and did not buy any. Years later, after another crash headline, his father messaged him: "I hope you sold early." And he did.

In between there is the year he stopped writing code himself, "meat agents" in smart glasses, a romantic argument that the best life extension technology is having kids, Michael Pollan on simulated feeling, and a fifty-percent kind of optimism about permissionless tech. You can find him on Nostr as Sirius, at iris.to/sirius. The name comes from the pun, the star, and Sirius Black.

What we cover:

• Why history panels still haunt him, and why he wanted to shill the new work
• NostrVPN as a peer-to-peer Tailscale alternative, and FIPS mesh routing
• Iris Chat, Iris Drive, git.iris.to, Hashtree, and the apps.iris.to directory
• Why he is not trying to make money from software
• Nostr's chicken-and-egg problem, bots, and a bet on agentic use
• Whether we are building for humans or for agents
• Bitcoin as a family of projects, and dissolving network effects
• Payments, Lightning, Square, BTCPay, and tap to pay
• The bitcoin.org WordPress story, and "oh, he's just a guy"
• The year he wrote no code, longevity, and consciousness
• Satoshi, an envelope of dollars, and "I hope you sold early"
• How to find him: Sirius, iris.to/sirius, and the three links to try first

This episode is sponsored by SideShift, Cake Wallet, eCash / LayerTwo Labs, Braiins Hashpower, and Orange Rock.

The previous conversation is S16 E12: Martti Malmi on Bitcoin in 2009 & Satoshi Nakamoto, at bitcoin-takeover.com/s16-e12-martti-malmi-on-bitcoin-in-2009-satoshi-nakamoto/. His published correspondence with Satoshi is at mmalmi.github.io/satoshi/. The full Bitcoin Takeover archive is at bitcoin-takeover.com.