S15 E51: Mike Carson on Impervious & Spaces Domains on Bitcoin

0:40Vlad CosteaHello there and welcome to the Bitcoin Takeover Podcast. I'm Vlad and this is episode 51 of Season 15. I usually say it the other way around. I'm live with Mike Carson, not Mike Garson, who is the famous piano player who played with David Bowie, but the Mike Carson, who is now the CEO of Friendster. You know, Friendster, the project that came before Facebook and Hi5 and everything else that we used as teenagers. But also nowadays he's working on Impervious, of which he's also the CEO. He's interested in domain names.

1:13He's interested in digital identity. And I guess we have a lot of stuff to riff on right now because it's an important topic and Bitcoin can be at the center of this revolution in identity on the Internet. So hi, Mike. It's good to have you.

1:29Mike CarsonHey, thanks for having me. I'm really honored to be on this show. I love your podcast. I think it's my favorite Bitcoin podcast right now.

1:38Vlad CosteaReally? What have you been listening to?

1:41Mike CarsonWell, I just, I listened to the Murch one that you just had, and I, I listened before that, I listened to, you had the CEO of StarkWare on there. And I had heard your podcast before, but recently I got back into it, and it's definitely, yeah, it's like, you have really great content. So yeah, it's definitely my favorite Bitcoin podcast right now. The only other one I really listen to is, I subscribe to Andreas Antonopoulos on Patreon, and he does some shows for his Patreon members. So I like that, too. Andreas is good. But thanks for having me.

2:17Vlad CosteaIt's an honor to be compared, not necessarily compared, but be somehow on an equal level with Andreas, because I know he did a lot for the stuff and for the space, a lot for the space, not for the stuff. And I got excited because I met him in Prague last year and he was super nice, and I gave him one of my magazines. And I'm really proud that I get to do something which I first watched him doing, you know. But I gotta ask you right now, why should we bother with digital identity? Because we have this beautiful KYC AML system, right? You put your ID online, it's simple. This person is exactly who they say they are on the ID card. Everyone's social security number is already leaked on some darknet right now.

3:06So why should we bother with all of this? Why should we think about how we can decentralize identity and use digital identity on the internet?

3:16Mike CarsonYeah, so that's a good question. So I've been thinking about this for years. So I'll try to answer the best I can from that standpoint. So the main thing that Spaces is covering is naming. So it's being able to, similar to a username or a user ID or a domain name, it's being able to have that in a decentralized way. And the main reason I got into this, I mean, we could go into that at some point, but I wasn't really into domain names. I started a company, park.io, and through that I own three ICANN accredited registrars and work with domain names.

4:07But what made me realize is that Bitcoin was a revolution for money. To me, it's a revolutionary invention for money. And a lot of people in Bitcoin talk about how money is fundamental to our society. If there's one thing that is really important to be decentralized, it's money. But one other thing that's really important is naming. We all have names. Cities have names. Companies have names. There's names everywhere. You can't just refer to a city by geo-coordinates, and you can't refer to domain websites just by their IP address.

4:50Naming is super important, and right now it's pretty much all centralized. It's all under a centralized control. And so through this whole process, I came to realize that names can be digital assets, and they should be decentralized too. And it's super important for a lot of different reasons. You know, freedom of speech. And so, yeah, that's kind of where we came with how I came to work on Spaces.

5:25Vlad CosteaSo what is Spaces? Because you made a very abrupt introduction into it. I did mention Impervious, which is the greater project that has lots of subprojects. I don't know how to describe them. Branches that it develops. I did take a look at your website. And Spaces is something which, if I'm not mistaken, is already on the Bitcoin signet. And it's in testing phase.

5:52Mike CarsonYeah, it's on testnet4 right now. So yeah, after park.io, I started Impervious to work on decentralized naming. And at first we were focusing on Handshake, which is another decentralized protocol that has its own blockchain. It's a fork of Bitcoin. So we worked on that a while, and then we also did some stuff with ENS throughout all that. But after working with that, I came to realize that it really... I think that it would be really important to have a naming system on Bitcoin for a couple different reasons.

6:38One, it's by far the strongest proof-of-work blockchain, and it's the most secure decentralized ledger out there. So why would you put decentralized naming on anything else? And two, Bitcoin needs it. Bitcoin needs a naming system. There's things that, for example, Matt Corallo did BIP 353 with the human-readable wallet addresses. And in that, he talks about, well, we shouldn't rely on another blockchain like ENS. So the best thing right now is the DNS. But DNS is totally centralized. It's completely centralized. So Bitcoin could really use this.

7:25Bitcoin itself can really use this for a lot of different reasons, for security. So, yeah, so Impervious was working on these other things, and then we were like, we really got to do this on Bitcoin. So we spent a year working on this, just focusing 100% on Spaces, this new protocol built on Bitcoin. And we wanted it to be 100% cypherpunk. That was the ideal. That's the ideal. It's like 100% cypherpunk. So no separate blockchain, no token, no pre-mine, no foundation, 100% cypherpunk.

8:02And also lightweight on Bitcoin. We didn't want to leave a large footprint, like clogging up all the block space and stuff. And scalable and all the things that we've come to learn from the different protocols and domain name system and stuff. So we took all that and we really worked to make Spaces. And so that's where we are now. We were able to raise some money to build it out. And now, yeah, we're live on testnet4 and we're hoping to go live on mainnet in the next month or so.

8:37Vlad CosteaThat's beautiful. When you think about it, this conversation about domain names, and that's what DNS is about. It's a domain name service. This conversation was being held back in 2010 and Satoshi was around when they were talking about this, decentralizing domain names. And they created Namecoin and Satoshi Nakamoto somehow took part in, let's say, the philosophical creation of it. And he was also the one who encouraged the people wanting to do this to start another blockchain that's going to be merge mined with Bitcoin. Instead of putting everything on the Bitcoin blockchain, they said at the time that it's much better to create a separate network.

9:19Eventually, I think that Ethereum became what Namecoin was supposed to be with some extended functionality. Namecoin right now, I'm not sure if there's anyone still running nodes or maintaining the domains that were purchased at the time. But to me, it's interesting that at the end of the day, it came back to Bitcoin. But I think technologically right now, the way in which these domain names are put in the Bitcoin blockchain is more compressed, is much more blockspace efficient than it was back in the day. I think these ordinal inscriptions, I'm not sure if you use ordinal inscriptions, but that's one of the most efficient ways to put data into the Bitcoin blockchain in a rather permanent way.

10:02Mike CarsonYeah, so Namecoin is a good, yeah, that was the first thing and it's, you know, I think that shows like the importance of naming is that the first, you know, first altcoin was Namecoin and yeah, Namecoin, you know, like, basically, we built Spaces on the shoulders of all these other, you know, people who went first and, you know, tried to do this naming system. And I think Namecoin, you know, at the time, you couldn't, you probably couldn't do, you couldn't do what we did. You can't do Spaces on Bitcoin at that time, you know, in 2010, because it's not scalable.

10:40Like, you can't scale to like hundreds of millions or billions of names on Bitcoin at that time. Like, it just wouldn't work. So it made sense having it as a separate blockchain. But, you know, I think there was, yeah, the main issues, there's papers, there's a paper actually, like an academic paper on, like, exploring why Namecoin, you know, didn't work. And their conclusion, the main conclusion is that it was a problem with distribution and that basically you could register, you know, tens of thousands of names for little cost.

11:17And so it was kind of like squatted on, the whole thing was squatted on. And then it was really hard for people to get names and use it from there. So, you know, we took all that stuff into consideration when we were building Spaces. And, yeah, ENS, you know, ENS is, we've worked a lot with ENS. That's, and they've been really super successful in a lot of ways. You know, in terms of like financially, I think they're doing hundreds of millions of dollars a year in registrations and stuff, and they have lots of registrations.

11:55But, you know, it's not Bitcoin. I mean, Bitcoin needs its own. It's also, you know, from a domain, coming from my work with like ICANN and the traditional domain system, it's not really scale, like it doesn't scale. It's all under dot ETH. It's under one top level domain dot ETH. And it's, and then there's other issues with like, you know, Ethereum, is it, you know, you have to use it like something like Infura or something, you know, like it's hard to get the whole blockchain, you know, like verify yourself.

12:37So, so anyway, we wanted to do something clean and cypherpunk and on Bitcoin. So that's why we've done Spaces.

12:49Vlad CosteaYeah, I think you opened up the Pandora's box for two conversations to be had about domains. The first one concerns ownership of domains, because if you deal with ICANN, it sort of belongs to you, but at the same time, it can be taken away from you for political reasons. You're not really censorship resistant. And there's also the issue of permanence, because you mentioned the issue of Ethereum nodes not being able to store all the data forever. There is some trust involved that these companies like Infura or whatever are going to be storing everything that you want and that you expect in the future.

13:28But you have no guarantee of that unless, and this is the sovereign way, you're going to be running your own nodes to make sure that this stuff stays online forever. And that's a big problem with Bitcoin. You have some technical limitations. You have higher transactional costs. But at the same time, you have a guarantee that whatever goes into a Bitcoin block is going to be there forever.

13:53Mike CarsonYeah, for your first point with the censorship, just domain names. There's so many people, there's literally hundreds of people who have access to your domain name from the registrar. Like if you buy it at GoDaddy, the registrar, the registry, ICANN, and anyone, anybody in between, any of the employees. There's an example, .cat is a top-level domain for Catalonia, and their offices were raided by the Spanish government because some websites were posting anti-Spanish government stuff. So the offices were raided. Some .cat domains were taken down.

14:39The CTO, I think, was arrested for sedition. So I mean, that's just one example.

14:45And this is just domain names. I mean, look at usernames like on Twitter. I mean, the president, Donald Trump, was taken down. So like, you know, if they can do it to the president, they can do it to anybody, really. And, you know, so you don't like, why should there be middlemen? Like, why? Why should there be people, hundreds of people in between you and your name? Like, you should be able to own this. Like, what? There's no reason. It's the same with money. It's like, you know, a lot of people will be like, ah, it works fine, you know, but a lot of people will say that about money.

15:19Like, oh, my bank, I can go to the bank and I get my money. It's fine. But like, why should there be banks in between and everybody else in between you and your money? And why should there be people in between you and your name? There should not be. There's no reason. And so, yeah, that's the main reason we built it. And I mean, that's just like the censorship stuff. There's also security stuff. Like, if you look at the Squarespace, like, you have to rely on, you have to trust not only that they won't take it away, but that they're secure.

15:49Like, why should you have to rely on them being secure? And that affected crypto. Like, from what I know from that incident, the Squarespace incident, like, it affected crypto companies and money was stolen from users because hackers were able to hijack their website. So, so you have to rely on that. And then there's other things like, for example, certificates, like all traffic on websites using HTTPS, you're relying, you have to get a certificate from a trusted third party certificate authority. So it's, you're basically getting a certificate from a trusted third party.

16:31And so it's like signed, it's, you're, you know, signed with somebody else's keys, really. So, so, yeah, this fixes a lot of those issues. And your second question, what was your second part of your question? Oh, about ENS and storing the data. Yeah, like, and why using Bitcoin? Yeah, Bitcoin. I mean, obviously, like Bitcoin, the whole, it's, it's relatively simple to, like, download the whole blockchain and verify everything yourself. And so it's, you know, in that way, it's a lot more decentralized than something like Ethereum, where you kind of have to rely on third parties, or if you try to do it yourself, it's just a lot more difficult. So, yeah, I don't know if that answers your question.

17:27Vlad CosteaNo, it does. It's useful to expand upon these arguments, because there are some layers to this. And some people will be listening and saying, you know, why do I need Impervious Spaces, it makes no sense. I have this ICANN, I just go on GoDaddy, I register a domain for $2 a year, and they're gonna be happy with it. And they're gonna think that it's just good enough for their use case, but they don't really own it. And that's an important talking point. And I did take a look at your protocol.

17:58It's on your website. And it seems to be very basic. It looks a bit like JavaScript, the way in which you register domains. Whenever you launch this, I want to register BitcoinTakeover.com, or dot whatever it's gonna be, dot badass, or I'm not sure what the extension is gonna be for this. But if one of you assholes listening to this is gonna squat on my domain, I'm gonna hunt you, I'm gonna track you down, I'm gonna make sure that I get that domain, okay? Because someone already has BitcoinTakeover.com, and they tried to sell it to me, and I just told them, I'm not gonna pay that much for it.

18:33Mike CarsonWell, yeah, actually, that might be a good segue to explain Spaces a little bit, if that's okay with you. So there's top-level spaces, and then there's subspaces. So the only thing that's done on Bitcoin itself is the top-level spaces. So if you wanted to get Bitcoin Takeover, you could open an auction for it, and it's on Bitcoin itself, and you just do transactions to open the auction and place the bids. And then you get it that way. So there's no dot after it. And the syntax is like, @bitcointakeover.

19:10So you could get that. And then if you wanted, you could sell subspaces, or you could just create it yourself, or you don't have to sell it, you could give it away free or whatever, but you could do it that way. So yeah, it's similar to traditional domains in that there's a top-level and then a second-level underneath, and this is for scaling reasons. Because in order to not completely take up all the block space and stuff, you need to limit what's committed to the block space.

19:45So it's just top-level, and we've limited the number of top-level spaces that can be registered per year to a small amount, like 3,600. It's basically 10 per day can go. So yeah, that's kind of how it works. And auctions, so if you bid on this, on @bitcointakeover, on Spaces, and you get it, the winning bid amount is burned. It's just gone forever, so it doesn't go to us in any way or anything like that. I mean, we did it that way because we wanted it to be cypherpunk.

20:39And we thought about other ways, like perhaps having the winning auction amount go to miners or something like that, but it just didn't work. It became more complicated. And so the cleanest way right now seems to be to just burn the money, burn the Bitcoin.

21:05Vlad CosteaI do look forward to trying this, and I do have a bit of a question about how this is going to work practically when you buy a domain, how you can access it. But before that, I got to tell people all about today's sponsors. The first one is SideShift.ai. Let's say that someone pays you in stablecoins and you're not happy, and you can't convince them that they should send you BTC or whatever you want to save or spend with. Dump that CBDC wannabe for something that you deem more valuable, which is free market money that you can actually hold in cold storage and cannot be censored by the Tether company by going to SideShift.ai.

21:44They have a pretty nice interface. There is no registration that's required. You can just swap instantly with very low fees. It's pretty cool. I recommend it. I use it myself for some swapping. And also there is StarkWare, which develops the Starknet network. And what they do basically is to have this zero knowledge proof rollup that they currently do on Ethereum and they want to bring to Bitcoin. It brings pretty nice scalability and privacy in one package. And all we have to do in Bitcoin to get that is to activate OP_CAT, which is a very basic concatenation operational code.

22:25It's 13 lines of code initially written by Satoshi. It was removed by Satoshi in 2010, along with other opcodes, because he was concerned that there are going to be infinite loops of data that are going to get concatenated until they crash the nodes. But in the post Taproot era, it's safe to use OP_CAT because there is a limit to the amount of data that can be added to this. And it's not just me saying this. It's Andrew Poelstra and a bunch of big brains who are much more qualified to make these assessments and the published articles.

23:01And there's a lot of content out there that you can consume on the topic of OP_CAT. But it is the sort of upgrade that's very non contentious, I guess, because if you want to break it, you can break it on BCH, you can break it on Liquid. They have it and have had it for years. So think about that. If you want builders to create interesting stuff on Bitcoin, think about activating OP_CAT. So now back to the question that I had for you, Mike. If I buy a domain, how do I type that in a browser?

23:33Is there some sort of special extension that's going to be required for me to be able to access the Web page? Or how is it going to work in practice?

23:43Mike CarsonYeah, that's a good question. So far we've built it. We've been really focusing on the protocol and making it a generalized naming system so that it can be used for a lot of different things. And we have the paper, if you go to spacesprotocol.org, you can read the paper and see what we have created for the second level spaces solution, which uses zero knowledge proofs to scale out all the subspaces. And then there will be a peer-to-peer network where you can store data for these names, for these subspaces.

24:32So you could store whatever you want. Point the name somewhere. You could use the name to point to an IP address, set up DNS, or you could use it to point to an Onion address, or you could use it for Nostr, or BIP 353, using it for a payment address for Bitcoin. So yeah, the stuff isn't built yet to integrate it into a browser or anything like that. So we've really just been focusing on the protocol and making sure that it works really well. And then after we launch on mainnet, then we're hoping to build out some of the ways to integrate it more.

25:25Vlad CosteaI think it's important. And there are at least two or three open source browsers to which you can build extensions and make sure that when someone types @bitcointakeover, it gets to the Bitcoin Takeover page. But I still think that. So how is it going to work? Can it be a redirect to something that already exists and is registered by ICANN, or can you build a Web page on top of this domain? And if that's the case, then how are you going to link them?

25:56Mike CarsonYeah, that's a good question. I mean, it's pretty wide open what you could be able to do with it. But basically you can store data for a name so you can store anything on this peer-to-peer network. So you could store DNS records so you could point it or you could store like an onion address and have it go right to, you know, that or like Nostr. You could use it for Nostr. So it's basically the way you'll be able to look up on the peer-to-peer network and look up an entry and verify using the zero knowledge proofs really quickly that the person who, you know, that the data stored is owned by, that the key matches, you know, that they actually own this name and that this is the data for that name.

26:51And then you can use it however, like, you know, however it's integrated. You know, when we were working on Handshake and ENS and stuff, we created, we actually created a browser, Beacon web browser. And it was, it used, it would look up the names on Handshake or ENS and resolve them. It was like the first browser that resolved ENS names using DNS. So it wasn't like a redirect. Like most names on ENS, like a .eth, they just redirect to a traditional ICANN domain. But there is actually built into the ENS resolvers a way to use DNS.

27:40So you don't have to like redirect. You can actually use like DNS. And it's good because then you don't have to rely on a trusted third party certificate authority to encrypt the traffic. So you can, there's this protocol called DANE where you can encrypt the traffic without using a third party certificate authority. And we were the first browser that did that. So, yeah, we may integrate this into our browser, into the Beacon web browser or try some of these other ways. But yeah, I don't know if that answers your question.

28:29Vlad CosteaNo, it is very important because at one point people will be buying these and expecting to build Web pages. The most basic use case for these domains is to redirect. And they're just for vanity, for people who want to buy maybe the short form of their domain, or maybe they could not buy from ICANN the domain that they wanted. So they will be using one that they do want and that they like to redirect to the one that they have. But at the same time, it's important to also build from scratch to have this community of people who are creating an ecosystem around these domains, because if it's only for redirecting purposes, it doesn't really defeat the Hydra.

29:12You know, you don't win the battle against centralized systems if you're just an interface that leads towards them. But if we do have builders, it's going to be much more fun and much more disruptive. And I can think of a few ways in which maybe I can build a simple Web page just to have fun and make people listen to my podcast. Just don't squat on my domain, please.

29:37Mike CarsonYeah, I mean, we build it in a way that makes it really hard to squat on the names. There's a 10 day auction. Also, any bids in the last day extend the auction by one day. So it'll be pretty hard to we took that really into consideration when we were designing the system. But yeah, back to the question of like integrating. I think BIP 353 would be a really good starting one, being able to have a human readable... Payment addresses and stuff. I mean, that solves like some, that would help in a lot of ways for some things.

30:16Like, for example, I don't know the exact details, but I know there was like a protest in Canada with the truckers and stuff and people were donating like a GoFundMe to GoFundMe page with, you know, and, but then I think GoFundMe was like, that, we're not going to give the money to the truckers. We're just going to distribute it to whoever we want to and so, you know, like, I think having a human readable name would make it a lot easier to be like, just send money to like truckers you know, that fund or something. You know, you could send.

30:50So it makes it a lot easier to do that type of stuff. But it's a simple, it's a simple first step to get this integrated. And actually, you don't even need to build, to send, like if you get Bitcoin Takeover, if you get that top level space, like people can send you don't even have to set anything up, people can send donation or whatever to that using our current software that we have, like you can just, using our wallet that we've created, you could just send, you know, a Bitcoin to Bitcoin Takeover, like @bitcointakeover.

31:33But using subspaces, you'll have to do it a little differently because you have to use the zero knowledge proofs and stuff like that. But yeah, I think so anyway, for me, I think I do, like I came from the domain system and I think that's a really important part of this, but I think there's also some other like integrations that are exciting and maybe a little more simpler at first is like doing this payment stuff and also maybe integrating it with Nostr. I just saw an interview, I think with Lyn Alden, talking about how you could use Nostr and Lightning.

32:12And it was, you know, it's like similar to Venmo. It's like, this is basically Venmo. And, you know, it is like Venmo, except no usernames. It's Venmo without the usernames. And so Spaces makes it exactly, like if you integrate Spaces, then it is, you know, it's a decentralized Venmo. So that's another thing to integrate it. But yeah, eventually, I mean, we purposely made this general purpose decentralized naming. So eventually I would like to see integrations in a lot of different areas. But I mean, the promising thing, so we have open source software.

32:54If you go to spacesprotocol.org, everything's open source. You can go to our GitHub and see everything that we've made. And, you know, you can read all the documentation that we have if you want to like integrate this. And I've been going around to like BitDevs meetups and stuff and the response is really positive from the Bitcoin community. So I'm really looking forward to seeing, you know, seeing the integrations that people build and stuff.

33:21Vlad CosteaYeah, I do know that Paul Sztorc built, I think it's called Bitnames, which is sort of a namecoin fork for his Drivechains project. And he does want to have this sidechain that is dedicated to only having domain names and tokens and assets and everything that's connected to this. And the way in which it's going to work is that it can be merge mined with Bitcoin. So the same miners that secure Bitcoin are also going to secure that chain at the same time. There is not the same guarantee of permanence.

33:56So the base layer is going to be there forever. But if you want to something lesser expensive and more scalable, that enables you to get as many domains as you want. And I guess bypasses some of the limits imposed by the base layer. You'll be using that one as a sidechain. Anyway, I am also sponsored by LayerTwo Labs and they have this proposal for scaling Bitcoin, which is BIP 300. And most people, I think, mischaracterize it as some sort of block size increase for sidechains, because instead of moving transactions on the base layer, you're going to have these sidechains for other stuff.

34:33But I see it more as a way to drain altcoins of their use cases, because I believe that there is some legit activity that's happening in the altcoin space. There is a lot of useful experimentation that's happening. And after the experimentation phase, there is a market that builds around these use cases. And the fact that we don't have that on Bitcoin only gives these projects more legitimacy to say, yes, but Bitcoin can't do this. And if Bitcoin is able to get all the builders and basically copy and paste the open source code into a sidechain that has more thermodynamic security and more value, I guess most of these altcoins are going to die off.

35:17So that's why I think if we do want a future where everything is built on Bitcoin, something like drivechains is useful. And if you want to check them out, there's already a testnet version of these sidechains that you can download right now. You go to layertwolabs.com and you're going to find all the information you need to do this. I think it's on Linux, Windows, Mac OS. You just download the software and you see how it works to understand much better what the future holds for this project.

35:50It's not just an idea right now, it's an implementation. And also, I got to tell you about Hodling.ch, which is the service from Switzerland where you go and you get consultancy for your setup. So if you are into self-custody and of course, you should be into self-custody, but this is a bit more professional. If you want to do a multi-sig for a company or you have a very large bag and you don't want to be subjected to the $5 wrench attack, I think it's still $5.

36:18I haven't checked lately. Due to inflation, it might be $10. But if you don't want to be subjected to that sort of physical attack, it's a good idea to maybe do a multi-sig and maybe to have some sort of distributed backups. Maybe you should use hardware wallets. Maybe you shouldn't. The best way to know is to call these guys and they're going to give you their best expertise. And they hold no keys. They're not like Casa where they demand that you give them one key for backup or whatever.

36:48They will help you and tell you exactly how you should manage your backup and you benefit from the privacy of a Swiss service. So check out Hodling.ch. I'm done with calling sponsors for today. Thank you for sitting through my ads. And now let's talk about digital identity, because this is a very important concept and it's also a very poorly understood concept. And I think in the beginning, people assumed that a Bitcoin address or an Ethereum address or something like this is enough to prove that there is the same person behind the activity.

37:20And you can sign a transaction, you can sign from an address to prove that you are the owner. But I don't see this as being enough. I think it has some limitations. It is much better than KYC-ing with your ID, which only leads to criminals stealing your data at one point. It's just a honeypot. But I don't see this future with single addresses for one person. You have one address and then you can see their transactions or maybe you don't see their transactions. But if they do sign messages or transactions from that address, you know that it's them. Do you see any merit or potential in this?

38:04Mike CarsonWell, yeah. I think a naming protocol can be a help for that because it's basically what it comes down to. What it really boils down to is that it ties a name to a key so you can prove that you're the owner of that name. And so whatever you do with that name, you can prove that you own that name. So I guess I don't know. I think it's because tying it to an address, because that has privacy issues and stuff like that.

38:56So I think you can do, for example, silent payments or something like that with using just your space's name. But I think. Yeah, I don't know if that's I don't know if I answered your question.

39:29Vlad CosteaNo, it's fine. For many people, I think the first Bitcoin that they found was domains because they were able to buy domains for maybe a few dollars. And then they could sell them for thousands, if not tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of dollars later, because they they met projects that raised funds or maybe they dealt with larger organizations or startups or government institutions that wanted these domains. And it was a pretty profitable way. And you see Spaces beyond this initial phase where everyone registers the domain that they want.

40:07Do you see a marketplace potential? And if so, what's going to be the user interface like? Is it going to be like GoDaddy or something that we already have? Or did you design it in a different way with a slightly different philosophy to be adapted to Bitcoin's design?

40:27Mike CarsonYeah, I definitely think there will be a marketplace. I mean, there's going to be a value for, you know, easier to remember or more, you know, highly sought after names like Bitcoin, you know, like @bitcoin, if you can get the top level space for that seems like that will be, you know, super valuable. But so I definitely think that the similar to, you know, anytime there's naming involved, like domain names, or even Twitter handles and stuff like that you see a marketplace for valuable names, you know, for branding, or just for easy to remember, or, you know, shortness of it.

41:07So that, yeah, basically, so it's easy to remember and put put in places. So I think there will definitely be a market for that. And, and the interface, I mean, right now, we just, you know, we have command line software that we built that a wallet for that, but we're gonna, we're working on a like a GUI wallet, so it'll be easier like software so that people can, you know, be easier to bid and manage your spaces and stuff. And then for the subspaces, we'll have a service for that.

41:42So that, for example, if you get the top level @bitcoin, if you if you get that top level space, you can use our website or service so that you can sell subspaces. Under that, so you could sell like somebody could get mike@bitcoin or vlad@bitcoin or whatever. And so you could actually turn it, you know, into a business where you sell subspaces, and you make money from the sale of those. And we'll have a website that helps provide the service for that.

42:18So it can, you know, people can easily go on to the website or, and or register second level spaces under that. It will provide the service of creating the, you know, the zero knowledge proof so that it's all handled for you so that you don't have to do it yourself. You could do it yourself if you wanted. But yeah, so that's our plan.

42:50Vlad CosteaI mean, it sounds very promising, and I'm excited for this. But there are so many domain services that have been released in the last few years, and I haven't heard much about them. So I hope that this one is going to be successful. I remember at one point, I was invited on The Bitcoin Group, which is the podcast by Thomas Hunt, Mad Bitcoins. It's pretty OG. He has an assembly of guys who have been in Bitcoin for longer than 10 years. And after the show, there was someone who mentioned that there's this protocol where you can buy emoji domains.

43:25Yeah. So basically, you could buy smiley face with tears domain. And you could get subdomains for that one. And people were paying a lot of money for them, except that it had no proper browser integration. So it was all highly speculative. You had no guarantee that at some point in the future is going to be used for anything. And I don't think it had any success. I don't know what happened to it. This was back in 2021. So it was at the peak of the NFT mania, and everyone was trying to get collectibles and trying to find something to make 100x on.

44:07Mike CarsonYeah, you make a really good point. I mean, when I bring this up to people in the domain industry, they're like, oh, another blockchain solution to naming.

44:21Well, a lot of them are like, we don't need that. We don't need blockchain. But from my perspective, I started park.io 10 years ago. And I worked with ICANN. I had three ICANN accredited registrars. I worked with registries. I worked with the .io registry, .ai.

44:44And going through all that, I came to the realization. And also at the same time, really getting into Bitcoin. I got into Bitcoin in 2013.

44:58I got into Lightning, too. We were one of the first, park.io had one of the first 50 nodes on the Lightning network. So through all this, I realized that domain names are digital assets, and they really should be on the blockchain. To me, I've had this strong conviction that decentralized naming is so valuable and so necessary that it's inevitable. It's definitely going to happen.

45:30We're still in the very early stages. We're figuring this all out. It's new. It's all new. We're all just trying to figure out the best solution. First, there was Namecoin. Then there's other things. And so we spent a long time just focusing on trying to build the best. Because of this conviction, trying to build the best solution possible. And I self-funded it for the first year or so. And it's really just to try to do that. Because I know that this is going to happen. There's no way we're going to live in a world in 20 years from now where all the names are centralized.

46:21It can't happen. I just know it can't happen. And so we just worked on this to try to build the best solution. And what we came up with, who knows if it's the best solution. I personally think it's the best solution so far. But if something comes along that's even better, then I'll be interested in that one. I just want to know what the best thing is. I just want to work out the best system. But I think that we're still in the first inning of this decentralized naming stuff.

46:49We're figuring it out. But you can already see the value. You can see ENS doing hundreds of millions of dollars. And another company, Unstoppable Domains, which is, I don't think it's really decentralized, but they were valued at a billion dollars or whatever. So I think the market sees the value of this and knows that it's super valuable. And it's really just a matter of time and getting the right solution. So even though there's been a lot of different solutions that have come out, you know, there's going to be a solution that is the right solution, the one that works.

47:45And I personally think it should be built on Bitcoin because of the security of the block space. I mean, where else would you put it? Where else would be as secure, decentralized? So Bitcoin needs it anyway. So that's where we came to the solution. And yeah, I don't know. Maybe it won't be the one, but we did our best. We worked hard to try to make it the one. And maybe some other people will learn from us and do something even better.

48:24Vlad CosteaWell, it's hard to break monopolies and it's hard to get people to move from something that's so convenient and so heavily advertised. Something like GoDaddy is advertised at the Super Bowl and everyone knows about it. I think the one that I used was Gator something, HostGator. At one point, I registered some domains with that. Right now I use some Romanian company just because I thought it was nice to support a smaller project, but they still resell. They're buying from ICANN and they're reselling to me. And there's this Romanian authority of .ro domains, which is in charge of everything.

49:10And it sort of sucks. I wish there was something decentralized for this and we could bypass the middleman and we could bypass the censorship. But I think what it takes is to build communities and to have a sort of network effect, because you are also the CEO of Friendster, if I'm not mistaken. And you know how hard it is for that project to compete with Facebook, with Twitter. We saw how Elon Musk messed up a lot since he took over Twitter and made a lot of controversial decisions.

49:43And this enabled basically Meta, which is the mother company of Facebook and Instagram to come up with Threads. But that one, even though it had some support from celebrities and people who are mad at Elon Musk, it still did not get the user base. So there needs to be a way for these projects which are decentralized to have a community that backs them, to have people who use them and understand the utility. And I do expect once this one goes on mainnet, for some people to complain that these are not financial transactions that are being put in the Bitcoin blockchain.

50:23Say, oh, you know, this is a money network and you're putting your graffiti on it, just like with ordinal inscriptions when they're inscribing their JPEGs. So I do encourage everyone listening to this to be open minded about domains, because this can be very revolutionary and useful. But my question right now is, how is it going to work in the sense that you mentioned ENS a few times? And as far as I know, the only way in which ENS was useful was to have a vanity address for your wallet so that people could see what you store, what you transact and stuff like that.

50:59So do you think it's also going to be used for this with people opening up their wallet addresses to people? Does it work the same in a UTXO model?

51:11Mike CarsonYeah, well, so yeah, just to talk a little bit about, yeah, like, you know, people get mad at ordinals because it's not a financial transaction and it's taking up block space. You know, my view on it has kind of, you know, I love Bitcoin. I love it. And, you know, I know it's a revolutionary invention and I think it's super important that money is decentralized. But to me, what I've come to realize is, you know, what's really valuable about Bitcoin is this block space. Like this, the block space is this truly decentralized, you know, space, like a ledger that is secured by like all the all the miners and like it's, you know, the most secure proof of work blockchain.

52:08But so the space, the space has value. And, you know, in my in my mind, the way that I'm thinking about it is like money is the first killer app that was that made use of this space. Money is. And it's really important, super important. But I think naming is super important. And I think it can use the space also. And why shouldn't it be able to? I don't think it takes away from money. You know, we designed it really carefully to have a very light footprint, you know, on it.

52:41Like it hardly uses much space at all, you know, and it's really limited to what's done on on the top level, like on Bitcoin. So but in my mind, you know, that space is so valuable. It's valuable because it's, you know, it's it's truly decentralized ledger, like super in the most in the world, the most decentralized space that anybody can use, you know, for free. And and we we rightfully put money on there and money was the first killer app. But I think naming is super important and deserves that.

53:25I think it could use that space also. I think that space is is can be used for other really important things. So anyway, we designed it to be really lightweight in that in that point. And then your second point was, yeah, like about integrating. Was that your second? What was your second question?

53:53Vlad CosteaI got to think about it. But right now, you basically made me consider this potential issue. Whenever a domain is registered to to someone, which is going to be a Bitcoin address, that's going to be an on-chain transaction. And whenever they issue subdomains from it, there's going to be another on-chain transaction.

54:14Mike CarsonWell, no, it's the the subspaces are done with zero knowledge proofs. So like it's a tree that we we do it all off chain. We could commit on chain. So like we have a if you go to our GitHub, you can see this proof of concept Subspacer that we have where we use RISC Zero to create like I think like the ZK-SNARK proof, which you could you could commit that on chain just to prove the changes that have been just to prove what subspace the changes to the subspaces and stuff.

54:53But but we purposely designed this to be super scalable. So like you can't you can't have hundreds like like just just domain names have 300 million domain names registered right now on the Internet, something like that. And you can't have that on Bitcoin. Like it's just you would you know, it's just not possible to scale it. So we've really we've we've we've scaled it by doing the top layer and the second layer and the top layer is done on Bitcoin. And so that's really limited to just ten a day.

55:25So like three thousand six hundred top level spaces are are done on on the Bitcoin blockchain and everything else is scaled off off chain, like using the zero knowledge proofs.

55:40Vlad CosteaThat actually sounds cool and makes a lot of sense. It sounds even more scalable than OpenTimestamps, which is something else that right now a non-monetary use that is not contentious. So if it's going to be done with zero knowledge proofs, the footprint on the blockchain is going to be negligible. I don't think having a lot of demand for domains is going to boost transaction fees for those who want to do remittances on Bitcoin.

56:09Mike CarsonYeah, yeah, exactly. And so we designed it. There's no changes necessary to the Bitcoin protocol. It's running just as Bitcoin is now, but it is scaling and it's really light footprint, lightweight, like really small footprint on Bitcoin block space. But it's anchored in that space, which gives it the security and decentralization. And so, yeah, I remember your first question, which was like about communities adopting it and stuff. And my hope is that the Bitcoin, you know, I think the Bitcoin, I'm hoping the Bitcoin community can get on board with this because it's built on Bitcoin and it's built for Bitcoin.

56:50You know, like there's a lot of use cases where this could help build Bitcoin. Like it's a security risk. It's a risk to rely on domain names because they're totally centralized and you don't want to have to trust, like that goes against Bitcoin. That goes against the whole, you know, Bitcoin philosophy. You don't want to have to trust. So you don't want to have to trust these third party certificate authorities to like give you know, something to sign with. So yeah, I'm hoping the Bitcoin community really, you know, helps build this out, helps us build this out.

57:28And I've been going to these BitDevs meetups and, you know, there's some people there that are, you know, super, you know, they don't like how ordinals are using the space. And, you know, some of like some of those people have said to me, like, this is the only thing built on Bitcoin that I see that has value. And so I think it really, I think they get it. I think they understand how it can help Bitcoin and, you know, that it's built in a smart way. So my hope is that, you know, the Bitcoin community adopts it.

58:10Vlad CosteaOnce again, when did you say that you expect the mainnet launch for this Spaces protocol?

58:16Mike CarsonI'm hoping in the next month or so, but, you know, we'll, you can follow us like on Twitter, it's @spacesprotocol or also we're on telegram, which you can, you can find all our stuff on spacesprotocol.org. But yeah, we'll, we'll definitely be putting updates there. But yeah, I'm hoping in the next month or so, I mean, we're doing testing now.

58:41We have an explorer, if you go to explorer.spacesprotocol.org, you can see like spaces currently in auction and stuff on testnet4. So we're doing a lot of testing and, you know, we're writing a lot of tests for our software and everything's going well. I mean, everything seems to be running smoothly. So yeah, my hope is to launch in the next, to launch on mainnet in the next month or so.

59:15Vlad CosteaRight now I'm looking at the impervious.com web page, and you seem to have six different projects from Badass domains to Beacon browser, Fingertip, Forever IDs, Impervious Domains. And the top one is Spaces Protocol, which we discussed mostly during this interview. And I was wondering if there's any one of the other five that you think is worth mentioning and discussing?

59:42Mike CarsonYou know, a lot of this other stuff was built for, when we first started out, we were building for Handshake and ENS. So I mean, I personally think Beacon browser is cool, but it's, it's not, it's not like set up for Spaces yet, but it was the first browser that used DANE that's, can resolve DANE. So it's, what that means is it's, and it's also the first browser that could resolve dot ETH domains with DNS without like a redirect or anything like that. It actually used true DNS.

1:00:19So you could actually do an HTTPS for a dot ETH domain without a trusted third party certificate authority. So yes, the first browser that resolves with DANE, which means that you could have encrypted traffic, encrypted traffic HTTPS, without relying on a trusted third party certificate authority. You could create the keys, you have the keys, nobody else has the keys to encrypt that traffic, which is I think like super important and is a big reason why I think, you know, we did Spaces and stuff. So, so yeah, I mean, but yeah, Spaces right now has been our main focus for the last year and a half. We've been, we've been a hundred percent focused on Spaces.

1:01:09Vlad CosteaSo for the people who are looking for ways to keep up with Spaces and be there on day one and register all the domains that they want, what's the best way to follow the Spaces project?

1:01:21Mike CarsonWell, if you go to spacesprotocol.org, we have a link in the top right to our Telegram. I think that's probably the best way is on Telegram, because we'll definitely be updating there. And especially if you have any questions or anything like that, we could answer them. Also on Twitter, we'll announce anything there also. So yeah, the Twitter @spacesprotocol, twitter.com/spacesprotocol, and our Telegram, which I think is t.me/spacesprotocol.

1:02:00Vlad CosteaAnd on a personal level, I was going to ask you if you can make your hair from the Twitter profile picture, because it's super cool. If you can get that hairdo. I don't know.

1:02:10Mike CarsonYeah, I mean...

1:02:20Vlad CosteaSome people tell me that I have the best hair in Bitcoin. I feel like there's competition here.

1:02:25Mike CarsonSo, somebody said I had the best, I have the best hair in the domain name industry. So hey, look, we're two of the best hair guys on a pod.

1:02:41Vlad CosteaIt's nice. I got to give you that. And that picture looks impressive. You know, there's that stunning feel like you're like, okay, that's something I respect.

1:02:53Mike CarsonThanks.

1:02:54Vlad CosteaSo how can people follow you personally and keep up with whatever you're doing? And why should people still care about Friendster in 2024?

1:03:06Mike CarsonYeah, so you can follow me on, I guess, Twitter is the best way. You can get to my Twitter by going to cypherpunk.com. I got that domain. So cypherpunk.com will redirect to my Twitter for now. But yeah, Friendster, I don't know, it's just, I've been into domain, you know, the domain industry for a while. So I just follow domain names and, you know, park.io originally is a drop catching service. So what that means is that when domain names expired, there's a lot of competition to get these domain names, if they're valuable, like some valuable domain names can expire.

1:03:51And there's a lot of competition to get them the exact second, like less than a second that they become available. And so we wrote a lot of scripts to get them. And basically that was our service selling that on our website. And so through all that, I really got to know like expiring domain names and so friendster.com expired and somebody else got it, but I was able to get it from them. And also their trademark, they abandoned their trademark. So we got the trademark. So anyway, yeah, I want to bring Friendster back.

1:04:30I think right now is a good time. So this is my other project besides Spaces is Friendster. You know, a lot of people are kind of antisocial network for good reasons because they sell all your data and they manipulate you with ad algorithms to make you depressed and isolated, anxious. And like, so there's a lot, and there's even a study where like people would pay to no longer be on some of these social networks. They'd pay money to no longer be, but they don't want to do it because they're afraid they'll miss out.

1:05:03So anyway, I wanted to, I thought it might be fun to bring Friendster back and make it a place where you don't sell, you know, it doesn't sell your data. It puts users first, basically puts users first. And, you know, maybe there'll be some way, I'm hoping there'll be some way to tie this into Spaces. Like each user gets their own decentralized spaces, like subspace username, like @friendster or something. There's been a lot of interest. I mean, it's crazy. Like there's, we've slowly been opening it up, but there's like around 250,000 people still on the waiting list to get in.

1:05:52So yeah, that's mostly, I think it's just fun. I liked Friendster when it first came out. You know, it was the first thing of its kind and I thought it was really cool and interesting. So I thought it'd be fun to do it again.

1:06:12Vlad CosteaNo, I think at the time the narrative was that it's Napster for friends. And that's why they called it Friendster. There was no concept of social media or social network or whatever. It was just Napster for friends. And the, I can't talk anymore. The revolutionary part about Friendster was how you could create these circles with people. And I think Google, I don't recall the name of the service, it might have been circles. But Google at one point in 2011, 2012, they created this social network that was all about putting people close to you in different circles.

1:06:48And you had a circle for your family, a circle for your friends and stuff like that. And it's funny how I think Friendster came in 2003, 2004.

1:07:01And it took Google about eight years to copy this formula and they still failed.

1:07:07Mike CarsonYeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. We'll see how it goes.

1:07:14Vlad CosteaIf you can get MySpace, I think that one is also nostalgic or Hi5. In Romania, Hi5 was the shit. Before Facebook, everyone had Hi5.

1:07:24Mike CarsonOh, yeah. Okay.

1:07:26Vlad CosteaBut it was fun. You could actually learn how to program in HTML and maybe some PHP because everyone wanted to have the funny animated page and have a song playing in the background and stuff like that.

1:07:42Mike CarsonYeah. Yeah. The customizable templates and stuff. Yeah. It's cool.

1:07:50Vlad CosteaThe internet used to be more fun.

1:07:52Mike CarsonYeah, I know. Yeah, I know. Hopefully we can bring it back to the fun days.

1:08:04Vlad CosteaAnd that's actually a brilliant idea. If you have a user base on Friendster, you can onboard them to Bitcoin domains with Spaces and bring more people to Bitcoin. Because I guess developers are excited about this, but I'm not sure about Bitcoin users and they're going to follow the network effect. So if you do have some people who don't care much about Bitcoin, but they see value in domains and they're going to join Bitcoin, then the Bitcoiners will follow along. And I think that's what sets your project apart from all the others.

1:08:37Mike CarsonThanks. Yeah. Yeah. I'm hoping that it can onboard like, you know, lots of lot more people onto Bitcoin.

1:08:46Vlad CosteaI'm not sure if I have any more questions for you at this time. I think it's super cool what you're doing with Spaces. And I hope that everyone listening, we've had about almost 400 people listening on livestream, which is nice. I hope that they give it a try and they check out the website, which is on impervious.com. And that's where you find information about the Spaces protocol. It's on the Bitcoin mainnet 4 [sic: testnet4] and you can give it a try.

1:09:17Mike CarsonYeah. Yeah. Test it out on testnet4 and download the software and try it out. It's pretty easy to get started. You can get coins from a faucet pretty easily for testnet4 and start bidding and stuff. And yeah, thanks so much for having me. I really am honored to be on your podcast. I love your podcast. Thanks so much.

1:09:41Vlad CosteaI love your work. So that's I guess the admiration is mutual. Thank you very much for your time. And I know I was late about 30 minutes. I apologize for that.

1:09:49Mike CarsonNo problem.

1:09:50Vlad CosteaI hope we had a great show regardless. So thank you very much. I'll see you in the next one.

1:09:54Mike CarsonOkay. Thanks.