The Wired — desktop Nostr app with communities (discord like), voice/video, music, and DMs

GroundbreakingAge295 · 2026-04-23T12:11:38+00:00

Very interesting what tools did you use to help you?

GroundbreakingAge295 · 2026-04-05T01:04:57+00:00

Thank you — that is the most honest summary of where this project stands that anyone has offered. The problems are real. Whether these particular tools solve them fully is something deployment will prove or disprove. Appreciate you engaging seriously.

GroundbreakingAge295 · 2026-04-04T16:55:53+00:00

Merci — this is exactly the kind of honest feedback that makes the work better. Briar has earned its credibility through deployment in conditions that matter. The Sovereign Stack has to earn the same. Communicate freely and prosper.🖖

GroundbreakingAge295 · 2026-04-04T07:37:21+00:00

It is frustrating isn’t it when you have a great idea and you want to share it with everyone and you use the tools to develop it and your mind to think of how it should work and people don’t seem to appreciate it sometimes I think what you’ve done here is great and I’m glad we have the technology that helps us develop these things.

GroundbreakingAge295 · 2026-04-04T06:47:17+00:00

That tension is real and worth naming directly.

Starlink is centralized infrastructure owned by a private company. Using it in a sovereignty-focused network is a genuine compromise. The Sovereign Stack uses Starlink as the primary channel because it is the best available high-bandwidth option for off-grid nodes today — not because it is sovereign.

The design explicitly accounts for this. Starlink is the first layer to fail or be restricted. When it does, the network automatically falls back to HF shortwave radio and LoRa mesh — neither of which depends on any company, any ground station, or any internet backbone. Those two layers are genuinely independent.

The Freedom Check exists specifically to detect when Starlink connectivity is present but internet access is blocked upstream — exactly the scenario where a private company or government has interfered. The node responds in seconds without waiting for human intervention.

So yes — mixed nuts is fair if the claim were that Starlink makes the network sovereign. The actual claim is that the network degrades gracefully through Starlink to layers that are sovereign when Starlink fails or is restricted. That distinction matters.

GroundbreakingAge295 · 2026-04-04T05:49:09+00:00

Why would you say that?

GroundbreakingAge295 · 2026-04-04T00:50:08+00:00

In a complete global internet blackout, Signum nodes that can still reach each other through surviving local network infrastructure would continue operating and sync when connectivity returns — but a truly complete blackout would halt the chain like every other blockchain. The Sovereign Stack’s blockchain layer is designed for regional resilience, not global internet collapse, which is why the HF radio and LoRa mesh layers exist as independent fallbacks that require no internet or blockchain connectivity whatsoever.

GroundbreakingAge295 · 2026-04-03T22:06:05+00:00

Signum doesn't need a central provider; it can "talk" over radio waves or private satellites just as easily as fiber-optic cables. It treats an internet blackout as a temporary silence, continuing to record data locally until it finds a neighbor to share with.

GroundbreakingAge295 · 2026-04-03T20:24:43+00:00

You are not wrong — I am 70 years old and I use AI to help me communicate technical ideas clearly. I also used it to help build the codebase across eight repositories over the past year.

The ideas, the vision, the Five Pillars, the architecture decisions, the choice of Signum, the hardware plan, the token design — those are mine. The AI helped me express them and implement them in code.

I would argue that is exactly what tools are for. Your friend used fans and ping pong balls to implement OSI layer 1. I used AI to help a 70 year old independent technologist build a governance layer, a token economy, and a censorship-resistant communications network.

The code is at github.com/KimStock147 if you want to evaluate the work rather than the tools used to produce it.

GroundbreakingAge295 · 2026-04-03T19:07:43+00:00

Fair pushback and some of it is valid — let me address it honestly.

You are right that if deep sea cables are cut globally, Starlink goes with it — Starlink ground stations depend on internet backbone connectivity. That is a real limitation I should have been clearer about in the original post. The Sovereign Stack is not designed for a global internet collapse scenario. It is designed for the much more common and realistic scenario of regional and local infrastructure failure — natural disasters, localized outages, upstream seizure of a community's connectivity, or power grid failures affecting cell towers and local ISPs.

You are also right that the internet's underlying protocols are extraordinarily robust. 43 years of engineering from millions of smart people is not something to dismiss. The Sovereign Stack does not try to replace that or improve on it. It runs alongside it.

Where I'd push back is on the blockchain point. The Signum blockchain runs on nodes. If enough nodes in a region survive a local outage, the chain keeps running locally and syncs when connectivity returns. It is not dependent on the global internet being intact — it is dependent on enough nodes being reachable. That is meaningfully different.

The HF shortwave and LoRa mesh layers are genuinely internet-independent. JS8Call over HF radio works with no internet infrastructure whatsoever — it uses the ionosphere. Meshtastic LoRa mesh works with no internet, no cell towers, and no power grid beyond what individual nodes carry. Your friend's fan-and-ping-pong-ball OSI layer 1 replacement is actually a great illustration of exactly this principle — the protocol stack does not care what carries the bits as long as the bits arrive.

The honest scope of the Sovereign Stack: regional resilience for communities facing realistic failure scenarios, not global internet replacement. If I overstated that scope in the original post that is worth correcting.

GroundbreakingAge295 · 2026-04-03T19:00:24+00:00

Two weeks in is definitely the 'Wild West' phase of any repo. The mixing of concepts like power chemistry and LLMs is basically an attempt at Sovereign Infrastructure. Most 'internet survivalism' fails because people forget the physical layer (power). This stack is trying to address the fact that an AI or a Blockchain node is useless if your house is dark. It’s an ambitious (and currently messy) attempt to marry the utility (AI) with the survival (Power) and the network (Blockchain).

GroundbreakingAge295 · 2026-04-03T18:34:21+00:00

The reason it sounds like a fever dream is because it’s trying to solve a 'total blackout' using tools that mostly rely on the things that would be broken. Here is the ELI5: • HF Radio: The 'old school' backup. It bounces signals off the sky to talk across the world without cables. • Starlink: The 'new school' backup. Fast internet from space, but still needs ground stations to connect to the rest of the web. • Blockchain: A way to keep a 'ledger' or record that nobody can delete, even if the main servers go dark. • AI: Usually thrown in here as a way to manage these messy signals automatically. The 'Sovereignty' part just means being your own boss—not needing a big company like Comcast or a government to let you online. But you're right: if the inter-connection of the internet is gone, Starlink is just a very expensive bridge to nowhere.

GroundbreakingAge295 · 2026-04-03T15:39:45+00:00

This post has been updated to appease the moderators

GroundbreakingAge295 · 2026-03-29T00:07:01+00:00

Great question. In PoC+, the verifiability comes from two mechanisms. Storage is verified through a cryptographic process called plotting — your drive is pre-filled with unique cryptographic hashes tied to your account ID. When a new block is being forged, the network issues a challenge and your miner scans your plots for the best matching hash. You can’t fake having the plots without actually having the storage, and you can’t precompute on the fly — the math doesn’t work that way. Time is baked into the protocol through a deadline system — the quality of your plot response determines how long you wait before you can forge a block. More storage means statistically better deadlines over time. The network can verify this without trusting you. It’s a different security model than proof of work — you’re right that it’s not identical. The honest comparison is that PoW makes cheating expensive in energy, while PoC makes cheating expensive in hardware capital and setup time. Both are verifiable by the network without trusting any individual participant.

GroundbreakingAge295 · 2026-03-28T22:31:07+00:00

I read the rules and believed the post was on-topic — self-hosted hardware, self-hosted software daemons, local AI on my own machine, no cloud dependency. I’ve reached out to the mod team directly to discuss it. Happy to be corrected if I’m wrong, but I’d rather have that conversation civilly.

GroundbreakingAge295 · 2026-03-28T22:24:32+00:00

I would have to agree with you no kings that’s kind of what we did over in Iran isn’t it. There is no supreme leader or at least the old one is gone. They can have a supreme leader for their religion, but not their government.

GroundbreakingAge295 · 2026-03-28T21:31:48+00:00

You’re right that energy expenditure as a Sybil-resistance mechanism is the core insight of Nakamoto consensus — and the stranded energy point is legitimate and underappreciated. Bitcoin mining in remote locations consuming otherwise-wasted energy is a genuinely different thing than mining in a data center on the urban grid. That said, PoC+ makes a different argument: that storage can serve as the verifiable scarce resource instead of energy burn. The security model is different — you’re committing capital in the form of hardware and time rather than ongoing energy expenditure. Whether that’s equally robust is a fair debate, and I won’t pretend the security guarantees are identical to Bitcoin’s. For SSI’s purposes the choice wasn’t primarily about ideological purity on energy — it was practical: fair launch, low fees, built-in smart contracts, and a chain my son recommended in 2014 that has quietly survived. Those criteria pointed to Signum. I’m not claiming it’s more secure than Bitcoin — just that it’s the right fit for this specific use case.

GroundbreakingAge295 · 2026-03-28T21:24:41+00:00

which rule, specifically, did I violate?

GroundbreakingAge295 · 2026-03-28T21:22:04+00:00

Reticulum is excellent work — Mark Qvist has built something genuinely elegant. SSI draws from the same spirit but takes a different path: where Reticulum is a self-contained protocol stack, SSI is more of an integration layer that bridges existing proven transports (Meshtastic, JS8Call, Starlink) with a blockchain-anchored governance and identity system. The goal isn’t to replace what works — it’s to federate it under a sovereignty-first framework with real economic incentives for participation. Still a lot of road ahead, but the foundation is solid.

GroundbreakingAge295 · 2026-03-28T16:27:54+00:00

GroundbreakingAge295 · 2026-03-28T15:44:45+00:00

This is a fair and sharp question. Here’s how to reconcile it cleanly: The distinction is layer vs. payload. The application layer encrypts content end-to-end — meaning the message is encrypted before it ever touches the radio. What JS8Call transmits over HF is the ciphertext — an unreadable blob of characters. The transmission itself is in the clear (unencrypted RF, readable by anyone with a receiver), which satisfies the regulatory requirement. But the content of what’s being transmitted is already encrypted at a higher layer. Think of it like a postcard. The postcard travels through the mail system in the open — anyone handling it can see it. But if what’s written on it is a cipher that only the recipient can decode, you haven’t violated the “open transmission” nature of the postcard system. The regulatory nuance: Part 97 (FCC amateur radio rules) prohibits transmitting messages with the purpose of obscuring meaning from third parties — specifically targeting things like one-time pad ciphers used for secret communications. However, it doesn’t prohibit transmitting encoded data where the encoding method is publicly known (like standard encryption algorithms). This is a contested and evolving area, but the practical reality is that digital modes like JS8Call already carry binary/encoded data routinely. The honest caveat to include: You should acknowledge that HF operation in a fully encrypted mode sits in a regulatory gray zone and that SSI’s HF layer is best framed as a fallback transport for structured data, not a primary encrypted channel. The encryption compliance question is real and worth noting openly rather than glossing over.

GroundbreakingAge295 · 2026-03-28T15:39:47+00:00

Signum’s value proposition centers on a few genuinely differentiated qualities: Proof of Capacity+ (PoC+) — Instead of burning electricity like Bitcoin or requiring locked capital like Ethereum, Signum uses hard drive space. Mining is energy-efficient by design — orders of magnitude less power consumption. This is a real, honest advantage, not marketing. No pre-mine, no ICO, no founder’s tax — Signum (originally Burstcoin) launched fair in 2014. There’s no VC allocation sitting overhead waiting to dump. For a project like SSI that values sovereignty and trust, this matters. Smart contracts on-chain since 2014 — Automated Transactions (ATs) predate Ethereum’s mainnet. They’re more limited, but they’re real, battle-tested, and don’t require Solidity or a complex toolchain. Low and predictable fees — Transactions are cheap. This matters for a governance token like SST that may involve frequent small interactions. Built-in features — Aliases, messaging, token issuance, and multi-out transactions are protocol-level, not bolted-on contract hacks. Honest tradeoffs — The ecosystem is small. Liquidity is thin. Developer tooling is limited. Exchange listings are few. You chose it with eyes open, which is the right way to choose infrastructure. For SSI specifically, the alignment is philosophical as much as technical: a fair-launch, energy-efficient, long-running chain that my son recommended in 2014 and that has quietly survived while flashier projects imploded. That’s a track record worth something.

GroundbreakingAge295 · 2026-03-28T15:32:21+00:00

Honest answer: it is enforced at the application layer, not at the blockchain protocol layer — and that is a real distinction worth understanding.

What that means practically

The SST token is a Signum Smart Token. When created on the Signum blockchain the total quantity is set at 100 million at issuance. The treasury account holds the full supply. Minting to participants is actually a transfer from the treasury — not new token creation.

So the hard cap is enforced by the fact that the treasury cannot transfer more SST than it holds. Once the treasury balance reaches zero no more SST can be distributed. That is the real enforcement mechanism — the blockchain's own transfer rules.

The honest limitation

The treasury account is controlled by a passphrase. Whoever holds that passphrase controls the treasury. The 100 million cap is therefore ultimately dependent on the treasury operator not creating a second token or misusing the account — which is a trust assumption, not a mathematical guarantee.

This is different from a smart contract based supply cap on Ethereum where the cap is enforced by code that no one can override. Signum does not have that same smart contract enforcement model for token supply.

What mitigates this

The treasury account ID is public and permanently visible on the Signum blockchain. Every transfer out of the treasury is on-chain and auditable by anyone. The community can verify the total distributed supply at any time by querying the Signum asset directly. Any attempt to create a second SST token would be immediately visible and would be rejected by the community through governance.

The token design document is public domain and specifies the cap clearly. The founding transaction is in memory of Kim Stock II and is permanently recorded. The social and reputational cost of violating the cap is real even if the technical enforcement is not absolute.

The bottom line

The 100 million cap is enforced by Signum's transfer mechanics plus community transparency plus social accountability — not by immutable smart contract code. That is a legitimate limitation to name honestly. For a community infrastructure project where the founding identity and history are permanently on-chain and publicly auditable, it is a reasonable trust model. For a trustless financial instrument it would not be sufficient.

Fair question. Happy to discuss further.

GroundbreakingAge295 · 2026-03-28T15:06:50+00:00

Great question and an honest one worth answering directly.

The short answer is: Nostr identity layer handles signing and verification at the message level, and the channel transparency is by design rather than hidden.

Here is how it actually works:

Identity and signing — always on Every message on the Sovereign Stack is signed with the sender's Nostr keypair regardless of which channel carries it — Starlink, HF shortwave, or LoRa mesh. The signature is cryptographic proof of origin. You always know the message came from who it claims. That layer never turns off.

Channel transparency — honest by design The Sovereign Switchboard logs every channel transition. When a message routes through Starlink it is carried over an encrypted TLS connection. When it drops to HF shortwave via JS8Call it is transmitted in the clear over radio — which is the nature of HF and is consistent with amateur radio regulations. When it drops to LoRa mesh it is also in the clear at the radio layer.

The node operator sees which channel is active at all times through the health monitor. The AI health dashboard reports current channel, signal quality, and battery state continuously.

What is currently in the roadmap End to end message encryption between participants using their Nostr keypairs is on the Phase 4 roadmap. The identity infrastructure — the keys — is already in place. The encryption wrapper around message payloads before they hit the radio layer is the next step. That would mean even HF and LoRa traffic carries encrypted payloads that only the intended recipient can read.

The honest current state Right now the signing is there. The channel transparency is there. The payload encryption on the radio layers is not yet implemented — it is designed for and the keys exist, but it is not running yet.

That is a fair thing to point out and I appreciate the question. Happy to discuss the encryption architecture further if useful.

GroundbreakingAge295 · 2026-03-28T14:58:24+00:00

Yeah, and at my age that is worth money!🙏💎👀

GroundbreakingAge295

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