Knowledge Fight Interactive Search Tool

All Episodes

Previous Next

Sept. 12, 2023 - Health Ranger - Mike Adams

01:28:34

Episode 13 – Sep 12, 2023 – BASTYON inventor Daniel Satchkov on decentralized content publishing...

Large

Audio Only |

Scroll

Time	Text
	Welcome to Decentralize.TV here on Brighton.com.
	I'm Mike Adams.
	We'll be joined by our co-host Todd Pitner here in just a second.
	And the episode today is with the inventor of a peer-to-peer decentralized social media website called Bastion.
	And we'll show you how to spell that and so on.
	The inventor is Daniel Satchkov and he'll be joining us here in just a second.
	But Todd, welcome to the show.
	Great to have you with us today.
	Thank you.
	It's always great to be here.
	I've been playing around with Bastion.com today and really, really eager for this interview of Daniel.
	Oh yeah, absolutely.
	I can't wait as well.
	And it's perfect to have him on to talk about decentralized social media content, which is something we haven't had yet on this show.
	So let's bring in Daniel right now.
	Welcome to Decentralized TV, Daniel.
	It's great to have you on.
	Just welcome.
	We honor what you're doing.
	Thank you so much, Mike.
	Hi, Todd.
	It's an honor to be here.
	I watch a number of your shows and I actually listen to one of the free audiobooks you had back in the day.
	So I appreciate all the free content you're putting out there.
	Oh, that's great to hear.
	Thank you.
	And I love the fact that you're also...
	It's very useful, very practical.
	I gave it to my wife.
	Well, we pride ourselves on being practical here.
	We're all about practical applications of this technology.
	And thank you for wearing the shirt that shows the spelling of the domain name, because that's going to be people's first question.
	How do you spell it?
	So it's B-A-S-T-Y-O-N, bastion.com.
	And is that name inspired by the English idiom that sounds similar, like a bastion of free speech?
	Yeah, Bastion of Freedom.
	In fact, this is an idiom that exists in many languages, not just English.
	So Bastion of Freedom is kind of a very, very important original name of the project was PocketNet.
	While I think it says something important about technical side, so we said that it's like internet in your pocket as opposed to you being in somebody else's pocket.
	But Pocketnet was not a catchy name and we thought long and hard and spoke with the community and came up with Bastion, which is Bastion of free speech, Bastion of freedom.
	I think that really works.
	I like it.
	I like it a lot.
	Now, Todd, you've been using it for the last couple of days.
	You're actually ahead of me on this one.
	So what's your impression just initially here?
	Yeah, yeah.
	Well, now that I'm a user...
	May I first begin, Daniel, presenting my personal pronoun for this interview.
	Uh-oh!
	My name is Todd Pitner, and I self-identify as a white hat, thanks to bastion.com.
	I like it.
	Why?
	Why?
	Well, I went through the amazingly easy process of signing up at bastion.com, and I chose I'm a white hat as my username.
	So that is now my personal pronoun.
	So anybody who wants to go and follow me there, it's I am a white hat.
	So that's what I am, right?
	Let me share with you what impressed me most, the sign-up process.
	It was so easy.
	So first of all, you go and you enter your username.
	I chose I'm a white hat.
	You can put your email address in there, but it's optional.
	I chose not to.
	Then it says Join.
	And then you go through just one simple CAPTCHA. And then what pops up is Follow Popular Bloggers, of which, shout out SGT Report.
	Sean, I followed you immediately.
	And then it goes to the account setup, where you can do absolutely nothing.
	You cannot upload a picture.
	You cannot put any personal information about yourself.
	It doesn't matter.
	I did upload a picture of a real handsome guy in a white hat, thinking somebody may mistake me for that guy at some point in time.
	But it was just so easy.
	And then the cool thing, Mike, just like a crypto wallet, You can go get your private keys and write them down.
	And so I did.
	I put them in my little special book that I have of very important keywords for different wallets, etc.
	So at any point in time, I mean, I don't know.
	This is where I need Daniel to step in.
	I mean, basically, nobody can censor me.
	Right, Daniel?
	That's right.
	That's right.
	And so you spoke to a few items, a few aspects of Bastion.
	I mean, the first one is Pseudonymity, right?
	Anonymity, pseudonymity, those are the slight distinction we can get into that.
	But the point is, in today's environment especially, but almost always, for free speech to exist, there has to be a way to speak pseudonymously or anonymously.
	In other words, not identify who you are.
	I think you understand today that all around the world, even, you know, surprisingly in America, very frequently, it is better not to identify who you are.
	And not only that, but not to connect your social media profile To email or a phone number.
	This is really important because if you watch what's going on, the latest coming out of UN and organizations like that, they're actually working on a major database that connects all social media platforms, all corporate platforms.
	Bestium, by the way, is non-corporate, as I told you, Mike.
	I'm not a founder.
	I'm not a CEO, right?
	You said correctly.
	I'm an inventor.
	So I'm kind of a more figurehead, somebody who's speaking about Bastion, but there's no control over the network that I exercise or have.
	But all these corporate platforms, they're connected now and they're going to be connected more and more.
	So whenever you're in one platform and you supply your phone number or your email, now everything you do on that platform, even if you don't comment or anything, just the actions, things you watch is going into databases, right?
	And this is not about scaring people.
	I'm actually a very positive person.
	I believe in the end things will turn out fine.
	I think it's very, very foolhardy to believe that you want to connect your opinions to your personal profile, and that's going to be fine.
	For some people like me, like you, who actually put out our names and speak about it, that's fine.
	But for many people, there could be repercussions for them speaking their mind.
	Well, Daniel, I've experienced, of course, major repercussions, and just let me share an update here real quick.
	You know how Nigel Farage was debanked in the UK?
	And then, of course, Dr. Joseph Mercola, his staff and their family members were banished from JPMorgan Chase.
	Well, as of last night, my accounts were seized by Robinhood.
	And so they just seized my account, froze it up, and they said I'm not allowed to contact customer service for 10 days.
	So no service, no explanation.
	They say, just wait, and by the way, you can't have your money back.
	So that's a repercussion.
	That just happened to me, and I believe I'm being targeted because of my speech, exactly to your point.
	Yeah, but with you or me, we at least have an audience.
	We can go out and many thousands, hundreds of thousands of people will know about this.
	But for a regular person, they'll be debanked and nobody will know about it.
	They'll basically have no recourse, right?
	True.
	Not even, you know, maybe immediate family.
	That's it.
	So that's why Baskin is built so that it doesn't take any of your personal information.
	Whether you do social media, also in Bastion, there is a messenger.
	There is a nascent new app that's a messenger with text, with phone calls, actually, and it's all peer-to-peer and not connected to your phone number.
	That's really important because even very admirable platforms that I respect, like Signal, They will still collect your phone number, which I think is a really bad idea.
	Right.
	Because metadata, right?
	Even if encryption is very strong, metadata means who you are, who you talk to, who you like, who you connect to.
	I think these are serious issues that you need to really protect.
	You need to keep it protected and private.
	So Bastion is completely private in that regard.
	In fact, you can open multiple accounts, and it's very easy to switch between them.
	And that's again, like you want to use one account for commenting more openly.
	Another one you can make that's a little bit more restrained.
	That's completely up to you.
	We want to give that power to the user.
	And the private keys that Todd spoke about, Bastion works exactly like Bitcoin.
	So a lot of Bastion is built on top of Bitcoin, actually.
	Really?
	So I believe Bitcoin is much more important than just money.
	Even though money is important enough, Bitcoin is important for a lot of things.
	But this private key means that, for example, no developer Not me or anybody has access to your account because like in Google, they can reset your password, which means they can access your account.
	But when you have your private key, that's it.
	Nobody can access your account or your wallet, your social media, your messages.
	It's just impossible.
	So let's back up a little bit, Daniel, because you're getting into some areas that I really do want to talk about, but I need to set the stage for the audience.
	So Bastion, as I understand it, and correct me if I'm wrong, there are not central servers that There are no central servers.
	That's really important.
	So Bastion runs off peer-to-peer nodes.
	Yep.
	But then where are those nodes if people are accessing Bastion through a web browser and they're not running a node themselves, like Cordle, for example, who we've had on the show.
	In Cordle, you download and you run the node yourself, and then that's your interface.
	It looks like a browser, but it's not.
	On yours, where are the nodes?
	Yes.
	Well, yeah, and I watched a quarterly interview.
	It was interesting.
	So I will say this.
	The nodes are all around the world, but not every user will run a node.
	It's just not realistic.
	Bastian has, for different months, you could look at SEMrush and different sites that track website visitors.
	We have no tracking in Bastian, but there are third-party websites out there on the web, SimilarWeb, SEMrush, and you can look at Android downloads and so on.
	There are about 2 million unique users per month.
	It's not realistic for everybody to run a node.
	So there are hundreds of nodes around the world.
	There are in the States, there's some in Canada, France, Vietnam.
	I mean, almost every place in the world there are some nodes.
	When you go into bastion.com, you are connecting from the browser to the nodes around the world.
	And that's really important because it's very hard to shut down.
	So the nodes, if the nodes are in one country are shut down, then it's a problem, but you still can connect to another country.
	But can I also choose to run a node?
	Can I go to bastion.com and download a node and run that too?
	Absolutely.
	You can run a node.
	It's just optional because we have to.
	You see, it's very important.
	Privacy.
	And freedom are actually in the numbers.
	What I mean by that is, if we set up a perfect network, Mike, and the network is for you, me, and 20 other people, we have no privacy, even though we can use old nickname, white hat, black, it doesn't matter.
	There's 20 of us.
	It's very easy to tell.
	And then it has no freedom because ultimately there's no privacy and it's very easy to shut down.
	So you need to create, we set out to create an app True.
	Whereas we have up to 2 million users and there are people who are barely internet literate that can use Bastion.
	And that's, you know, they have their private keys, but they know that they have a hard time using regular web, but they can use Bastion because it's really easy.
	So you can run a node and it's all based on nodes and, you know, it's permission listed.
	It's like Bitcoin nodes type of thing.
	But most people don't need to run a node.
	But bastion.com also, I have the website here, but very importantly, bastion.com is not the main bastion.
	You can think of bastion.com as a window from the old web into the bastion world.
	Understood.
	But.com is a censorable thing.
	It's very easy to shut down a website.
	Exceedingly easy with DNS. You know that.
	I'm sure your viewers have heard that from you.
	So if you go to bastion.com slash applications...
	Or GitHub, you can download an app.
	When you download an application to your computer, you no longer depend on.com at all.
	Bastion could be shut down.
	In fact, much of the internet can be shut down and that application will run.
	I will give you two examples.
	These are very important.
	In China, we know people in China use Bastion with no VPN. And that is very important because China is the most censored country in the world, and kind of the rest of the world is catching up to it, unfortunately.
	So in China, you can run Bastion application.
	Now, if you go to bastion.com, it will simply not work in China.
	You know that.
	But if you use the application, you don't need a VPN because application uses special protocols to connect directly to the nodes in any part of the world it can reach.
	Oh, wow.
	Wow.
	Oh, and I see you have the APK for Android here, too.
	So you can install it without using Google Play.
	Android also does the same thing.
	Android is more censorable in some sense because it's Android.
	So the least censorable thing, the most robust, indestructible, quote-unquote, thing is the desktop application.
	Android is kind of next step.
	A little bit worse.
	And then, of course, the web is kind of the most censorable thing,.com.
	They all talk to the node.
	So it's not an issue of like, nobody's going to shut down 800 computers around the world.
	I mean, until we have the worldwide tyranny, which I don't think we will, nobody's going to do that.
	But the problem is they can shut down bastion.com.
	They can do various things.
	Like, for example, remember the Events in Kazakhstan, the revolution in Kazakhstan, about a year and a half ago.
	Actually, incidentally, a country where I was born and lived until 15 years old.
	What they did was, during these events, they shut down the internet, it seemed like.
	But they don't really shut down the internet.
	They shut down all of the DNS and many protocols.
	But Bastion application worked.
	We have proof.
	We have viewers from Kazakhstan who send us videos, but they go to every website.
	Nothing works except state media.
	And then they go to Bastion application and it actually works.
	So they were able to get real-time events, real-time news about what's going on.
	So bastion.com is a window into the old web.
	You can use it in the meanwhile, but you should be fully prepared that it will be stopped And then you go to bastion.com applications now and download the app to the desktop.
	That way, even if much of the internet is shut down, it is very, very likely that Bastion application will work.
	Makes perfect sense.
	Todd, it's all making perfect sense now.
	Right.
	I have a question, Daniel.
	Can you download the app to mobile devices?
	Yes, there's an app for Android.
	You can get it from the Play Store.
	It was actually banned from the Play Store.
	Then they brought it back for some reason.
	I have no idea how long it will last.
	But in Android Play Store, there's close to 200,000 downloads.
	So it's a pretty popular app.
	But there's an Android app that you can get from our GitHub or from that page I gave you, bastion.com slash applications.
	You can get an Android that is not a Google Play Store Android.
	It's a direct app.
	So then it becomes pretty much uncensorable too.
	Right, right.
	But no iOS, right?
	There is an iPhone app.
	Oh, there is?
	Yeah, there is an iPhone app.
	Unfortunately, it's very limited.
	Because we went back and forth with Apple for years about this app.
	And of course, they didn't want to do it.
	They kept, you know, delaying things and coming up with weird kind of complaints.
	And then we almost gave up.
	And then they wrote to us that, oh, if you remove some things, we'll allow it.
	So it's a very limited version, but I feel like it was worth it because we can still get people from iPhone into the bastion world.
	We had that conversation with Apple, by the way, on our Natural News app, which was never allowed because they said you have to remove articles that are critical of Satanism.
	Wow.
	Yeah.
	Right.
	So, you know, to be quite honest, the iPhone app just got in there recently, so I'm guessing that it probably lasts until the first complaint.
	All right.
	So, but the bottom line is...
	Because we're not able to remove it.
	It's not that we...
	Whether we want to or not, you don't have to trust me.
	There's just no mechanism for us to remove it.
	It's permissionless.
	Look, I tell people, number one, don't use iPhone.
	And also don't use Google Android.
	Use a de-Googled phone like what I use.
	I only use de-Googled phones.
	And in a de-Googled phone, you just install the APK, and you have the APK, and then it's done.
	So...
	But what I love about this, what I'm learning about this, and I should disclose, you know, Daniel, you and I spoke, it was almost like a couple years ago, I think, initially.
	It was a while ago, yeah.
	It was a while, whatever it was.
	And I gotta admit, at the time, I did not grasp the construct of what you were doing.
	And now today, it actually makes sense, but I think that's only because...
	I've become more educated about the topology of these systems, what is true peer-to-peer, you know, digging a deep dive into this whole subject area.
	So now I think I can better appreciate what you've built.
	And it's extraordinary.
	Because as you said, you know, TCPIP will continue to work, even when they shut down domain names and DNS. TCPIP will work.
	So you have, your app just uses, I guess, specific ports, right?
	It's just listening on certain ports in order to pass traffic, right?
	That's right.
	That's right.
	But also in the app, the desktop app especially, is like a Swiss knife of censorship resistance because it uses certain ports to connect to the nodes, but it also has built-in Tor.
	We took Tor and built it in.
	Especially they have a new Snowflake protocol that is quite advanced.
	The desktop app is smart enough to know that it uses a standard method like, let's say, Bitcoin to connect to the nodes.
	But if that doesn't work, they'll try Tor.
	If that doesn't work, they'll go to Snowflake.
	We keep adding different algorithms to make sure that in the extreme situation or situation of extreme censorship, which I think we're all coming to.
	That you'll be able to have access to information.
	Oh, yeah.
	Well, this is extraordinary.
	And let me just give out the website here, bastion.com, B-A-S-T-Y-O-N. And here's the applications page that you were speaking of, Daniel.
	Download Bastion for Windows.
	And here's Android.
	Here's iOS, Mac OS, and Linux downloads.
	So that's how you really run the app.
	That's the best way.
	Yeah, this makes perfect sense.
	And from the desktop app, it's very easy to run a node.
	Oh, from here.
	Okay.
	Alright, so before we move on, Todd, do you want to chime in before I ask the next round of questions?
	Yeah, I just kind of wouldn't mind rewinding just a bit for those people who just may not have a clue.
	Could you please, Daniel, give us a little bit of a history lesson?
	I mean, what was the genesis?
	What drove you to invent Bastion?
	Yeah, so...
	I have been thinking about, basically, so my background is that I was born in the former Soviet Union.
	I came to the States when I was 15.
	Then I played sports, and then I worked in finance.
	So out of all things that I do, you can call me like I'm a math geek, right?
	I do a lot of applied math.
	And I love math.
	My father was an engineer, inventor.
	He taught me a lot of it.
	I just like it.
	So I worked in finance and didn't really think about those things and was kind of a normie.
	But then over time, I started realizing more and more that things are going in the wrong direction.
	Because there was one conception of America that I had when I came there.
	And clearly, over time, it became drastically different.
	Also, I worked in risk management.
	Risk management taught me a lot of things about thinking things through to their conclusion.
	It was around 2015, 2016, especially 2016, where I realized that this is going to end up in severe censorship.
	By severe censorship, I don't mean what we have now.
	When you have a blogger banned here, that's horrible.
	I mean, it's really atrocious or even debanking of some people.
	It's very serious censorship.
	But the censorship I thought about when something clicked in 2015, 2016, I realized that in the end, they're going to ban all dissenting opinions.
	I read enough Orwell to realize that this is very similar.
	They're going to ban all of it.
	More so, I think, that they're going to try to control the Internet in a much more serious and direct way than they do now.
	For example, trying to make Internet use by ID or something like that.
	So in 2016, when I realized, I started searching for technology to overcome that.
	Now, in fact, I'm not like most people.
	I wasn't a Bitcoin fan.
	Even though I worked in finance, I hate the speculation aspect of it.
	Yeah, we share that with you.
	Yeah.
	And so for the longest time, I refused to participate in it.
	In fact, I had a colleague who was a very smart guy, finance guy.
	He would grab me in 2012, and he would grab me by the hand and say, let's go buy some Bitcoin.
	I tell you where you can buy it.
	I forget what it was, but it was less than $100, I think.
	And I was like, no, I'm not going to do that.
	This is not interesting to me.
	I have a family.
	I don't want to gamble and I'm not a gambling person.
	So that person, by the way, ended up retiring because he bought a lot of Bitcoin.
	But I don't regret it because that's not what I'm looking for in life, right?
	I was successful enough in many things that I do.
	But for the longest time, I didn't care for Bitcoin.
	I didn't even want to read about it.
	I was like, this whole thing just smells bad.
	But in 2015-16, I started reading all this stuff by looking for technology.
	And I realized by reading the Satoshi White paper, as soon as I read it, I was like, this is beautiful.
	Because I love math.
	And math is like poetry, right?
	And this is really so beautiful, you could see it right away that it's genius.
	Because you could see that it solves much more than money.
	And so then we started building.
	Fortunately, over my career, I led teams of engineers and many different projects.
	Very talented engineers.
	I had a very good relationship with them, and they were like-minded.
	I found enough top engineers to start building the platform.
	Since 2016, really, we were building it.
	This is a long time.
	It was very difficult for years because to build a decentralized system is much more complicated to build a Facebook.
	Facebook is built in six months, but this took six years.
	For me, Todd, to answer your question, it was the realization that the end game is something very, very serious where by that time I had kids already.
	I was like, I don't want my kids to live in that world.
	For my life, maybe I'll hide and so on, but I don't want my kids to experience this kind of world where they're basically forced to think certain things and they cannot think for themselves.
	And so we started building Bastion at that time.
	That's amazing.
	That's extraordinary.
	It's a great story.
	So I'm always curious, if you don't mind me asking this, Mike, these are...
	How on earth, how did you go about the funding with a totally decentralized project that has no company, has no founder?
	Well, first of all, think about it this way.
	Decentralized platform, one of the beauties of it is it doesn't require computers.
	So you don't need servers because at the outset, the project is that we don't use centralized servers, so whoever wants to run a server.
	So that becomes the first part.
	The second part, the most expensive part in all these startups is people.
	To get high-quality people, if you take 100 engineers, There will be even, you know, not a high chance that even one of them is top quality.
	It's very hard to come by good engineers, but I had a fortunate background in that I led teams of engineers for many years.
	And so I've known a lot of them, and I know how to tell good from bad.
	I also know how to inspire them.
	I will tell you a story.
	I didn't tell this ever publicly, but these engineers are like me.
	They're math geeks.
	They're probably much more geeky than I am even.
	And so there were times that were very difficult times sometimes because these people work for years without a salary.
	They have other jobs or they have to make money elsewhere.
	And you have to make them believe in the project, right?
	And they do believe in it.
	But there were times when things wouldn't work.
	Things would break.
	I found some ways one time.
	We're sitting there and I could see they're all down.
	They're just ready to quit.
	And I asked them one question.
	I was like, guys, think about this.
	When the movie is made about Bastion, which actor do you want to play you?
	That's great.
	I could see their eyes light up and the next day all the problems were fixed and they were just like powering forward.
	So I know how to motivate engineers.
	That's inspiring.
	Yeah.
	That's great.
	I love it.
	Okay.
	Wow.
	Well, this is truly amazing.
	I want to ask you now about how you provide revenue for your site and about PocketCoin and just start talking about your revenue model, the crypto model that's, I think, a layer of this and how all of that works.
	So there is no revenue.
	If you're in doubt, think always about Bitcoin because we model the idea of it on Bitcoin.
	There is no revenue at all.
	There's no earnings or revenue.
	The pocket coin, which is the cryptocurrency of Bastion, and the reason it exists is very, very important.
	This is not like a side thing.
	It is critical because of the financial censorship.
	A pocket coin is emitted just like a bitcoin is emitted inside the network.
	And it provides earnings for authors and for note holders.
	Right now, it's not worth a lot, but it is traded on some exchanges already.
	But it provides enough earnings for people's motivation to run computers, right?
	For example, I mean, you probably know that in decentralized economies in general, there's a problem called tragedy of the commons.
	I'm sure you've heard of that.
	The tragedy of the commons is that most good projects that rely on altruism fail simply because there are always people that will take more than they give.
	Unfortunately, that is the real world.
	You can have a network of 20, 30 like-minded people that will be very altruistic, but once it becomes big, it's not going to work.
	Cryptocurrency embedded in Bastion is really important because it incentivizes people to run nodes.
	It also incentivizes bloggers because part of the emission goes to the nodes, but part of the emission goes to highly rated bloggers.
	I see.
	So over time, that provides income, and that's really important because blogging, I always thought before Bastion, I was like, this is the easiest thing in the world.
	But now I know a lot of bloggers, and I started doing something myself.
	I realize it's difficult.
	Because you have to prepare.
	You have to be serious about this.
	Bloggers cannot have a full-time job and be a good blogger.
	It's almost impossible because you're a journalist.
	I'm not talking about OnlyFans.
	I'm talking about good bloggers.
	It's very difficult.
	They need to earn something.
	So embedded into the bastion right away was a concept of internal economy that is independent of the bankster central banking and all that stuff.
	So, PocketCoin was always meant to be a thing that bloggers can earn But also it's a token that can be used for advertising, and that's where it closes the loop.
	Okay, that was my next question.
	So it's like an attention token on that side.
	Exactly.
	So you can advertise, and there are advertisers already, not too many, but 50, 60 ads per day are run on Bastion.
	People come in, and they will buy PocketCoin, and they will advertise their products.
	And none of that goes to Bastion.
	All of that goes directly to Notes and to Creators.
	Okay, well, count us in.
	Okay, number one, Daniel.
	So we're going to earn some pocket coin.
	We're going to get all over Bastion with our content.
	And then I'm going to talk to my marketing team to actually advertise on your platform using your coin.
	I think that's awesome.
	That's a beautiful use.
	I love it.
	Yeah.
	And one more thing that might interest you or other bloggers that I should mention that I don't know if you heard of ContentSafe.
	It's a completely separate platform from us.
	I just connected with them recently.
	They work with some bloggers.
	So they built a very cool thing where you can upload a video and it gets mirrored to many other platforms.
	You upload it only once, which I think is a very important thing for bloggers.
	To not spend time uploading to 10 different places.
	So we're about to release an integration with Bastion, where if you upload to Bastion, it's automatically mirrored to BitChute, to Odyssey and Rumble and all these places.
	Oh, wow.
	Yeah, that does sound very useful.
	Okay.
	Nice.
	Is PocketCoin, is that riding on the Bitcoin blockchain as a token?
	It is not on a Bitcoin.
	It's its own blockchain.
	But the blockchain is very similar to Bitcoin.
	So we use Bitcoin code.
	Because with cryptocurrency, one of the things that people don't appreciate, even those people who try to build them, is security.
	When you're a small project, when you're really small, nobody cares about you.
	You can do whatever you want.
	As soon as the project starts gathering value, and PocketCoin does have value because there are many users on Bastion, security becomes really important because there are many, many hackers out there.
	So we decided not to build our own.
	We decided to use Bitcoin because it's so well tested.
	It's so well tested.
	And the security is very strong, so we took it.
	However, we made one modification.
	It doesn't use proof of work.
	It uses proof of stake.
	And I actually watched a Quartal interview.
	I have to disagree a little bit because proof of stake, first of all, I don't believe there are any other viable algorithms other than proof of work or proof of stake.
	And I love the Quartal thing.
	I don't think it's a good idea for decentralized platforms to get into kind of arguments about these things, right?
	So that's not my goal.
	But proof of stake...
	It's the only algorithm that is viable for a new cryptocurrency today.
	I will explain why to those even who are not familiar with crypto.
	There is something called hashing power in the proof-of-work algorithm.
	So hashing power is a computing power that allows you to basically win money, make blocks in the proof-of-work blockchain.
	The thing is, with the advent of Bitcoin and any others, there is so much hashing power in the world.
	You can go for $5,000, you can rent enough hashing power to completely overwhelm and attack almost any blockchain in the world except the top ones.
	So if you're a small blockchain using proof of work, basically it takes $5,000 to steal all your money.
	Proof-of-work is not viable because of that.
	Proof-of-stake is different because it uses internal tokens that people have to get, so you can't just go and rent hashing power and go ahead and pretty much reorganize the blockchain.
	Reorganize the blockchain means that you can spend the money twice, which means you can steal money.
	Proof-of-stake, for security reasons, is actually a very good algorithm.
	I don't want to get into details.
	I know that stuff very well.
	There are no other viable algorithms that are secure, okay?
	And what I hear sometimes people say, well, you have to make sure that you give it to humans, right?
	Like a proof of humanity.
	Now that would never do.
	That's dystopic.
	If you read the new world coin, that white paper, that's what they say.
	You prove your humanity and we give you money.
	Proving humanity means that you're in a concentration camp basically.
	That's the code word.
	Because when you prove humanity, what do you do?
	You give up your biometrics.
	Yeah, they want to scan your eyeballs.
	Yeah, so in the real world, there is no perfect algorithm.
	Proof of work has many problems.
	Proof of stake has many problems.
	There is no perfect algorithm.
	It's all about trade-offs.
	But in the real world, when you have a big network, you need security.
	And the only two secure algorithms are proof-of-work and proof-of-stake.
	So we're using Bitcoin with the proof-of-stake modification.
	That's the blockchain that it uses.
	So you did a hard fork?
	You did a hard fork of Bitcoin and made that modification?
	Well, it's just using the code.
	It's called a clone, so it's not a fork.
	But you could say a hard fork, but it's better to call it a modified clone because hard fork assumes that we took Bitcoin at some point and forked it.
	But it continued from that point.
	No, we just took the code, we cloned it, changed it, and then ran it as a separate blockchain.
	But then the blocks on your blockchain, of course, guarantee the integrity of the content.
	Absolutely, exactly.
	But what about the pocket coin transactions?
	Are they also shared on the same blockchain, or is that a parallel blockchain?
	Yes, it's all the same blockchain.
	Okay, so it secures integrative content and the coin transactions as well on the same blockchain?
	Yes.
	Okay, wow.
	Well, that's really outstanding.
	Okay, and then proof of stake.
	Now, I'm really glad you brought that up, and I'm very much open to what you just said, and I think we can all tell you're a very high IQ individual.
	You've thought through this deeply.
	I just want to mention the only thing, my understanding of proof of stake is that in some projects it can tend to make the rich richer in a sense because the people with all the money and power gather up all the coins and then they assert governance control over the project.
	I'm happy to answer that.
	Yeah, please do.
	I think because I've done this for a while.
	So this is not proof of stake or proof of work.
	In any free economy, there is a tendency for rich to get richer.
	And that tendency has to be checked in other ways.
	Whenever you have more resources, you can always get more resources.
	The only way around that is communism.
	I'm not sure that that's like...
	No, we don't want that.
	Yeah, so I'll explain why.
	Now I'll substantiate what I said.
	Yes, proof of stake clearly tends to make rich richer.
	But let's look at proof of work.
	Right?
	Bitcoin.
	Does it tend to make rich, richer?
	Obviously, yes.
	Because in order to win Bitcoin right now, you need to have ASICs, which are very specialized chips.
	Absolutely.
	It costs millions of dollars.
	So you have to have millions of dollars.
	The more money you have, the more you make.
	Then the more you make from Bitcoin, the more you invest, and that way you grow, right?
	So it is rich, get richer.
	But it's almost any algorithm.
	Let's say that you come up with an algorithm Again, I don't want to pick on Cordell because I loved a lot of the things that I interviewed.
	I loved the founder.
	I loved the project.
	I just think that to set the record straight, if you have an algorithm where you have some founding members that are allowed to give to five or ten people permission to become nodes as well, and then those can give to more people over time, but the founding members They still, you have to understand that they may be very ethical, but who controls that the second layer of people is ethical?
	For example, I'm one of the people who got very high in that hierarchy.
	Now I give five permissions to who?
	To me.
	I just run five versions on one computer, five no's.
	And then they go, and then those five give to other five.
	So it is also rich, get richer.
	It's not a function of proof of stake.
	This is really misleading.
	And this argument was made a lot, even though I like Bitcoin, but there are some people, they call Bitcoin maximalists, they will say that there's nothing in the world by Bitcoin.
	Except Bitcoin, nothing exists.
	They do make that, yeah.
	I think that's like, for example, I like Monero more than Bitcoin, even though I love Bitcoin.
	We just couldn't use one.
	The first version of Ashton Pocketnet used Monero, but we couldn't make some of the things with social media work because you can't have complete anonymity like Monero does, plus the blockchain is a little bit bloated.
	The argument that the rich get richer with proof of stake is not true.
	Actually, it's true, but it's just true for absolutely any cryptocurrency project.
	The only project I would prefer to work in a world where rich get richer, but there are some mechanisms to limit that, right?
	For example, in Bitcoin, there are some mechanisms to limit that, and they're not mathematical.
	They're more social.
	Remember, for example, when there was a Bitcoin Cash hard fork, right?
	Yeah, sure.
	There was a huge debate about why.
	And then the underlying source of that debate was purely because one side, the side that wanted Bitcoin Cash or wanted the 8 megabyte blocks, they were the rich get richer.
	They had the most hashing power.
	They had the most money.
	And so they wanted to expand that.
	And also 8 megabyte blocks would price out some of the smaller nodes.
	And they would basically own more of the network, right?
	So technically speaking, rich get richer...
	It seemed at the time that the richer, it's going to be like rich get the richest and everybody else is poor.
	But the community rebelled.
	What did they do?
	They had user-activated soft fork.
	They went with another code base that had less hashing power.
	And that, I think, is misunderstood that many people will believe that somehow blockchain or cryptocurrency controls for all the social problems.
	It's like they call it trustless.
	Nothing in the world is purely trustless, right?
	Nothing.
	You have to have some social mechanism, and the social mechanism that's in question is the open source code inability to fork, which is what you said, Todd, right?
	So when the Bitcoin community realized that the richest tried to take over, they just did basically because it's open source code, they stayed with the developer team that was true to the principles.
	And that mechanism keeps check on the rich get richer.
	Same thing in proof of stake.
	Like Bastion is very important.
	It's open sourced and it allows anybody to clone it.
	So if there was any malfeasance, those rich who would want to control the network, they would be left with nothing because people would just fork it.
	They would say, here's a Bastion that's true to its principles, go here, and those rich will be left with nothing.
	Wow.
	Alright, this is a really deep discussion and I want to bring it back for our audience here just to remind everybody why we're having this discussion too.
	So bastion.com is where you can experience this system through the existing internet domain system with any browser.
	And the reason this matters, I hope you don't mind me summarizing this, but the reason this matters is because on Twitter you can be censored.
	I was censored for four years.
	You know, on Facebook, you can be censored.
	On YouTube, you can be censored.
	Frankly, on any centralized system, including our own, Brighteon.com, because it's centralized, the potential for censorship always exists, including just government coming along and seizing your servers.
	Right?
	It doesn't even have to be the corporation.
	It can be some outside enterprise.
	So the thing about Bastion is it is a decentralized social media type of system.
	It looks a lot like Twitter on the screen.
	It acts a lot like Twitter.
	But again, it's not only...
	It's not just that...
	There's no corporation behind it.
	Not even that there's a corporation that says we're not going to censor you, but rather there is no structure for censorship at that corporate level.
	Now, Daniel...
	I'm sure there is, you know, each individual user can decide to turn off channels that they don't want to see in case people are putting up, you know, snuff videos or whatever, right?
	I'm sure that exists.
	So there are two very important, of course, you can block, it's very easy, and then you don't see content.
	But what's important, there are a few things you said.
	First of all, I think you said a very important thing, Mike, about Whether the corporation or the founders say they're going to be for freedom.
	And that, I think, is where a lot of people are mistaken, unfortunately.
	The idea of a freedom platform today means that a good guy with some money or a gal creates a platform and promises not to censor and we all go there.
	I don't trust any one person.
	Yeah, the problem with that is...
	Look at, for example, Jack Dorsey.
	Now, I'm not a particular fan, but I think it's hard to argue that he was for free speech for many years.
	He was a free speech...
	I mean, at one point...
	Well, he banned me.
	Sorry?
	He banned me.
	That's right.
	But before that, he said that if there was a free speech wing of the free speech party, Twitter would be it.
	And I think he believed it at the time.
	But what he found is that a corporation...
	It has shareholders.
	It has a board.
	So Jack Dorsey, basically, there's nothing you can do.
	Same thing with WhatsApp.
	I don't know if you know that WhatsApp, right?
	That is the least secure, the most dangerous messenger you could use, in my opinion.
	Owned by Facebook now, but it was started by Brian Acton, who is a freedom activist.
	But then, you know, what could he do?
	There's 19 billion dollars, 19 billion reasons, but also the board.
	So there's nothing he could do.
	So it's not, don't trust when somebody tells you, go to a corporate network.
	Corporation, in my opinion, is not the right structure for any of this.
	It doesn't have a social responsibility.
	It will betray you.
	It will betray you always.
	Now, as far as on Bastion, yeah, go ahead, Michael.
	Well, yeah, but let me just add, and this is really critical.
	So on Bastion, we don't have to trust you, Daniel, as an individual, because you don't have the power to take anybody down.
	And I have said publicly that my goal is to make Britean obsolete in its current structure.
	Which is centralized, you know, hosted servers.
	Ultimately, I want to eliminate that and make it obsolete to take us out of the control loop of what goes on there.
	But you've already done it with Bastion.
	That's what's really cool about what you've done.
	We've worked for many years on this.
	And as far as, like, earlier Todd also said the money.
	I invested a lot of my own money.
	I'm successful in many other projects.
	But also there were other people.
	I don't know if they want me to name them, but there were a couple of people who came up with serious money to help the project.
	And one day their names will be known.
	But as far as censorship, I want to make a very important point, Mike.
	I think that the word censorship in itself has to be distinguished from arbitrary censorship.
	So the two reasons why censorship on YouTube and Twitter are abhorrent is, one, that it's not transparent.
	You don't know how exactly they're censoring.
	Sometimes they just block you, so you know.
	But many times they shadow ban you, so you don't know that you're actually not getting the reach.
	Whereas that's impossible with the open source codebase.
	In Bastion, that's impossible.
	There's no shadow banning because the code is open.
	Any programmer can see it if it's shadow banning.
	That's the first thing.
	But the second thing that's really important to think about philosophically is The arbitrary censorship, because society cannot live without censorship at all.
	And Bastion has a mechanism of censorship.
	It is by the community.
	But it has very simple terms of service on Bastion.
	What's not allowed is pornography, including, of course, anything related to pornography.
	Direct threat of violence are not allowed.
	And promotion of Illegal narcotics.
	Those things are not allowed.
	It's very simple terms of service.
	Those are three great terms.
	The community enforces them.
	So what happens is, and the system is being kind of more and more advanced, but we came up with something very unique that is called decentralized jury.
	Users that have used Bastion for many years, they become a pool of jurors.
	And when any user can complain, any user that's used it even for a little bit, not right away, but used it for two or three months, you can file a complaint.
	Like, this is pornography.
	And the complaint has to be very clear.
	You cannot say, this offends me, or this is not going to work, or hate speech.
	There's no such thing as hate speech.
	You have to say, this is pornography, or this is a direct threat of violence, or this is illegal narcotics.
	And so when enough complaints get together...
	There is a lottery run on the blockchain that, from the pool of jurors, randomly calls some jurors to decide the matter.
	Wow.
	That's great.
	They get a notification, and this is a new system that's going to be released in September, but the old one is similar, but I'm describing the new, more advanced one.
	They get a notification, and so this experienced user will go in and say, and they're just going to get a post, and it will say, is this pornography?
	Yes or no?
	Very simple.
	You don't need to determine whether it's hate speech and all this stuff.
	In the end, if you look at Bastion, you will see, scroll through it, for a system that's censorship resistant, you'll see there's no pornography.
	Because people know that the community will get rid of it.
	I think we need to have this system running at the DOJ. And we could ask the question, is this cocaine in the White House?
	And the jury could say, yep, that's a bag of cocaine.
	Guilty.
	Instead of all these secret government deals only for certain people, you know?
	I love this concept, Daniel.
	This sounds really amazing.
	And you said it's coming out in the next update.
	Is that right?
	Yeah, this is coming out in September, Decentralized Jewry, but there are mechanisms already.
	They're a little bit less advanced, but still, community decides what gets removed.
	I love it.
	Okay, that's awesome.
	Wow.
	Well, you have really thought through this in a lot of detail.
	I'm thrilled to have you on, and I feel a sense of regret that I didn't come to recognize all this sooner, frankly.
	I mean, you've done some really amazing things here.
	I mean, Todd, are you getting that same feeling?
	It's astonishing.
	I just have one last question because I can sense you're wrapping it up, Mike.
	No, I'm not.
	I'm enthralled by this.
	I feel like this is really amazing stuff.
	But go ahead.
	Well, then, I'll ask more than one question.
	But one question I wanted to ask, Daniel.
	When the movie Bastion comes out, what actor played you?
	Good question.
	You know what?
	I'm a math geek, but I honestly never thought of that.
	That was a question I put to the engineers because I know that those guys would want more dates and stuff.
	I'm not at that stage of my life.
	I've got the guy.
	I've got the guy.
	Spend more time with my kids.
	Okay, I nominated Russell Crowe.
	I hate Hollywood.
	It would not be a Hollywood actor, first of all, because I hate Hollywood.
	I want Russell Crowe to play you.
	It's like 10 years ago, and I didn't watch a single one, I don't think, since.
	I'm a juror on this decentralized.tv, and Russell Crowe it is.
	Yep, it's Russell Crowe, Daniel.
	He's going to play you.
	That's very complimentary to me, but I would prefer to be like an indie actor because I don't like Hollywood.
	Okay, alright.
	Well, maybe Russell Crowe doesn't like Hollywood either these days, but nevertheless, okay, I suppose in the interest of time we do need to think about wrapping this up because Todd and I will have some discussion after you leave us here, Daniel, but And I understand, we've only just barely scratched the surface here.
	And it's obvious we've got to have you back on the show.
	I mean, that's just obvious.
	But maybe Todd and I will use it a lot more between now and then, and then we can ask more in-depth questions.
	But what would you like to say in summarizing this project for our viewers?
	Remember that people tend to make one mistake.
	They think that tomorrow is always going to be a little bit like today and yesterday.
	But 99% of the time they're right, but a lot of the time changes are very swift.
	And if you rely on corporate social media, even if they say that it's for freedom, one day you may find that you don't have access to the information at the worst possible time when you need to.
	True.
	The other thing you should think about and why I invite you to join Bastion and Quartal and whatever other decentralized open source networks that you can find is because if you delay it, it will be too late.
	It's not hard.
	Bastion, I think we made it very, very easy.
	I think it's the easiest of all decentralized networks, but there's still some learning curve and you still have to get there.
	And if you delay it too long, then you might be late.
	So I encourage you to not delay it And stop sponsoring because whenever you use corporate social media, you are sponsoring.
	Don't be mistaken.
	Even if you don't pay them, even if you're just watching videos on YouTube, the fact that you're watching videos on YouTube is actually sponsoring them.
	So think about those things.
	Okay.
	Yeah, well said.
	I think you're absolutely correct.
	I mean, there was a poll that just came out that said up to 70% of Democrats in America support government censorship of information, as long as it's labeled disinformation.
	Yeah, well, exactly.
	We know that, according to Orwell, they will find all the labels they need.
	Exactly.
	And you were born in the former Soviet Union, and now, increasingly, I feel like I am living in the rebirthed Soviet Union in the United States.
	It's worse.
	It's worse because in the Soviet Union, there was always a place, your family, where they didn't really touch you.
	With my dad, I was able to have conversations about anything.
	He told me so many different things.
	And with my grandparents, I heard.
	So there was no censorship at home.
	People trusted each other, and nobody went into your family.
	And I think that the fact that today we see intrusion into family is much worse, actually.
	That's right.
	Even though that was totalitarian, this is totalitarian like cubed.
	And also, here's something else that's important.
	So, the nodes run the code, obviously, which means that even if...
	I mean, this is unstoppable, is my point.
	I mean, no one can take this down unless they were to somehow delete all the nodes simultaneously, correct?
	That's right.
	That's right.
	And also, again, a very important thing that you don't trust people, right?
	No matter, you know...
	I think I'm trustworthy, but there are ways to force people to do things.
	Somebody can put a gun to your head, they can threaten.
	For me, the whole network is set up that there's nothing I can do, but even if developers wanted to do something nefarious, people would copy it.
	So, in fact, the vision of Bastion, and maybe we'll talk some other time, but this is a very important topic.
	Bastion is not just Bastion.
	Right now, there's a whole infrastructure built that's released already for what's called mini-apps, where people can build other applications on Bastion.
	Oh, now you're talking.
	So, it's really like a platform, and it's very easy to build.
	Now you're talking.
	Woo!
	Making me drool over here.
	And the other thing that is going to be also part of the – that's in the next six months is that we want to – most cryptocurrencies don't like when people fork cryptocurrency.
	They feel like this is like an intrusion.
	We actually would love for people to fork Bastion and create other – you can create other types of social media.
	You can create movie review sites.
	You can create chats.
	As an example, there's an app that some developers are working on that's based on the Bastion platform.
	It's called Barteron.
	Barteron is a pseudonymous app, just like Bastion, but for trade of goods and services, bypassing the financial system.
	Those things are the future.
	That's where you have to think about and where you have to go.
	If you're a developer, if you're a smart person, you really have to work on these things because that way, first of all, it's great because you're going to get real food and you're not going to be forced to scan your iris or whatever.
	Very important, you're creating a better future for your kids because they're going to be able to use that.
	I have one question, a tech question for you, Daniel.
	I noticed you have videos.
	People can post videos directly to Bastion.
	What is the size?
	Is there a file size limit of those videos?
	I imagine there is.
	A great question.
	There are a few tiers.
	So, first of all, when you just sign up, you cannot upload videos.
	That is because, as you can imagine, with no personal identity verification, there's one of the most difficult things.
	The most difficult thing about Bastion is how to build a network That doesn't degenerate in the absence of identity verification.
	True.
	It's very hard.
	It requires so much creativity and pain.
	So one of the things with video, if you can just create an account pseudonymously, in 30 seconds anonymously, and you can upload videos, obviously you'll just create a DDoS attack, right?
	And you'll just kill our server, kill the nodes.
	Right, because videos are a lot of data.
	Exactly.
	The way Video of War works is that when you come in, you can't upload.
	You have to use the platform for about two or three months, and then you get an upload limit.
	I want to say it's something like 300 megabyte a day.
	Then as you use it more, you can grow that limit.
	There is a way to bypass that.
	If you have some pocket coin in your wallet, you don't spend it.
	Uploading is free.
	But if you have some pocket coin in the wallet, the system treats that, okay, you're not a bot likely because it would be very expensive to have many bots with pocket coin.
	So then you can upload immediately.
	So can someone then just purchase the pocket coin and hold it?
	Yeah, you can buy it on exchanges, but I really think that cryptocurrency exchanges are a temporary thing.
	So yes, you can buy on exchanges and you can do that, but there's also a category pocket coin peer-to-peer.
	That's what I always recommend.
	Try to find people at Bastion and buy it peer-to-peer.
	That makes perfect sense.
	Is there a pocket coin marketplace as part of the Bastion ecosystem?
	Like to buy and sell the coin?
	There is not, but you can find people to go directly peer-to-peer.
	Barteron, when it comes out, it will have a cryptocurrency component, not just Pocketcoin and others, because cryptocurrency legally in many places is assets, so it will be a barter type of thing.
	So there will be that on Barteron, but within Bastion, we want to have a decentralized economy.
	It's an advertising token and pocket coin is very important, but we don't want to create a trading platform.
	That's something that we don't want in there.
	People can just do peer-to-peer or go to exchanges.
	There was just a new exchange that added pocket coin completely on their own.
	It's starting to get noticed.
	It's called Biconomy in Canada.
	What is it again?
	What's the exchange again?
	Biconomy.
	Okay.
	Before, exchanges that have pocket coin before were all in Asia, and it was very hard for Americans to use them.
	But Biconomy is really good, and it's open to Americans.
	They just contacted the team and said, we want to add it, and boom, they added it.
	All right.
	I'm going to make a note about Biconomy.
	Let's see.
	Biconomy.io.
	Is that right?
	I think so.
	I'll have to get the website.
	I didn't go there.
	Okay.
	All right.
	Well, anyway, yeah, that's interesting to note.
	Okay.
	So this is really cool that you've thought through all these issues in such detail.
	Bottom line, I'm definitely going to start using this and posting personally.
	You know, I always think Twitter is going to re-ban me.
	I keep testing it.
	I keep saying something more and more interesting to see if I'm going to get banned, and so far, no.
	It's inevitable, Mike.
	I'm sorry.
	I know it is.
	It is inevitable.
	This has been amazing.
	Take comfort in that.
	Huh?
	Take comfort in that.
	Oh, yeah.
	No, I absolutely know it.
	Okay, so this is really cool.
	Very good stuff.
	Todd, anything else you want to say before we let Daniel go and then we have our discussion?
	Well, he's thought through things so well all the way back from 2016.
	So my last question is, Daniel, can you just give us a little bit of insight of where do you see Bastion.com, or not even.com necessarily, but Bastion in five years?
	I think in five years what I'd like to see is that, actually echoing a little bit what Mike said, I'd like to see the main Bastion app become much less important, become like a niche app, and I'd like to see many people come in and build their own apps This app, because social media is evolving, this app for video, this app for messaging, and I'd like to see a very vibrant, decentralized economy.
	Barteron is a big first step, but I really think we need that because when you have this pressure like we had in 2021 and so on, 2020, it's really important to be able to have an economic life because that's the most important kind of censorship that gets to people.
	It's inability to buy stuff, inability to go to a supermarket.
	And supermarkets are just like mags.
	You don't want to use them.
	You just don't want to use them.
	So I'm hoping that Bastion itself is an app today, which I think is a very cool app.
	I'm not a programmer, by the way.
	I should give credit to programmers.
	I can inspire them, and I'm a math guy, so I do all the math, and I do all the kind of write-ups and creative stuff, but the programmers create an awesome network.
	But in five years, I hope that it's much smaller.
	Basically, it's not as important that there are many other apps on the platform that take over.
	That's fascinating.
	I'm sure they will be.
	Okay.
	All right.
	Well, Daniel, then we're going to say thank you for your time today.
	It's really been an extraordinary conversation, and you are welcome back here.
	And now Todd and I are going to have our own discussion about your platform.
	So thank you for joining us today.
	Thank you, everybody.
	Thanks for having me.
	It's an honor.
	Absolutely.
	It's an honor to have you on.
	Thank you, Daniel.
	All right.
	Take care, Daniel.
	Okay.
	Wow.
	Todd, how amazing was that?
	Well, you know, all the sidebar discussions you and I have been having lately with decentralizeddirectory.com and such, and the PMAs and everything, it's just like, is the big guy upstairs just hand-feeding us the solutions via these interviews, or what?
	I know.
	Isn't it amazing?
	Because...
	And I've got to say, even I said this during the interview, I didn't grasp what Bastian had built at first.
	And frankly, I didn't really get it until today.
	And the fact that it is incredibly decentralized and it has its own app, which I didn't know either.
	This was confusing.
	It was like, oh, it's a website.
	Which means there must be central servers somewhere, but actually not.
	It's just a gateway.
	It's just a bridge to the app and the nodes.
	So the.com address is just a keyhole through which you see the app that's run by the nodes.
	Now it makes sense.
	It's astonishing.
	And he did.
	He thought through everything.
	He and his group of engineers.
	Yeah.
	And I'm fascinated to dig in and learn more.
	And, you know, I mean, I just set up an account, but I haven't really used it at all.
	And I understand that within the app, there is the private messaging, which is supposed to be pretty robust.
	So we should definitely be testing that.
	Yeah.
	Super impressed.
	And I had the benefit of having a lot of road hours over the last two days, and I was consuming just lots of his other interviews.
	And I really encourage anybody to go out and search for Daniel Sachkov, S-A-T-C-H-K-O-V, and Bastion, B-A-S-T-Y-O-N. Just put those three words together and And start listening to him because he is a real visionary.
	And I tell you, man, it's hand-delivered solutions.
	We just have to be awake enough to appreciate them and engage with them.
	Yeah, absolutely.
	Just extraordinary what he's built.
	I'm just amazed.
	Join the official discussion channel for this show on telegram at t.me slash decentralized TV where you can ask questions or offer suggestions of who we should interview next.
	Also be sure to subscribe to the email newsletter on decentralized.tv where you'll be alerted about one day in advance of each new upcoming episode before it gets published.
	On Decentralize.tv, you'll also find links to our video channels and social media channels across all platforms, including Brighteon, Rumble, Bitchute, Twitter, Truth Social, and more.
	Check it all out at Decentralize.tv.
	Hey, real quick, Todd, you know, as this show is getting quite popular, people are really loving it and spreading the word.
	Thank you for spreading the word about this, but...
	We had a company reach out to us that has made the DTV mugs.
	You see that?
	I love that.
	Look at that.
	Those look good.
	A couple of mugs, yeah.
	And these don't earn any profits for us, by the way, but this company is called redpillprint.com, and we want to support them.
	For just making these available for the show.
	And they also have hats and they have shirts.
	And they said they accept cryptocurrency, which is something that we requested.
	So if you go to redpillprints.com, we're just giving them a shout out here.
	They've got all kinds of stuff here.
	I mean, look at all this.
	Stay awake, not woke.
	Stuff like that.
	They have a bunch of stuff, but go there and look for the DTV or the decentralized TV, you know, mugs and shirts and whatever else, and you can...
	Here we go.
	Do not comply with tyrants.
	All kinds of good stuff there.
	Yeah.
	And we learned about it because the person running this is what?
	He's a community member in Telegram.
	Totally.
	Decentralized TV. That's right.
	So we invite you all.
	Yeah, thank you for the plug.
	Indeed, Decentralized TV is the Telegram channel.
	And again, mugs, hats, whatever else.
	So it's all good.
	And you can spread the word.
	Alright, with that said, let's get back to Bastion, because I want to say, here, let me bring it back up.
	I want to say, first of all, I'm all over this, man.
	I'm sold.
	I'm going to be...
	I'm putting this right beside my Briteon.social tab now in my browser.
	I'm going to post to Bastion everything that I'm posting, even to Telegram or Briteon.social, and I'm going to try to get to where I can start posting videos on Bastion as well, but...
	I think it makes instant sense.
	I'm going to run a node.
	I'm going to download and run the full node, too.
	Yeah.
	Why not?
	Me, too.
	Help the project.
	Why not?
	Yeah.
	I don't know.
	I just feel lately that I'm getting a great exercise in humility, Mike.
	I know.
	All of these savants are coming on, these brilliant people who my jaw just drops, you know?
	It's like I kind of follow them, you know, but...
	Wow.
	I mean, the planning and the foresight that he had to actually execute on his plan is just astonishing.
	Yeah, I know.
	And he's really thought deeply about a lot of these things.
	Like, his explanation...
	About proof of work.
	I always thought proof of work was really, really secure against 51% of tax, but I guess he's right on the smaller projects, not so much.
	It doesn't take that much money for somebody to attack it and take it over if it's proof of work.
	I hadn't really considered the implications of that, but...
	But he said there's advantages and disadvantages to everything, which makes perfect sense.
	But I've got to say, I would not have understood Bastion if I did not already know about Cordell.
	Right.
	So I kind of have to thank Jason Crow at Cordell for educating me about that system, which I think gave me the mental framework to understand what Bastion is.
	Right.
	Which is kind of like a...
	Well, I don't want to say it's like Cordal.
	It's completely different from Cordal, but it does all the things that we want Cordal to do, by the way, which is to distribute content.
	Yeah.
	It's like Cordal, but different.
	Yeah.
	It's brilliant.
	I'll just say that.
	It's freaking brilliant.
	And again, we're going to use it.
	In fact, I was texting my staff during that quick break to just say, look, set up accounts for Brighteon and Natural News, and then I'm going to set up a Health Ranger account, and we'll start using it.
	Just blasting it.
	Yeah.
	It's awesome.
	Absolutely.
	That's awesome.
	Yeah, and are you going to then become a blogger there too?
	Well, I'll post the things that I'm posting all the time, which is usually, you know, here's a new video, here's a new interview, here's an interesting meme or whatever.
	Yeah, I'm just going to post there in addition to the other places I post.
	But yeah, I'm going to use it.
	You know, my stage name is Todradamus, and...
	I think that you're probably going to be the fastest followed person on Bastion.
	I don't know about that.
	There's a lot of good people on there I can see already.
	Yeah, there are.
	The thing is, I'm going to start...
	Talking about Bastion and spreading the word about it, because I think Daniel's point is absolutely correct, where there's going to come a day where your account on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, whatever, it's done.
	It's just done.
	There's going to be an announcement, some emergency, and all dissenting opinions are hereby banned on all platforms, period, by order of the Grand Marshal Right, right.
	And it's going to be done.
	And at that point, there's going to be a mad rush into things like Bastion or Cordell or whatever is decentralized.
	And by the way, I think on that day also, people are going to mad rush into privacy crypto, by the way.
	Yes, they are.
	Yes, they are.
	Just from me listening to other interviews of Daniel over the last couple of days, I know that his private chat is pretty dynamic, and I think I would encourage us all to start learning more about that, and it would operate much like Signal, I guess.
	But that's something, Mike, I know you've been talking a lot about wanting to build, create an emergency broadcast system.
	That's right.
	It seems like Bastion would be the perfect place to do that.
	Yeah, absolutely.
	We are, in fact, we're talking with Cordal about funding and building an emergency broadcast system on Cordal and then open sourcing that code for others.
	Bastion may actually function right now as that system, right?
	So maybe we don't have to build anything on Bastion, but just set up an account called, like, you know, Brighteon Emergency Broadcast or something.
	Right, right.
	And just tell people about that.
	I mean, as far as I can tell, it's going to...
	I just want to be able to send out audio clips, video clips, images, text, documents.
	I don't know if Bastion supports dropping in PDFs or Word docs or anything like that.
	I haven't tried that, but I assume it probably does.
	I guess we'll find out.
	Probably in their messaging service.
	Yeah, probably so.
	You can just drop files, I would imagine.
	I would think.
	Daniel's probably laughing when he's listening.
	Of course it does.
	Of course it does.
	We thought of that.
	We thought about that when you were in your mom's womb.
	Yeah, right, right.
	We built that eight years ago.
	You didn't even...
	No, he's a brilliant guy and obviously has thought through this very well.
	So I would just say, bottom line, I mean, we don't even have to make this discussion that long today because this is like 100% thumbs up, 10 out of 10.
	Yes.
	Right?
	Yes.
	Everybody use it.
	We're going to use it.
	We're going to have a decentralized TV channel on Bastion.
	Yes, we do.
	All right, I'll set that up.
	Okay.
	Shocker.
	Yeah, shocker.
	Right.
	All right, so everybody go to bastion.com, B-A-S-T-Y-O-N, and don't just use it there on the web server.
	Rather, go to bastion.com slash applications.
	Download the app, which is really, I believe this is a server, a node.
	Excuse me.
	Download the node.
	Run the node.
	I'm going to do that.
	Actually, I'm going to do that from multiple locations, given that we have a lot of hardware sitting around.
	So, download it, use it, participate, and look for me on there, too.
	Because, yeah, the day is coming.
	I mean, I keep posting more provocative things on Twitter.
	Like, today, Elon Musk tweeted out, he said, we should have a competition for the best PSYOP. And I replied to Elon, and I said, you would win that one.
	So, he might ban me.
	Who knows?
	That's brilliant.
	I really don't care.
	Hey, I have a perhaps naive question.
	Yeah.
	To download a node and operate a node, you don't have to have your computer on the whole time, right?
	Yeah, you do.
	Oh, you do.
	Okay, so that's the whole idea.
	Yeah, because your node has to pass traffic and it has to confirm blocks and whatever else.
	I guess it's like a combination node and mining together.
	Yeah, because I was just thinking about putting on my laptop, but I shut my laptop and shut it down all the time.
	I think you'd want to keep it running all the time.
	Okay.
	If you're going to run a node.
	Do it on my desktop.
	Yeah.
	But, you know, look, and I think as a node, then you earn some of the pocket coin, too.
	As he said, it's part of the emissions of the blockchain integrity, is you get some pocket coin.
	Yeah.
	But I don't...
	I mean, it doesn't matter to me earning pocket coin or not.
	I want to run a node to support the network.
	Right, right.
	Is that your pocket coin?
	Are you just glad to see this?
	What's got in your pocket with your pocket coin?
	What is that?
	Oh, don't worry.
	It's just a 9mm something.
	Yeah, okay.
	Right.
	But that was good.
	Yeah.
	Every appendage up from this.
	Okay.
	Awesome.
	All right.
	Well, then we'll wrap it up there.
	And we'll just...
	I will give credit to our sponsor today.
	By the way, I did not forget.
	Excellent.
	Thank you for that.
	Excellent.
	I'll give credit to our sponsor.
	And then we'll say that we'll invite Daniel back for an update in, I don't know...
	Maybe December.
	A couple months or something.
	Yeah.
	Well, he says he launches...
	A couple of initiatives in September, right?
	So maybe we let them get those out.
	Maybe target early November.
	Well, I mean, it's funny because right now we're actually...
	We're booked.
	We're booked out eight weeks right now.
	I know.
	So I forgot to tell you that we have a guy coming in in studio who is with a de-Googled phone company that sells data SIM cards that you can buy with Monero.
	Oh, nice.
	Which I think is super cool.
	And so, I forgot to tell you, Todd, but I opened up a Thursday to have him in the studio.
	Okay, great.
	Because I didn't want him to wait eight weeks to come in on a Friday.
	Perfect.
	Next Thursday?
	No, I'll text you the details, but it's a couple weeks out still because my Thursdays are pretty much booked, but not as badly as the Fridays.
	But anyway, he's going to come in.
	Our sponsor for today, folks, is the Satellite Phone Store, sat123.com for satellite phones, obviously, here.
	And then they also have the Bibby Sticks, which are right here, and it's satellite communications.
	And I should mention, too, that we are open to other sponsorships, just not crypto coins.
	So we're not ever going to let a coin become a sponsor of the show because we want to maintain that neutrality.
	We don't endorse a particular coin.
	We're open to all coins that are viable and that have good solutions and good tech, but especially privacy coins that are available.
	That's what we really prefer.
	But anyway, Satellite Phone Store is our sponsor for today, SAT123.com, and that decentralizes you from the cell towers and the power grid.
	But, of course, the satellites are centralized, so it's not a peer-to-peer.
	We don't have peer-to-peer satellites yet.
	Todd, are you going to launch your satellite soon?
	I've not launched my satellite.
	That's still in my right pocket.
	Yeah, right.
	I haven't launched a satellite either, but if we ever launch satellites, then we can have peer-to-peer satellite comms.
	But that seems to be requiring a little bit more cash than I'm ready to spend.
	Right.
	So you can't avoid all centralization in communications, but you can get a satellite phone.
	Anyway, we thank our sponsor there, sat123.com.
	And then also don't forget about redpillprints.com here with the mugs.
	You can get your DTV mug.
	There we go.
	And you can enjoy your coffee and you can show people and ask, what's DTV? Oh, glad you asked.
	Check this out.
	And then you can tell them about Bastion and everything else.
	Great logo, by the way.
	You and your team created that.
	Yeah, that took a little effort because that was like version 7 or something.
	I was telling my team, I kept saying, no, more node-like.
	And they were like, what do you mean node-like?
	I said, well, look up images of nodes.
	And first they gave me images of circuit boards.
	I was like, those aren't nodes, those are circuits.
	But anyway, whatever.
	They nailed it.
	So, yeah, it looks good.
	You know, one last thing, you know, Mike, Rome wasn't built in a day, right?
	But if you look at history, it was destroyed pretty quickly.
	Rome burned pretty quickly.
	It burned pretty quickly.
	And so it can happen.
	And I think when we take a look at our lives right now and the purpose for Decentralized.TV is to start prepping a little bit.
	Meaning, what do we talk about?
	We talk about coaching people to get out of fiat into gold, precious metals, silver, private crypto, food, etc.
	So I'd like to announce, Mike, this has been something that you and I have been brainstorming about, but I'm going to launch a website called decentralizeddirectory.com.
	And I submit that to escape the controller's system, you need an executable escape plan.
	And so, my vision of decentralized directory is for it to be an aggregate of solutions.
	It is under construction.
	It is a big idea right now.
	But by the time you watch this and listen to this, please go to decentralizeddirectory.com.
	If you are just a person like me and you want to sign up with the email list, I'll keep you informed as to its development.
	But if you are a service or product provider who is pro-freedom, And you are pro-decentralization.
	And if you have any kind of solutions, there's going to be a section for you to submit a little bit of information about your company or your service as well.
	And we'll follow up and have a chat.
	And ultimately, everything that resides within that directory is going to be kid-tested, mother-approved.
	And just really excited about it, Mike.
	And you're the one who inspired me.
	Yeah, this is a great idea.
	Thank you for bringing that up.
	I should have prompted you about it because part of this is, you know, I was, and thank you for agreeing to do this because we've received a lot of questions from people who actually need some kind of hand-holding and some personal coaching about what they want to do, some corporations and institutions also that want to get into crypto.
	And so let me announce this for you, Todd.
	So Todd has also agreed to serve as a consultant just by the hour.
	If you have questions about crypto or you need to get some assets into crypto out of the banking system and you want to reduce risk, reduce volatility, or make your assets more private, whatever you want to do.
	If you want some real high-level consulting of a guy who knows this because he's been in it for years, and obviously he's the co-host of the show, then you can contact Todd Pitner at decentralizeddirectory.com, and you can request the personal consulting.
	Again, thank you, Todd, for being willing to do that, to offer a consulting service.
	You're going to get, I think, a lot of interesting clients doing that, for sure.
	I hope so.
	I'm sure you will.
	Yeah, go ahead.
	I was just going to say, just like the guests that are coming on this show, it's like everybody who ends up being attracted to this one way or the other, they're just really interesting, amazing human beings.
	So when I say I hope so, it's just I can't wait to meet everybody who comes across our paths in the future.
	And let me just add a plug for you, Todd, which is that if you want to use Todd's services there, Todd can help you avoid pitfalls.
	Because he's seen the mistakes, he's seen rug pulls, he's experienced a lot of stuff over the years as well and can help you avoid those issues and make smart, informed decisions that can achieve whatever your goals are with crypto.
	Again, Todd, you're going to have to tell me.
	I mean, I know you're going to keep clients' information private, but just in general terms, I want to hear some feedback about sort of the discussions that you're having and what kind of solutions people are looking at.
	I think it'd be fascinating to share just general information about that on the show.
	Again, protecting the information of the clients, but just talking about trends.
	Like, what are people asking about?
	What are some solutions that have come up?
	Things like that.
	You can share that on future episodes.
	Excellent.
	Looking forward to it.
	So, again, Mike, you inspired me to go down this path, and I thank you.
	I think it's a great idea, and I know it was born out of the fact that you have a ton of people within your network who are basically asking you to be the sunset and guide, and, you know, folks, if you can't tell, he's been really, really busy, and so it would be my pleasure to be able to help guide anyone through an escape plan, and I say escape plan just because I like magic and Escape the banking system.
	And you and I talk quite a bit too, Todd, so we're kind of on the same page about the various projects, the technology, the state of tech.
	And I would say, Todd, because of the position of where we are with this show, that we actually get to have a lot of conversations that maybe the public hasn't heard yet about solutions and tech and things like that.
	And that's information that you can share with people where appropriate if it helps to solve their problem.
	That's right.
	That's right.
	Yeah.
	All right.
	Well, private membership associations should be really interested in what we have going on.
	So I'm just planting that seed out there if you're a PMA. Very true.
	All right.
	Well, again, that website is decentralizeddirectory.com, right?
	So check that out.
	And thank you for watching today here on decentralized.tv.
	and we have more episodes coming a couple of weeks typically right now.
	So be sure to watch every episode.
	You're going to learn amazing, profound information that can help maintain your freedom, your liberty, and your assets.
	Thank you for watching today and thank you, Todd, for joining me.
	It's been a pleasure.
	Indeed.
	Cheers.
	All right.
	All right, and we're happy to announce a new sponsoring partner, which is AbovePhone.com.
	And if you put in slash DTV, then we'll get credit for that here at Decentralized TV. So it's AbovePhone.com slash DTV. AbovePhone is a de-Googled phone provider that has an ecosystem of applications that are fantastic.
	This is a way to have a mobile device.
	It works, of course, with Wi-Fi and Bluetooth and everything.
	And you can put a data SIM card in it.
	And so you can get your bandwidth from the cell towers if you want.
	And you can buy those SIM cards from above phone using Monero, by the way.
	So you can have privacy crypto to purchase the SIM cards so there's nothing that ties you to the phone or the data or the cell towers.
	How cool is that, Todd?
	Wow.
	I mean, we finally found a provider.
	That's amazing.
	That's amazing.
	So this is just kind of a junior varsity question here.
	With that phone, are you getting a new phone number, or are you pointing over the number that you've always had?
	How does that work?
	Okay, so the phone is, of course, it's brand new hardware.
	You purchase the phone, which are Google hardware phones from the above phone company, which is all pro-Liberty.
	I mean, they're all on board with everything we do.
	And then you have a SIM card in it, which passes data back and forth to the cell towers.
	But you don't have an SMS or a phone phone.
	Rather, there's an app that lets you set up a phone number, and you have calling and receiving.
	It functions normally, but it's using data instead of using the actual phone protocols.
	That the cell towers use.
	Now the good news why this is great is because you are not going to be wrapped up in some kind of geofencing warrant Because normally, if you're standing and then somebody robs the bank a block away, well, they can issue a geofencing warrant and they can say, let's go talk to everybody, visit everybody's home who was within 100 feet of the bank robbery based on your phone number and your phone checking in with the cell tower and registering as a phone.
	So with these de-Googled phones from a phone, they don't register as phones.
	They register as data devices, which is common for things like trackers and security cameras and what have you.
	So those data devices don't get swept up in the geofencing warrants.
	That's fascinating.
	Yeah.
	That's very cool.
	Right.
	And then in addition, there's nothing about this phone that's tied to your identity.
	Right.
	So your name, your social security number, your credit card, nothing is tied to that, especially if you paid using crypto, obviously.
	Privacy crypto, even better.
	So this is the way to be anonymous and protect your privacy while actually having a mobile phone device.
	Now, it runs virtually all the apps you need, but not 100% because it doesn't use the Google Play Store, obviously.
	It's running the Graphene OS, but a specialized version of Graphene with all these apps on top of it.
	I mean, I've used Graphene phones.
	I'm running Graphene right here.
	I've been doing this for years.
	I de-Googled a while ago.
	I don't know if it's been years, but it was a while ago.
	And I can run everything that I need to run, you know, like Signal or weather apps or, you know, mapping.
	I don't run Google Maps, obviously.
	Like, Google has no place.
	Can you get crypto wallets on that phone?
	Absolutely.
	I've been running all the crypto wallets.
	I've been running Epic Wallet.
	I've been running Cake Wallet.
	I've been running Monero wallets.
	I've been running all the, yeah, all the crypto.
	Oh, that's awesome.
	That's even better.
	Yeah, yeah.
	So you don't need Google.
	Perfect.
	You should de-Google your life, because Google's spying on you all the time.
	Right.
	And so are iPhones, by the way.
	So again, go to abovephone.com slash DTV, and it'll take you to this website here, abovephone.com, and you can get their hardware, you can get their SIM cards, you can even just take your existing hardware if you want and use their SIM cards.
	And that gives you a level of privacy.
	But the best way is to get their Google Pixel hardware that's been de-Google with their SIM cards that you purchase with crypto.
	And then that's the whole package.
	Then you are truly private and you cannot be easily tracked like you can with your normal spy device.
	Wow.
	So, cool stuff.
	And last question.
	Yeah.
	Then is there, like, a monthly fee that's associated with, like, you know, I know with my setup, you know, I have a lot of daughters, so there's five of us on the plan.
	And so every month my wireless bill is pretty healthy.
	Oh, okay, yeah.
	Well...
	You can use the hardware without paying any monthly fees, but if you want to use the apps that have a phone number for you, there's a small monthly fee associated with that, but that's optional.
	You don't have to run that.
	The other thing is the SIM data cards you pay per gigabyte.
	Okay.
	Right?
	So it just depends on how much data you want to use or whether you watch videos on your phone all day through the cell towers.
	But, you know, just switch over to Wi-Fi when you're home and you're just using your Wi-Fi so you're not being charged for that data.
	So it's actually a lot less expensive than using a regular phone.
	It sounds like it.
	And it's a lot more private.
	And you have total control over it as well.
	I'm ordering...
	Yeah, yeah.
	Serious.
	Yeah, it's pretty cool.
	If you want to decentralize your mobile phone, this is the answer.
	And you can help support the show, by the way, because this is a sponsoring partner.
	So go to abovephone.com slash DTV and check out what they have to offer.
	And I think you'll really enjoy it.
	And it'll revolutionize your life.
	And you can probably sleep better at night knowing you're not being constantly tracked.
	So, all right, there you go.
	Above Phone.
	Love it.
	Very cool.

▲