About this episode

Timothy Allen interviews Polycarp Nakamoto about building a decentralized internet on Bitcoin and the implications for society.

Community, Mesh Networks, and the Plan to Build a Parallel Society on Bitcoin – Polycarp Nakamoto is the masked, anonymous figure at the centre of Lab 484, a research laboratory and cluster of startups based in Austin, Texas, building for Web 5: a second internet that runs peer-to-peer on Bitcoin nodes rather than the centralised choke points of the web we use today. Through Lab 484 and its flagship Archipelago operating system, the community is assembling the hardware and software for a censorship-resistant mesh network, owned by nobody and run by everybody, that they believe will be needed when the internet as we know it fails. Timothy Allen sits down with Poly in person at a community compound near Austin for one of the more unusual conversations in the show's history. It is a conversation about whether you can rebuild the internet from the ground up on the one piece of digital infrastructure Poly considers genuinely decentralised: Bitcoin. They move from the question of anonymity, through the architecture of a second internet (mesh networks, Bitcoin nodes, Nostr, e-cash), to the harder problem sitting underneath all of it: people. Along the way: why Poly thinks the internet…

People in this episode

Host: Timothy Allen

Guest: Polycarp Nakamoto

Topics covered

• decentralization
• mesh networks
• Bitcoin
• parallel society
• censorship resistance
• internet architecture
• human condition

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: Lab 484, Bitcoin, Nostr, Archipelago

Places: Austin, Texas, community compound

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