25: White Noise, MLS, and marmot w/ Jeff G

May 30, 2026 · 1h 15m

About this episode

Jeff G and Gigi discuss the evolution of White Noise and the challenges of private messaging in hostile environments.

"What we're actually building is an unstoppable messenger." Jeff G & Gigi take a walk in Oslo. Listen on sovereignengineering.io In this dialogue: Jeff G explains how White Noise started as an attempt to build the most private messenger possible, then slowly mutated into something else: an unstoppable messenger that can survive ugly network conditions and hostile environments Why MLS on Nostr is mostly an ordering problem: identity and delivery are the easy parts, group-state evolution is where everything breaks Forked histories, missing commits, and the nightmare scenario where a group silently splits into incompatible realities without anybody noticing The temptation of coordinators, sequencers, and Pablo's hilariously named Serial Killer Relay , plus the deeper question of when a relay stops being a relay and quietly becomes a server Calle's Cashu headaches, NIP-60 and NIP-61 edge cases, and the "pocket with a hole" problem where balances seem to disappear, reappear, and generally behave like loose change under a couch Jeff G's current bet for Marmot : a deterministic state machine, tunable convergence rules, and automatic re-init flows that make occasional desync…

People in this episode

Host: Gigi

Guest: Jeff G

Topics covered

private messaging
network conditions
group-state evolution
privacy challenges
deterministic state machines
communication protocols

Keywords

unstoppable messenger
MLS
group privacy
NIP-17
chat reliability
state machine
network issues

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: White Noise, Nostr, Pika, Calle, Marmot, NIP-60, NIP-61, Serial Killer Relay

Places: Oslo