“Don’t be afraid of going your own way.”
Johnathan Corgan & Gigi take a walk in Madeira. Recorded during SEC-07.
Listen on sovereignengineering.io
In this dialogue:
- Why FIPS started with Arjen asking for networking that does not depend on registrars, central authorities, or yankable domain names
- Johnathan disappearing for a month after Costa Rica, then returning with a protocol design that scratched the itch
- FIPS as a self-organizing peer mesh: no privileged coordinator, only what each node can enforce locally
- Transport-agnostic networking: Ethernet, Bluetooth, UDP overlays, Tor, serial links, and whatever else can move packets
- A hilariously impractical but very useful test: tunneling FIPS over Nostr relays, with ping times measured in seconds, and it still worked
- Why robustness under ugly conditions matters more than looking elegant on the happy path
- 150 nodes already on the FIPS testnet, and what has to change to get from 150 to 1,500 to 15,000
- Friday Demo Day as the forcing function: build it, show it, let other people poke holes in it
- The next FIPS release: fewer unnecessary pieces, stronger protocol negotiation, harder internals, more battle testing
- “Try to break it” so friends can fix it before hostile actors do
- Costa Rica and SEC-07 as a return to the early Cypherpunk and early Bitcoin energy: do not reform the old system, route around it
- Why Nostr feels miraculous if you remember the world before it, even if normies still see it as half-baked
- “Rough consensus and running code”: academic rigor, design review, and why code still has to survive contact with reality
- Johnathan’s critique of “shower thought to ZapStore in six hours” culture: speed helps, but engineering still matters
- Claude Code wrote most of FIPS only after two months of protocol iteration and roughly 30,000 words of design docs
- Johnathan read every file and every line of code his agents produced, which is probably the only sane way to use them
- Agentic coding as a force multiplier, not a substitute for thought: bad programmers get worse, good programmers get faster, non-programmers can finally build
- Drive-by AI pull requests, effort-matching reviews, and why maintainers should not do all the thinking for you
- Advice to younger builders: dissent, trust your own judgment, stop scrolling, and start doing stuff
- “You can just do things”
People mentioned:
- Arjen (brought the original itch from Costa Rica, noDNS instincts, freedom-tech networking)
- Cobrador (TollGate, weird deployment constraints, “I didn’t think this would exist for 10 more years”)
- SatsAndSports
Projects & tech mentioned:
- FIPS (Free Internetworking Peering System, a transport-agnostic encrypted mesh)
- Nostr
- TollGate (connectivity sold by the packet in hostile or weird environments)
- Tor
- ZapStore
Recorded at 945,297.
