jcorgan
Johnathan Corgan

🎶 Older now, but still running against the wind 🎶

Scientist, engineer, consultant, pilot. Slinger of bits and reducer of gradients.

EN/ES ☸️

Public Key

npub19wavu4f7l6l43h24jyskn7fvzy37kcfp67aqjtmv2qgy4lp34nhsda8p6k

Profile Code

nprofile1qqszhwkw25l0a06cm42ezgtflykpzgltvysa0wsf9ak9qyz2lsc6emcpzemhxue69uhky6t5vdhkjmn9wgh8xmmrd9skcqg4waehxw309a3x2an09ehx7um5wgcjucm0d5hq2ywv

Publishing to

bitcoiner.social

bevo.nostr1.com

Author Public Key

npub19wavu4f7l6l43h24jyskn7fvzy37kcfp67aqjtmv2qgy4lp34nhsda8p6k

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Last Notes

2026-04-12 13:56:31

Engineering solutions to problems is mostly about assembling existing pieces into a new whole, more so than inventing a new wheel.
FIPS combines known, battle tested concepts going back decades in the fields of networking, cryptography, distributed computing, resilient communications, and operating systems, with full credit to those who came before.

2026-04-10 05:13:53

GM ☕️
https://blossom.primal.net/041c966996776b4779259444ae9484cb3d621159e5451188a4015ed833daacaf.jpg

2026-04-03 07:37:15

GM ☕ Turns out you can just @nprofile…vhfa things.

2026-03-29 14:36:33

🛩️🇵🇹 #39

2026-03-28 23:31:07

The kids are alright.

2026-03-28 17:03:26

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Lol, and people say the US is ultra-capitalist.

2026-03-28 16:40:55

GM 🤎 ✈️

2026-03-27 12:57:45

GM ☕ I've learned way too much about Bluetooth in the last week, but FIPS nodes can now auto-discover each other and peer over BLE to create or join a FIPS mesh network. No IP needed 😏

2026-03-24 06:09:51

Sometimes, all you can be is one of those small, newfangled, warm-blooded mammals just staying out of the way of those giant dinosaurs fighting among themselves until the meteor arrives.

2026-03-17 19:32:46

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Yes, the squares are actually what get dynamically generated and transmitted on updates. I'm not sure what the point is that you're trying to clear up.

2026-03-17 19:06:43

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We are perhaps describing two different things.

2026-03-17 19:06:14

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Well, to be clear, with k peers the node only stores one bloom filter from each one. During the gossip protocol updates the ones sent up and down the spanning tree are calculated on-the-fly as needed, not stored. So they are 'possible' bloom filters but not stored bloom filters.

2026-03-17 17:19:12

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One bloom filter advertised by and received from each peer is kept locally.
Whenever an update comes from a peer, if it is different from what is already stored, the node will update its local copy, then:
For each remaining peer that is either a spanning tree parent or child, calculate a new bloom filter consisting of the union (XOR) of all the other peers and send it.
This is called "split horizon" routing and essentially means that after convergence each node has a bloom filter for each of its peers containing all nodes reachable through that peer.
Later, at the routing stage, the node can examine all its peers' bloom filters to identify candidate next hops for routing.

2026-03-17 03:05:03

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Nah. Just tell them it's a game where they have to line up all three sticks.

2026-03-16 12:55:44

GM ☕ It's good to be back working on open source after so many years away.

2026-03-15 03:52:21

I miss George Carlin.

2026-03-12 17:03:52

running fips
#naddr1qv…r2fm

2026-03-11 15:57:56

GM ☕ BIG PLANS

2026-03-10 15:46:23

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Sorry, this is now pushed properly.

2026-03-10 12:46:09

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This has been updated in current master.

2026-03-10 12:43:31

GM ☕ The future is here, it's just not evenly distributed yet.

2026-03-10 03:18:38

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The example configurations in the README.md have a public FIPS test node using both UDP or TCP you can use to connect to the mesh.

2026-03-09 12:47:29

GM ☕ Another day of just doing things!

2026-03-07 18:28:12

The FIPS (Free Internetworking Peering System) repository is unavailable from Github currently. We've mirrored it here:
https://gitworkshop.dev/npub1y0gja7r4re0wyelmvdqa03qmjs62rwvcd8szzt4nf4t2hd43969qj000ly/relay.ngit.dev/fips
We were attempting to transition it from my personal github space to a new organization we had just set up for multiple fips repositories, which succeeded, but then the new org got flagged by some automated process, and the original is no longer in my account. It's under appeal.
This is why we Nostr.

2026-03-07 00:21:17

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You can turn that off in settings.json

2026-03-06 13:53:50

GM. ☕
Don't apologize for using coding assistants to increase your productivity, but remember--they aren't accountable for what you publish, you are. The difference between AI slop and 10x output is design, oversight, testing, and standing by what you make. Proper software engineering hasn't changed, it's just gotten...amazingly easier.

2026-03-05 22:32:33

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This remains the most important application development work in the Nostr ecosystem.

2026-03-02 14:11:40

GM. I love the smell of packets in the morning.

2026-03-02 00:47:26

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That and "never meet your heroes".

2026-03-02 00:43:08

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Workin' on it!

2026-02-28 22:43:54

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Yeah, packaging hasn't arrived yet. But it's pretty simple, there are two (soon three) binaries, one of which is the fips daemon, needs some capability flags, and a yaml config file.

2026-02-25 16:15:02

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Yes, the node software allows normal IP applications to use an IPv6 interface with an automatically created, npub-derived IPv6 address, and other nodes in the mesh can find it by using npub.fips as the name.

2026-02-25 03:37:57

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See the docs, several design concepts were inspired by Yggdrasil.

2026-02-25 03:37:12

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It does not now, but that has been in the back of my mind as transport option. We'll likely do Tor support first however.

2026-02-24 21:35:21

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The "routing tables" are fixed size. Read the design docs for how that works.

2026-02-24 20:55:49

Announcing FIPS, the Free Internetworking Peering System
https://github.com/jmcorgan/fips
Nostr gives you a sovereign identity. But the network underneath, the IP routing, the DNS, the infrastructure you depend on to reach each other, is still controlled by someone else.
FIPS is a mesh networking protocol that makes a Nostr keypair your network identity. Nodes find each other and route traffic using npubs directly. No DNS registrars, no IP address allocation, no routing authorities. Just keypairs and encrypted links.
Nodes self-organize into a routing tree without any global coordination. You address peers by npub, and unmodified IPv6 applications work transparently: Nostr relays, web browsers, whatever.
Today it runs as a UDP overlay on the existing internet, in order to let you easily test its capabilities. But it is designed from the ground up to directly use arbitrary transports like Ethernet, Wifi, Bluetooth, Tor, and point-to-point links, without any IP stack. We're working on these next, but wanted to get the core capabilities out and tested in the wild.
The FIPS design builds on decades of prior work in mesh networking protocols, traffic engineering and network security, and adapts and combines them to solve the problem of self-sovereign internetworking in a new way.
https://github.com/jmcorgan/fips/blob/master/docs/design/fips-intro.md
This is a v0.1.0 alpha. It has passed extensive simulation testing, small scale deployments, and is ready to be trialed in real world uncontrolled conditions. And if it breaks, you get to keep both pieces...
Rust, MIT licensed, Linux for now.

2026-01-23 02:14:22

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This also means you have to be comfortable going your own way and not rely on familial or tribal membership to validate who you are.

2026-01-23 02:10:47

No need to disengage, just stop arguing. Be an example, not an adversary.
Bitcoin touches on so many convenient but sacred fictions that many people have to hit "fiat bottom" before they become willing to entertain alternatives to what everyone knows.
#nevent1q…rkph

2026-01-21 16:35:35

Everything makes sense if you imagine the people in charge are fifth graders.

2026-01-01 23:06:52

"If there is hope, it lies with the Nostriches."
- George Orwell, 2026, maybe

2025-12-18 23:08:50

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All good points.
As someone else wrote, the biggest risk is a mathematical breakthrough. Since these are inherently unpredictable there is no way to hedge against something that might happen tomorrow or might happen never, other than to just give up.
On the other hand, it is the engineering difficulties in the practical implementations of these designs much more so than quantum error correction scaling that provides more fundamental limits on system size.
Issues such as thermal cooling, control circuitry and cabling, manufacturing yield, environmental shielding, and supply chains for components all present massive challenges to creating a hundreds of thousands of qubits system needed to produce error corrected logical qubits of the size necessary to put ECC at risk.
Surmounting these requires solving not just physics or math issues, but coordinating and tooling an industrial, financial, and political capacity I am deeply skeptical is actually achievable.
I maintain that the primary motivation to look at post-quantum cryptography now is to mitigate the "harvest and decrypt later" situation perhaps more important in communication systems like Nostr than in Bitcoin.

2025-12-18 21:02:49

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Hopium goes both directions, though. What's missing is an honest assessment and acknowledgement of the engineering practicalities involved in scaling the current state of the art. These will likely get solved, "eventually", as you say, but 1 yr. vs. 10 yrs. vs. 100 yrs. makes a qualitative difference in what current course of action is motivated.

2025-12-11 15:03:11

GM ☕ Do we have any Nostriches who have done the #Camino?

2025-12-08 19:55:41

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Heh, that must have been Tim, the one guy older than me there. But I certainly agree!

2025-12-07 20:09:39

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We don’t need no steenkin’ keys
https://blossom.primal.net/bf6dc2234128be0b8d62042c6255b6986d419c5d88cbd73dd7a5d4537a0e3137.jpg

2025-12-07 06:03:56

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I don't know, seems a bit gimmicky:
https://www.pentagram.com/work/caligra-c100-developer-terminal

2025-12-04 06:07:30

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This is great. I had assumed something like this must exist. My current efforts started as a side quest to understand why the NIP-65 inbox/outbox model seemed so broken; I hadn't intended to build out a full relay crawler 😏

2025-12-04 06:01:21

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I haven't, I'm still building this thing out. Tracking NIP-65 events seemed the logical way to recursively expand out relay discovery, followed by actually connecting to newly learned relays from those events and requesting their own NIP-65 events, etc.

2025-12-04 05:54:04

So far my relay crawling experiments show a steady state of about 800 nostr relays online and queryable at any point in time, while the collective unique relays extracted from recent NIP-65 kind 10002 inbox/outbox lists is nearly 3000. About half of the difference is down to DNS failures--relays that simply don't exist anymore.

2025-12-03 23:54:29

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There was a small but significant number of URLs that were discarded without trying because they were unroutable, including bare host names, localhost, .local and .private domains, IP address ranges that were for private use, and broadcast (!) IP addresses.

2025-12-03 23:49:43

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There were about 41500 kind 10002 events retrieved and processed to get the above, and the most common reasons for failure were failed DNS, connections refused, TLS handshake failure (bad certificates), or connection with no response.

2025-12-03 23:20:36

Just coded up a recursive relay crawler using NIP-65 events for discovery. Over the course of a few hours it discovered a total of 2,761 unique URLs for relays (after discarding a variety of malformed or otherwise unusable relay tags.) Unfortunately, actually going out and attempting a connection with each, only *800* were online and queryable! Not sure what to make of this. Clearly many people need to update their kind 10002 relay lists...

2025-12-03 05:42:40

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Butthurt is a terrible disease, affecting millions.

2025-12-02 05:31:16

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International airlines are a treat to be savored. Somehow US domestic airlines have all become crowded buses in the sky.

2025-12-02 05:18:37

I have to say that coming back into the world from seven years of self-imposed hermitage is both gratifying and horrifying. On the plus side, I have recently met and interacted with young people carrying the torch of a movement I had given up upon, yet the forces of humans at their worst remain arrayed as always against us.
Nonetheless, I am hopeful again.

2025-12-02 05:06:09

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Over two and a half minutes into it and I have no idea what's in it, and the reliance on memes and pseudo-humor has turned me away from watching any further. It sucks being older and informed.

2025-12-02 05:00:42

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Don't know anything about Flotilla, but my experience about such things is they emerge organically. People put stuff out there, sometimes it sticks, sometimes it doesn't.

2025-12-01 05:43:53

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I haven't found anything Nostr related other than Nostr itself. For bitcoin, the highest signal I have found is the "Delving Bitcoin" forums.

2025-12-01 04:32:43

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It pays to ignore the bleating and hysteria, and focus on signal.

2025-11-30 15:06:09

GM ☕ Last day of vacation before going back into the fiat world. I don't wanna!

2025-11-29 04:41:54

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Good times!

2025-11-26 19:25:08

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Not at all.

2025-11-26 16:12:12

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Not just suspected, painfully obvious from the start.

2025-11-26 13:52:04

GM ☕

2025-11-25 13:21:18

Nerd sniped by so many new ideas in the last few days the day job is really gonna suffer.

2025-11-24 12:29:23

GM ☕

2025-11-23 14:22:34

The kids are alright.

🛬

✈️

proof of life

If it weren't for the police and the army, politicians would just be disgustingly evil people you could safely ignore.
This one fact tells you everything you need to know about their actual role in the world--anything else is just propaganda to hide this.

2025-08-07 05:56:23

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And the wheel goes round and round, same as it ever was.

2025-07-02 02:03:21

https://blossom.primal.net/91b9c8e8ca910fb993e0463e1ffe114b1c736597f907ffb2d0729deffdcfa2de.gif A big beautiful box of pork...

2025-06-30 02:29:42

https://blossom.primal.net/a1397bfd804b4ef4b1cc657cb5092c3de5616ce6d8ab4491d7d63e5f234619c7.png

2025-06-28 00:50:47

We didn't get lucky, we just didn't listen to you.

2025-06-26 22:25:45

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la misma mierda, diferente día

2025-06-25 13:52:48

Bitcoin does not need politicians, it just needs them to go away.

2025-06-25 13:51:01

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Politicians quoting cypherpunk history are the jocks trying to copy your homework *and* take credit for it. Don't fall for it.

2025-06-22 00:34:22

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It was never "worthful". It was just a gentleman's agreement among a bunch of politicians to enforce power among themselves after overthrowing the previous bunch of of politicians, with a ton of effective propaganda that has kept it alive for a long time, until recently.

2025-06-20 03:37:36

One of the disappointments of being in my late 50s is watching young people having to learn the hard lessons of life all over again, instead of learning from history only a generation or two old.
Especially now, where events before the Internet seemingly never happened, and events after the Internet get endlessly memed or propagandized into whatever currently fashionable ideology benefits the status quo.
There has been a thin thread of rebellion against this that has survived in the form of cypherpunk activism of the 80s and 90s through the invention and proliferation of Bitcoin in the 2010s and now the advent of distributed, uncensorable communication networks such as Nostr.
And yet, it's not clear to me whether this nascent drive towards individual freedom will survive. Too much of the public discourse is consumed by "strategic reserve" this, "legal tender" that, and in general the tying of Bitcoin to its relation to the State. Politicians seek political favor by making noises allying themselves to the Bitcoin community, and to great benefit. The vast majority of Bitcoin movement is between exchanges, not individuals. I won't even go into the absurdities on display at conferences ostensibly about Bitcoin but have turned into promotional grounds for grifters and influencers.
We are at a unique point in history where we have both the technology and the motivation to establish direct, peer-to-peer, mutually beneficial, and most importantly, voluntary, non-coercive relationships among each other that bypass existing systems of surveillance and control.
Let's do this.

2025-06-17 01:14:00

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https://blossom.primal.net/02282dfce10094166333f7fcd3baf2d4b3fbe6bab474ba986b455c87fde2d5f9.png

2025-06-06 14:02:17

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Indeed. Properly used, AI is a developer's best friend, force multiplier, and pair programmer. But it's not a replacement.

2025-06-05 22:41:34

Sometimes it feels like being a small mouse dodging the feet of dinosaurs fighting each other for power, all the while a massive meteor is inbound.
You know mammals will emerge triumphant eventually, you just have to avoid the collateral damage long enough.
Be the mouse, not the dinosaur.

2025-06-01 14:43:33

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Delving Bitcoin has some of the highest signal in this entire space. The authors on that thread alone bring back some serious OG energy that is sorely missing elsewhere.

2025-05-23 05:21:27

Sometimes I am convinced that sociopaths in suits with flag-themed lapel pins will be the end of us. Other times I see the work that is happening in this space and get some modicum of hope.
Cypherpunks write code.

2025-05-19 14:18:19

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From what I read it might have lost propulsion, and the natural current was pulling it backward into the bridge.

2025-05-18 16:03:38

Step one of any journey back to our original self is to stop pretending, and to start seeing.
Live in the world as it is, not as others wish us to see it.

2025-05-17 03:43:03

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This is something definitely shared by pilots!

2025-05-17 03:01:23

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I was marveling over this new flex of posting Steak 'n Shake receipts and noticed the Fiat Amount thing for lightning payments. But I'd be really impressed if they used that for *all* the receipts.

2025-05-16 23:22:37

The choice of color of the prison guards' uniforms matters little to prisoners. Imagine them arguing all the time about red vs. blue making such a huge difference!
Crazy, I know.

2025-05-14 05:05:50

One of the very defining characteristics of the entire Bitcoin ecosystem is its voluntary participation by everyone involved.
Users choose to transact in bitcoin, what node software to run, and what valid transactions to propagate on the network.
Developers choose what node software and features to contribute their time and energy working on, and offer up that node software to users.
Miners choose to purchase electricity, which transactions to include, and when to enter into the proof of work lottery of producing a block.
The crucial difference in all of these is that nobody is made to, by force or threat of force, to act in any capacity.
Thus, in the absence of force, the *only way to influence the actions of others* is through persuasion, argument, and discussion. This is what is happening right now in the heated back and forth going on with the OP_RETURN configuration setting, and we should be celebrating the fact that nobody can be dictated to here.
So, welcome to cryptoanarchy, come on in, the water is fine.

2025-05-13 04:03:26

Have been recently working in Rust helping on an open source project completely unrelated to my professional work. It's nice to have a side project to spend time on again, and Rust brings the joy back into bare metal programming.

2025-05-12 13:22:50

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Smart at the edge, dumb in the middle.

2025-05-11 18:47:26

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What is twitter?

2025-05-10 14:02:49

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Still on my shelf!

2025-05-09 04:35:36

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I imagine this would have to be a learned thing, in that if you are following a hashtag from a text note, you'd start with that pubkey's outbox relay list, and then any other notes that show up for that hashtag, you'd scape the author of those notes outbox and add the relays to the list.
This doesn't solve de novo following a hashtag with no context, however.

2025-05-08 02:56:14

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I use it constantly for both Python and Rust projects, and it works great. But it needs to be treated like a pair programmer with oversight and checking. Still, the over productivity boost is enormous, especially for automating routine stuff.
It does struggle with Rust sometimes, certainly more often than with Python. I think that partly comes down to there being more Python code in its training set than Rust, and, Rust won't silently pass buggy code like Python often will.

2025-05-07 23:46:55

Writing code is great but have you ever fixed your neighbor's seven year old daughter's bike and watched her face light up when she finds out she can go outside and ride again?

2025-05-06 14:50:36

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Twitter is mind cancer.

2025-05-06 13:59:59

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Oh, sure. I don't post very often on Mastodon, but the academic related content is not really found elsewhere, and I don't reference my account there as any reliable way of reaching me.
Nostr is clearly the superior underlying technology. I'm just really looking forward to when the most frequent topic of discussion here isn't...nostr itself 😏