Philip Charter, fiction writer, prose editor, the man behind totallyhumanwriter.com and the editor of the 21 Futures Bitcoin fiction anthologies, joins Avi for a conversation about storytelling, the slow craft of prose, and the gap between the two that most people don't see until they try to cross it.

The thread that runs through the hour: Bitcoin is not the story. People don't care about Bitcoin, they care about the impact it has on their own lives, and the work the space is sleeping on is the work of showing those impacts in human terms. They argue that Bitcoin-centric fiction faces an almost impossible bind: Bitcoiners treat fiction as frivolous, and non-Bitcoiners read anything orange-tinted as a scam. The more interesting territory is stories where Bitcoin lives quietly in the plot rather than wearing laser eyes on the cover.

From there the conversation moves into the long apprenticeship of prose, the chasm between a great oral storyteller and a workable sentence on the page, and the unmistakable tells of AI fiction – the stacked adjectives, the spectral humming, the silences that stretch, the quiet everything. Avi shares his own experience using AI for the first pass of July 18 and the horror of recognizing those tics. Philip's defence of the short story form follows: it is a snapshot of change where the reader writes the ending – meaning living between the words and after the full stop, which is precisely the territory LLMs cannot reach.

They close on Bitcoin's culture funding problem, the case for patrons and guilds (Bitcoin for the Arts, the artist guild forming around BTC Prague), and the affliction that keeps artists making things whether anyone pays for it or not. Plus Philip's nearly-finished fantasy novel about a husband chasing mythical islands across an alternate-world ocean while his wife tries to find his trail home.

Links

• Philip on Nostr
• Totally Human Writer
• 21 Futures
• Bitcoin For The Arts
• Finding Home Episode 4 [Discount code: PIONEER21]
• Revolution.Rocks
• BTC Prague Discount code (15%) – NOSTR

What does it mean to be human online? In an age of AI agents posting, interacting, and transacting across the network, the question has stopped being philosophical and started being structural. Avi is joined by David Strayhorn (Brainstorm) and Nathan Day to dig into proof of personhood and why your social graph might be the most non-intrusive way to solve it.

On Nostr, bots are first-class citizens. The problem isn't that they exist, it's that we have no native way to tell who is who they claim to be. Nathan traces his path from BTC Map's proof of place to the attestation primitives that grew out of that work, and now to the Person NIP he's preparing to publish. David comes at the same problem from the other side: tags and decentralized lists, community-curated structures where web-of-trust scoring filters the spam by default. The two approaches turn out to be complementary.

The conversation maps the natural progression – proof of person, then proof of profession, then proof of competence – and lands on the inversion underneath it all: first-person credentials, issued by sovereign individuals and verified by the people who actually know them. Music discovery becomes the worked example. Spotify surfaces the popular. So does ChatGPT. But a Brainstorm-style service operating on social proof can finally surface the Joe Martins of the world. Timeline: Nathan says weeks. David says definitely this year.

Links

• Attestr
• Brainstorm.world
• NosFabrica

A man who travelled to 42 countries was asked to then go as far as he could travel. He found the farthest journey was the one within himself.

Paco of Run with Bitcoin returns after two years off the grid to talk about where he disappeared to. After finishing his 42-country journey at the end of 2023, the road ran out. An ankle injury ended his running. The conference circuit blurred into late nights and lost purpose. A wake-up call in Prague sent him to the Himalayas, where he traded the road for yoga, silence, and a notebook.

What followed was the inner journey that no map could chart. The AWS reset (not what you think it is). Three months of writing that produced 700 pages of blabber. Six months chasing the wrong tools and the wrong editors. The slow lessons in patience and humility. And eventually, the way back to the community through grassroots work with the 256 Foundation, the BitAxe assembly project, and India's quietly thriving Bitcoin scene.

Avi and Paco also dig into the upcoming book, "Proof of Work" or possibly, "Around the World with Two Bitcoins," and the Geyser all-or-nothing fundraise that ends Friday May 9th. With six and a half million sats to go and five days left, the man who traveled the world is asking the village to help fund the song he wants to sing in the next one.

Links

• Paco's Geyser Campaign
• Paco on Nostr
• Finding Home Episode 4 [Discount code: PIONEER21]
• Revolution.Rocks
• BTC Prague Discount code (15%) – NOSTR