Vincenzo Palazzo's avatar
Vincenzo Palazzo
vincenzopalazzo@sonarprivacy.xyz
npub1wg2m...dzaw
American by style, European by nature | ex- @amazon
Vincenzo Palazzo's avatar
Vincenzo Palazzo 2 months ago
The new Carl Desktop is available on carl itself over i2p If you are running linux x86 this is where you can find it App image: magnet:?xt=urn:btih:412c50488cc3ad55b468fecde741aafedf373569&dn=carl_0.1.0_amd64.AppImage Debian file: magnet:?xt=urn:btih:226ea4812a54f77f8a1e097712ecebc97a7382f1&dn=carl_0.1.0_amd64.deb
Vincenzo Palazzo's avatar
Vincenzo Palazzo 2 months ago
A few days ago I paid a Lightning invoice without touching my phone. I looked at a QR code through my Meta glasses, the glasses read the invoice, and Unify paid it over BOLT12. It's a proof of concept and still rough, but I think we're one of the first to ever try this on Bitcoin (or at least Lightning). The walletThe wallet I built Unify a few months ago. It's a bitcoin app, Lightning-only wallet, built entirely on BOLT12, and it does the basic things every wallet needs(why BOLT12 and not the usual invoices is a separate post. I'll get to it). The reason I could build it so fast is the Breez SDK @Breez_Tech. You add it to a project, let AI handle a lot of the rest, and in a few days, you have a wallet that moves real money. That's what I was talking about with @dannystagg, a friend of mine at Breez. ViareggioViareggio Danny and I had been chatting for a while, mostly about Meta glasses. We both use them, for slightly different things. We met in person for the first time at the Tuscany Lightning Summit in Viareggio. We talked about Breez's time2build challenge. I told him I didn't think any of the projects were really new (that's my opinion, not his!). When I criticize something I try to say why, so I gave him an example of what I'd consider new: paying with Meta glasses. They're good hardware, and nobody is using them to pay. He liked the idea. The missing pieceThe missing piece After the summit we kept sending each other the Meta AI SDK preview, saying we should try it. The problem is that the glasses need a companion app, and I was building one. So I added it to my todo list and started reading the SDK. What it does todayWhat it does today You open Unify and set up the glasses. They connect to the app, and the app shows the camera from the glasses. You look at a Lightning invoice, the glasses detect it on their own, and Unify pays it over BOLT12. The hard part is the scan. The first version of reading the QR through the glasses is unreliable, and that makes anything more than "look and pay" difficult. That's what I'm working on now. What doesn't work yetWhat doesn't work yet The flow is still tied to Meta. What I want is to say "Hey Meta, pay this invoice" and have the glasses take the picture, send it to the app, and let the app pay it. That isn't possible yet. It needs the glasses and the SDK to get better, and that will take some time. For now you pay by looking, not by talking. This is a small video demo:
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Vincenzo Palazzo 🟥 (@PalazzoVincenzo) on X
How I paid with Bitcoin using my Meta glasses built by @Breez_Tech Thanks to @dannystagg, for pushing me to implement this idea https://t.co/UZx...
 What's nextWhat's next Credit to @dannystagg at @Breez_Tech, who helped me try this for real. Next I want to work on the voice flow and make the scanning reliable. And I still owe you the post on why Unify is built on BOLT12. You can find me at @PalazzoVincenzo.
Vincenzo Palazzo's avatar
Vincenzo Palazzo 2 months ago
Carl: the torrent client I always wanted but couldn't find If you've ever felt like you were renting your own privacy from a tracker, this one's for you. # Carl: the torrent client I always wanted but couldn't find I've been using BitTorrent for years, and one thing always bothered me. The protocol is peer-to-peer, but almost nothing around it is. You still depend on trackers and indexers to find anything, and those are the parts that get blocked, seized, or logged. Your IP is attached to every piece you download and seed. For something that is supposed to be decentralized, that always felt wrong to me. So I started building Carl. Carl is a small, privacy-first BitTorrent client. It started as a CLI, like most of my projects, and now I'm building a proper desktop GUI on top of it so it is not only for people who live in a terminal. The goal is to do everything a BitTorrent client should do, without leaking who you are. ## Finding torrents without trackers The first difference is how you find torrents. Instead of relying on a few indexers, Carl finds and publishes them over Nostr (NIP-35). Every torrent is a signed event, so you can check who published it and which relays carried it. No account, no login, and nothing central that can be taken down. You query the relays directly, and publishing is basically one command. Pretty neat, right? ## Not leaking your IP The second difference is anonymity. I wanted Tor to be first-class here, not an afterthought. You can download over Tor, and you can also seed as a Tor hidden service, which is the part I like most. Your files live behind a .onion address and your IP never touches the wire. When you seed this way, Carl turns off tracker and DHT announces by design, and it tells you clearly that it did. There is no "trust me" here, you can see the real state on screen. ## Privacy you can actually see One small detail that matters to me. Most clients hide routing deep in a settings menu. Carl puts a badge on every transfer (clearnet, proxied, or tor) so you always know how something is routed without going to look for it. Three ways to find peers (trackers, DHT, Nostr) and three ways to route them (direct, proxy, Tor), labeled the same way everywhere. There are also no accounts, because there is no server. Your identity is just a local Nostr keypair that never leaves your machine. ## Where it's at Carl is still early. The CLI works today and the GUI is coming together. I'm sharing it now because if you care about this kind of thing, your feedback is what I need before going further. Ask your agent to install Carl for you and to teach you how to use it:
GitHub
GitHub - vincenzopalazzo/carl: Carl is a BitTorrent light client that preserves the privacy of the common user without requiring be Mr. Robot! ofc it is compliant with https://www.bittorrent.org/beps/bep_0000.html
Carl is a BitTorrent light client that preserves the privacy of the common user without requiring be Mr. Robot! ofc it is compliant with https://ww...
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