The Public is the DJ If you walk along the coast near Scheveningen, you can sometimes still feel a wisp of freedom in the air. The sea and the beach can do that to a person. Combine it with music, and you have a fantastic concoction, a magical mix everyone would like a taste of.

"What if we could broadcast our music all over the beach? The beach?! LAND!" Where laws stop at national borders, radio waves just keep going!". This is how I imagine the thought process of the pioneers who started Radio Veronica. What a brilliant idea! Just sail your little boat just outside the national borders, and start broadcasting. Whatever you want to get out there. Nice. Whoever wants to listen tunes in, and whoever doesn't, ignores it. Perfect.

What else doesn't stop at borders? Information wants to be free, or so it seems. The internet is a good example of this. Bitcoin even more so.

It is a 'Meme-World' and we are just living in it. Where Radio Veronica once embodied freedom in its frequencies, flowing over the Netherlands and Belgium, you now only hear the surf, filled with advertising, nonsense, and "the news". Sometimes, if you're lucky, a musical gem suddenly lies in the sand. But often, they are like razor clams. Expertly and purposefully assembled to do what they were made for: maintaining what was. Because when you pick up such a razor clam on the beach, there is no life left in it. The same goes for the many radio stations, commercial or not. The factory music, pre-cooked and all, is pumped into your ears in bite-sized chunks. At least, that's if you can still bear to listen to an average radio station for an extended period of time. Of course, this writing is a bit hyperbolic in its setup, but it should be clear that there is room for improvement.

Enter Noderunners Radio & the Jukebox Bot , the very first Bitcoin-powered radio station, where anyone can be the DJ. No longer will we succumb to the dictatorship of the oligopoly that holds sway over the music industry. A new, more melodious tea party has emerged.

We are on the eve of a "Cambrian explosion" in FOSS.

Or, Free (as in freedom) Open Source Software. The Jukebox Bot is also FOSS. This means that anyone can get started with it. Currently, this little robot is still somewhat limited in its movements. But thanks to a few brilliant Noderunners, hard work is being done to modularize the software. This means that it looks like such pieces of software in the future can 'on the fly' hook in and out with other pieces of software, to provide a certain service.

We envision a future where musicians can hash their work to the timechain as proof of creation by the creator. This would replace legacy copyrights with a more organic system. The process would likely involve a musician generating a unique digital fingerprint (a hash) of their song file and then embedding this hash into a Bitcoin transaction. This transaction, once confirmed and added to a block on the Bitcoin time-chain, would serve as an immutable and verifiable timestamp of the song's existence.

To receive payments, the system would utilize Bitcoin's Lightning Network and Nostr clients. When a user requests a song via the jukebox, the system would automatically send a payment in "sats" (the smallest unit of bitcoin) directly to the musician's Lightning address. The payment is instant and peer-to-peer, bypassing traditional royalty collection agencies and allowing musicians to be rewarded directly for their work.

We imagine that the public listening to the radio, when it eventually matures to FM and AM transmissions, determines what is played , while quietly also transmitting the status of the Bitcoin network over FM and AM.

Try it yourself. Listen via https://radio.noderunners.org or https://zap.stream/noderunnersradio. To add music, you can use the web interface of the jukebox to Noderunners Radio at https://jukebox.lighting/jukebox/web/-1001672416970 or use the TG chat at https://t.me/noderunnersradio

How robust do you want it to be? Any amateur can make a receiver with some copper wire and a little tinkering. Okay, we don't have an antenna yet and are for now bound to the waters of the internet, but our ambitions are high. The passion and the puzzle pieces are there, and they will one day be put together. Why not by you and me? If you don't yet see the path entirely, don't worry, we are also still figuring a large part of it out, but it comes down to the fact that it is in principle possible to replace legacy copyrights with a more organic system. Top-down systems, where a central power wields the scepter, are slowly but steadily being overgrown with the ivy of technological progress. A redistribution of power back to the individual.

Welcome to the most confusing decade ever. If you're trying to find the signal through the noise, you're not alone. It's predictable that this transition will not go smoothly in many areas. Evolution is always a story that is discussed and fought from different perspectives. Behind the scenes, people are working hard to make the transition as painless as possible for as many people as possible. Noderunners Radio and the Jukebox Bot are trying to contribute to that in their own way. Something we are now working on but is not yet completely finished is making it possible to reward the musicians directly the moment someone requests their music via the Jukebox.

If all this is incomprehensible language for you, or if you can't imagine what is being suggested above, we invite you to come and play with what already works. You can do this via the Telegram group of Noderunners Radio, the testbed for the Jukebox Bot: https:t.me/noderunnersradio

Current Status For now, this project is in its early days, even though it has been up and running for ~three years. Those building on it have been doing it at a loss of funds, when time and life permits it, as a hobby, out of a love for music and community. If this resonates with you, consider supporting us however and when you can. Thank you for your time and attention. Please play us a song!

Signed, from international waters, Noderunners Radio.

P.S. If you want to help build our shared Bitcoin future, consider supporting these projects.