I've known about Nostr for a while, but it wasn't until I received my first few zaps in a "Hey everyone, I'm new here" #helloworld message that things clicked for me.

The potential to earn with Bitcoin and receiving it straight into your wallet with no middlemen, however small the amounts would be, was facinating to me and has captivated my imagination since.

Was I providing value to the world by simply saying hello? What things could I do to provide value? What could be the ways to give back to this circular economy? Could a few sats transform into something bigger than me? What things could be built atop this new idea?

It is dawning on me how impactful the combination of Nostr and Bitcoin can be. Open Source, built from the ground up for freedom. A community of people who genuinely care. There is so much there to explore and to understand. It feels like opening a book for the first time, using a computer for the first time, or encountering a new life-experience that has you going "wait, I think this is significant" and being immersed with that new feeling.

Right now two hastags in particular have me going back to read again and again. #grownostr and #asknostr

#grownostr seems to be a place of people who want to build different communities within Nostr. People chatting in its purest form, often not knowing each other at all and engaging with their whole self, unadulterated, honest, open.

Then there is #asknostr, which seems like stackoverflow but for everything, anytime, people with random requests and benevolent people willing to help. Potential conversation starters and a human connection for anyone who might be struggling with something, whether technical or not.

There are no rules, and this has both sides of the yin & yang. In many ways I kind of love this, the fact that everything "just exists". The fact that all the messages aren't filtered or adjusted, that everything is linearly posted and readable like that is amazing.

This is how Twitter used to be, how Facebook used to be. That energy is here again! Can we keep it like this, this time around? Will Nostr be able to do what the big corporations have failed to do? This constructive melting pot is exactly what I think we need in our society, somewhere where you can find a new perspective.

If you have read this far, thank you. Thank you for being here and doing what you do.