Replying to Avatar やトナ

Taking break from nostr for a few days. I need to get off tilt and focus on my work.

I’ve been reflecting on the state of things here as i start to use bluesky more often (i still like nostr much better fwiw).

I know this may offend some of you but I’m getting frustrated with how caught up we all are in our zapping wonderland with no concern for the outside world.

If we want this place to grow and succeed we really need to take a look in the mirror and ask ourselves what it would be like to join nostr right now if you knew nothing about bitcoin. You would probably hate it, and stop using it within a day. Our worlds may revolve around bitcoin, but to a majority of people, they could give two shits about bitcoin.

Nostr is now considered by many outsiders as a “bitcoin project”. And I, for one, think that’s a terrible thing for nostr adoption and growth. There are brilliant people in this world who care about freedom tech but just don’t understand bitcoin yet and want nothing to do with it. And by making nostr all about bitcoin, we’ve scared those brilliant people off, who could have helped this place develop even further than it already has.

The way things stand right now, I see nostr adoption as being fully tied to bitcoin adoption. People won’t want to come here until they understand bitcoin. Instead of selling people just nostr, we now have to sell them nostr + bitcoin. And it shouldn’t be that way.

I’m still bullish on nostr, but we really need to do some self reflection at this point and ask ourselves what the correct path forward is.

See ya in a few internet frens 👋

I think it’ll get a bit smoother when clients begin to feature direct payments, hopefully with an option to use an in-app custodial wallet a la Fountain (podcast app). That way the burden is not on the user to go and find a separate lightning wallet app and learn how to get their Nostr profile set up with an NIP-57 compliant address etc.; it would be turnkey.

Users should be able to start accumulating satoshis from zaps without taking any action at all. For people that don’t care about bitcoin, the satoshis might as well be a relatively meaningless social currency similar to the “likes” they’re used to on legacy social media. But if the user accumulates enough bitcoin to be meaningful and wants to take custody of it, they can do so if they choose.

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