Nostr Web Client

Laeserin 8mo ago

Because Nostr is mostly avid Bitcoiners, at the moment, any project that isn't all about Bitcoin, or that isn't actively promoted by the big Bitfluencers and the Bitcoin dev fund (because they think it'll promote e-cash adoption), gets little attention.

But, that's okay.

The Internet is a big place and there are lots of people who care about Other Things.

In fact, there are billions of people and they don't all only care about Bitcoin, and lots of them have access to the Internet.

There are engineers, scientists, authors, homeschoolers, bookworms, history and theology buffs, doctors and... we'll scrape together some users, someplace.

We just have to build it, and they will come.

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Discussion

I’m on a cruise ship right now. The only thing we discuss here is cruising.

We are all the same 😂

Laeserin 8mo ago

Trying to parse through the PDFs has highlighted for me, how much knowledge is effectively trapped in that most-confining format. It forces all data into a strict corset and people are using massive servers running complex AI models to extract that information, on demand, for human consumption. Or they highlight or copy-paste little snippets, which means you need to display the entire PDF page and then the snippets, as well. How big is your monitor, bro?

They do this, leaving the data in PDFs, because PDFs print out precisely the same on all A4-sized paper. But who even owns a printer? I own one, but it isn't hooked up. It's been offline, for months, and nobody misses it.

Who even owns a PC or laptop? Almost everyone owns a smart phone, tho. The information needs to be formatted for reading and commenting on smart phones, and then reformatted to a printer version _when and if you go to print it_.

We're just going to extract it all, at once, for human consumption on any monitor on any machine. And then you don't need a fancy computer or a subscription, to get to the data. The data is then on the relays -- or even, on _your_ relay, on _your_ phone -- and it's written in plain text.

You can then just believe your own lying eyes.

Laeserin 8mo ago

This is the sort of wonky thing that motivates me. I know, it's not the sort of thing almost anyone else cares about, but it's the sort of thing where a small team of nerds can change the future, and I am so there.

DasFrettchen 8mo ago

You are wrong, we do care about it a lot. The problem is very technical though and it comes down to people like you to make it happen.

Laeserin 8mo ago

It's actually been a source of discouragement for us, as everyone is like...

Leave everything in the PDFs, bro.

Just add zaps to a PDF viewer, bro.

I could vibe-code that in 20 minutes, bro.

ᴛʜᴇ ᴅᴇᴀᴛʜ ᴏꜰ ᴍʟᴇᴋᴜ 8mo ago

these bros don't care about composibility, they just chasin' teh grantsz0rs

Laeserin 8mo ago

Latrica 8mo ago

In my opinion, some of these people need to just admit that they really don’t want others in their clique.

It’s cliquey. Cool. But some of them will throw in slogans and I just think it’s hypocritical. And sometimes laughable. My favorite hypocritical slogan some of them love to use is “Bitcoin is freedom money.”

I really want someone to articulate how Bitcoin can provide freedom, show examples with evidence, and answer my follow up questions without using logical fallacies.

No one has accepted my challenge to have an *intellectual* debate.

They love to have it and own it. They love to talk about it. Since Bitcoin is now “valuable”, they probably have attached their own self-worth and value to the price of Bitcoin. Now some of them feel emboldened and “better than” others. So much irony.

With that said, keep doing good work and good things will come your way. Perhaps, changing protocols might be something to consider in the future. Don’t go down with a sinking ship. Use it to your benefit. Don’t let things use you.

🇵🇸 whoever loves Digit 8mo ago

It's freedom money because I don't file taxes

But it's not freedom money because trying to avoid taxes makes it pretty much impossible for a lot of people to make money or survive today's fascism

Laeserin 8mo ago

It's freedom money because the currency is large enough for international trade without using any national currency as a carriage to travel over the border. That's why you don't have to know anyone's bank details, in order to zap them.

Which arguably means more for people in countries without a strong currency, but they are a tiny minority on here, so that fact tends to go down in all of the hype about nutzaps and video games and whatnot.

ᴛʜᴇ ᴅᴇᴀᴛʜ ᴏꜰ ᴍʟᴇᴋᴜ 8mo ago

that whole nutzaps thing is so puerile, when that shit started a lot of people went on my mute list or off my follow list

mentally so many of these devs are 12 years old even while a bunch of them are married and have young children, pathetic

Laeserin 8mo ago

Making everything you build into a penis joke isn't a sign of maturity and earnestness, you say?

ᴛʜᴇ ᴅᴇᴀᴛʜ ᴏꜰ ᴍʟᴇᴋᴜ 8mo ago

can't take any grown man seriously who behaves like this

ᴛʜᴇ ᴅᴇᴀᴛʜ ᴏꜰ ᴍʟᴇᴋᴜ 8mo ago

i was stuck around a lot of dudes like this when i was in prison... it's not funny unless you are a child who has just newly acquired such capabilities, no surprise that a lot of criminals are like this

Laeserin 8mo ago

I don't actually know any grown men who behaves like that. They're more the dry, droll wit sort of people.

ᴛʜᴇ ᴅᴇᴀᴛʜ ᴏꜰ ᴍʟᴇᴋᴜ 8mo ago

dad humor is fine :)

Tim Bouma 8mo ago

‘Freedom money’ is a big deal. Though technically no longer cool, but incredible to witness on the ground; I sent funds from the middle of the desert in India to someone in Zimbabwe. No banks or governments in the middle. We just need to focus building on top of transformative capabilities, diligently and quietly, serving communities versus hyping things like nutzaps - technically cool, but most users won’t care about.

Laeserin 8mo ago

I'm mildly nervous about supporting eCash on Alexandria, as I worry that less-informed users will get rugged and think it was our app.

Nobody seems to know that eCash isn't Lightning, and therefore is decoupled from Bitcoin. It's tokens/coupons/IOUs issued by someone with a Lightning node.

We also want to serve people with very little money. What if they earn what is to them quite a few sats, and then watch it just disappear?

🇵🇸 whoever loves Digit 8mo ago

Never support ecash

Simply Nostr 8mo ago

Why not ? E cash is awesome

Diacone Frost 8mo ago

Almost everyone starts with a custodial lightning wallet. Just saying.

https://stacker.news/items/951014

Laeserin 8mo ago

Yes. But that's almost always where they stay.

Diacone Frost 8mo ago

That makes me mildly nervous

Laeserin 8mo ago

And ecash is actually a layer entirely removed from Lightning. It's not merely a custodial Lightning.

It doesn't even necessarily have anything at all to do with Bitcoin.

Tim Bouma 8mo ago

In the end, ecash is just another payment mechanism that rides on top of bitcoin/lightning. The user won’t actually care other than that they need to trust their service provider. What I am building just looks like another lightning wallet.

The big issue is that there is indeed another layer of trust for ecash and that layer needs to be rock-solid before it goes operational. I am also mitigating the risks on that layer by storing everything on relays that can be independent of the custodial service. I have everything working, but it will be several months, maybe even a year before I have something that I would be comfortable certifying as a service. Once I get to that point, I will be pursuing interested parties that might want to be operators.

ᴛʜᴇ ᴅᴇᴀᴛʜ ᴏꜰ ᴍʟᴇᴋᴜ 8mo ago

let's just not support it in our version at least

running lightning infrastructure when you have more control over the last steps to the destination isn't as bad as dealing with shoddy commercial providers like my recent experiences, though it's more work... the actual servers aren't really expensive though, they mainly just need to stay online with high availability, and the software be configured to tolerate the amount of downtime of connectivity that is expected

Laeserin 8mo ago

We're just offering links to Njump profiles, at the moment, and people can go from there to their favorite daily driver to zap. That's enough for an MVP. We need to come up with some sort of coherent concept.

ᴛʜᴇ ᴅᴇᴀᴛʜ ᴏꜰ ᴍʟᴇᴋᴜ 8mo ago

yeah, something a bit like alby hub, i mean, it's fine, as far as it goes, between itselves so i feel like the idea would be to make a package that includes that, and have a communication system to have them form their own little subnet of the lightning network, so it has less interop problems while being easy to use

Laeserin 8mo ago

👀

Laeserin 8mo ago

Yeah, one of our goals is to give people in Zimbabwe or rural Nepal or whatnot, access to an application as high-quality and fully-featured as something someone at a Western university has access to.

That's only possible through:

1) large charity -- which means they are permanently beholden to whomever provides the charity, and the providers can be censored or pressured

2) distribution of FOSS, combined with micropayments -- so, Nostr

Laeserin 8mo ago

The problems they face are five-fold:

How to gain visibility and a good reputation, if they are not from a large university or are private citizens?

How to ensure/prove that their data has not been tinkered, while presenting it in a reusable and linkable format?

How to store the data and make it reachable for everyone on the planet, with the storage nearly-free?

How to prevent censorship?

How to use powerful search engines and complex data discovery and navigation tools, including intelligent ones, on the data, without bleeding money or needing to buy hardware?

I think we know the answer.

good/

Tim Bouma 8mo ago

Affirmative on that. My bet is that a community/foundation/church will take an interest in what is being built and will want to sponsor some development. Until such time, we need to keep on building what we think will be best.

Laeserin 8mo ago

Yes, especially as it's so abstract and novel that we will always have to "show and then tell".

Laeserin 8mo ago

I think that is what has lead to the dichotomy that the project with the most developers has the least funding.

Developers love working on something groundbreaking and innovative, and they can easily grasp vague, architectural concepts, whereas the most-popular things to fund are simply variants of things someone is already familiar with, or step-wise improvements upon something already existing. They've seen that xyz can make money elsewhere, so bring some of that money here.

Saying we're going to invent new data structures and algorithms and create new markets is a real funding turn-off because nobody knows if it is even possible, if they even understand the concept at all. It's only now, that we've proved the concept and have working models, that we're attracting people interested in funding the project.

Before, everyone was like

-1

Tim Bouma 8mo ago

I just wanna make a wallet that’s easy for anyone to pay for something and/or prove something.

Laeserin 8mo ago

That actually is much easier to get funding for.

Laeserin 8mo ago

TBH, we don't actually know, if this thing will ever make us any significant amount of money. We could eventually eek out enough side-gig money, supporting people's instances and adding bespoke features and etc., to keep us motivated to continue working on it, but that might be all.

Because we're designing it to be as forkable, runnable, and customizeable, as possible, we're sort of demonetizing the entire market for knowledge bases. Once it's been built, no one will pay us to build it a second time. They'll just ask their AI to "please build me an Alexandria, but in blue".

That's probably why it feels so much like charity, instead of like a get-rich-quick scheme. More like a go-broke-slowly scheme. 😏

But, you know, our ancestors didn't plant trees and build cathedrals, so that they can have trees and cathedrals. They built them so that the people who come after them can have trees and cathedrals. We call that "low time-preference development".

Laeserin 8mo ago

We've looked around at other protocols. It's been brutal building here, but we're hard people and this is the protocol that suits our needs best.

After we have implemented everything for Nostr, we can maybe create bridges to other protocols.

Latrica 8mo ago

Understood. I firmly support building bridges. I wish and the GitCitadel team much success. ✨

Laeserin 8mo ago

We actually have a real use case for zaps. How does the engineering firm in Germany quickly tip the person in Bhutan who has been giving them help with their new product design, as part of their international Development by Design effort?

Only Bitcoin can do that. Specifically Lightning.

Latrica 8mo ago

That’s awesome. I actually have numerous use case examples in the research paper about Bitcoin that I wrote. I plan to share one day. I’m just waiting on one thing. “Bitcoin Lightning” is an actual topic.

Laeserin 8mo ago

You can publish it on Nostr, with Alexandria, of course.

Latrica 8mo ago

Yeah I know. But first, let me see if this one thing happens.

In addition, I don’t want to just share a research article. I want the rollout to be unique. The research paper is the catalyst for other things. Once these other things are disseminated, I don’t mind uploading the research article.

The Merry Frankster 8mo ago

I'm here.

Ľḭṿḙśƫṟãɖãṁṹṧ💫#RunCoreV30 8mo ago

Maybe it could’ve been named

Bitcoin and (not much) other stuff over relays

Laeserin 8mo ago

😭

Nutzaps R Us