If Bitcoin integration is a uniquely special feature of Nostr, a lot of focus should be on broad experimentation around monetization - making services/features/gimmicks that people are willing to pay for (not NFTs).
Discussion
I'm building a bounty marketplace over nostr and it's going to be incredible
Best of luck. If you haven't seen it, maybe take a look at Resolvr, who spent a lot of time and energy into a bitcoin/nostr bounty marketplace. I think the pivoted, but not totally sure. https://stacker.news/items/301817
I'm going the other way. putting the agent back in the escrow (and removing all panels of developers, voting, programmed escrow, smart contracts, etc). I'll look into Resolvr though, thanks!
#nostr is the ONLY home for #bitcoin ... First all bitcoiners should be on #nostr ..
I mean ..it should be a mandatory part of owning bitcoin .. like you need Costco membership in US ..before you get social security number đ
Bitcoin integration is a uniquely special feature of Nostrâfor people that have Bitcoin to spend. Which is a tiny, tiny fraction of internet users.
That's the chicken-and-egg problem common to the adoption of new things. It can be worked from both sides. Lots of people working on promoting bitcoin adoption. Maybe people are also willing to adopt bitcoin just because there is something fun they want to do on Nostr?
It's very difficult to acquire Sats, that's the main issue for me. Person X may have become aware of something fun to do on Nostr, and they've discovered they need these things called Sats, which are apparently Bitcoin pennies of a sortâbut how to get them? That's where it breaks down. All the options out there present an order of magnitude too much friction.
What are the biggest friction points you see? And what would be your ideal scenario?
Ideal scenario:
I can invite anyone I know to private group.
1ď¸âŁ They have immediate access to #ecash and #lightning :pointright: because I run a private, AUTH, zero-knowledge mint for them (which they don't have to know anything about, for them it's just all ecash)
2ď¸âŁ They have access to that groups private order book to acquire :zap:
Eve, the community building software I'm building will be able to do #1 (except even better because it won't rely on any specific person to run a mint, but rather the mint will be run by the community themselves), and #2 could be done offline
> the mint will be run by the community themselves
As in the key pair of the group?
As in the mint's key is a multisig, with each member of the closed community network having to sign a message for minting new tokens and burning tokens (naturally this happens automatically as long as the user has the app open)
The mint part is not so simple. Small scale, no worries. Moderate scale, many worries.
First of all it may be illegal to run an unlicensed Cashu mint operating at even moderate scale in many countries. At small scale (groups of a few friends or family members) probably fine, grey area and all. But the mint starts doing any volume in these countries and then no.
This is because of what a mint is to these countriesâbasically a digital bank, with deposits like a bank, withdrawals like a bank, potential to fail like a bank. In regulatory terms this is very different to running a personal LN node, even with the same volume, or smaller.
In the EU a Cashu mint might come under MiCA, and some larger community mints might become de-facto VASPs under MiCA. (The VASP categorisation doesn't actually take volume into account, rather the nature of the service, what the mint is doing, how businesslike the whole operation is, etc.) If I was an EU citizen then I'd never allow myself to become the head of a Nostr community with a busy mint that ran on my server, regardless of what the community was about.
Regardless, all it may take is one or two larger community mints rugging the community for these regulations to suddenly become more in play. Also community mints would be very vulnerable to smurfing, which is a type of money laundering vector where agents will make many small transactions through a mint; if a community suspects its mint has become a smurfing vector, what is it even to do to? It gets messy fast.
Obtaining the license could be faster and cheaper in a jurisdiction like Estonia, Malta, etc. but that will require an entity in that jurisdiction. It'll also mean AML and CTF obligations, which are tricky in a Cashu context.
This is not a popular topic here, but it is what it is.
Throw in selling Sats for euros or dollars (a whole other type of license) and the community owner is going to be putting themselves at a higher degree of risk in these countries. Not to mention how to collect payment? PayPal won't allow it, Wise won't allow it, Venmo won't allow it (underneath Visa and Mastercard won't allow it), so how is the person buying the Sats to pay the seller in a way that is compliant? (Apps like Peach try to tiptoe around this but Peach won't scale, and anyway average commission on peer to peer Sat purchases there is like 20%, due to sellers wanting to be compensated for the risk.) So basically the community would always be under the tableâif not in one context then in another.
Again all of this depends on the countryâthe country of the mint itself, and of the users of the mint.
Anyway zooming out these are scale concerns for which Nostr is pretty far right now, and also stress testing the idea (for our own use case). TLDR small-scale casual community mints I think are a good idea, but only for close-knit groups of people who already have their Sats in hand.
Yeah, that's :110percent: why I've been talking about the Private group scale as the number one place for this. Beyond that, you run into all the regulatory issues **and ** you lose trust.
Our use case is private too, but in many places the regulator could care less about any private/public distinction. We looked at locking down a mint to a private group via various means, but lock it down too much and you've made the blind signature aspect irrelevant, lock it down too little and then all the AML stuff. (Actually all the AML stuff often regardless.)
I'm totally fine with having an AUTH mint that knows I'm in the group, but not who I am. This is possible.
That was our first approachâyou know everyone in the wider transaction pool but can't associate any individual transaction with any individual person. Doing that, however, ties the mint, the community, and the client all together in a certain critical regulatory sense. So if we had a Nostr client that was an EU entity then that entity would be a potential enabler of all activity on all mints in all communities (public and private) created in or accessed via that client. Same for many other places. That's the tricky part.
I don't see that issue at all for us.
1) Zapchat will have no clue about what private groups are using it
2) The payments by the mint are lightning payments, the mint being one node in the system. So only the group members know anything about the mint. (Or is it this part I'm getting terribly wrong?)
I dunno how you plan to structure it, but we found the issue can be both.
The mint needs the URL, the server, the associated LN node, and whatever basis for AUTH (database or other). A community member could spin all that up independently, and manage access independently, so not asking Zapchat to assist with any of it, nor letting Zapchat know the URL or any other details of the mint in a formal-input sense, or of the mint transactionsâit's all discussed in MLS e2e encrypted messages and all transactions done outside the client.
That would be no different that a bunch of people spontaneously agreeing to do all that with each other in a Signal group chat. Then Signal itself can legit say "we can't know anything about that".
But for the mint to actually be a basis for fun features then a bunch of data on the mint, the users and the transactions will have to pass through Zapchat's servers, of those of whatever other client, no getting around.
Yup, the goal is that make that spontaneous stuff, actually spontaneous.
And have the hosting provider not be the app. External service that should know as little as possible about what is being hosted.
Simply "buying sats". Let's assume you've just learned what a Sat is 5 minutes ago, now you've decided you need to get 5,000 of these so-called Sats because that'll unlock something fun on Nostr (which you've also just learned about a few minutes ago). Your motivation will carry you for about 5 minutes of Googling, that's about it.
Strike debit card purchase works in 30+ countries (not in Canada and some other larger ones), and not in some US states like New York. Where Strike does work (and I've just onboarded to test) you're looking at photo-scanning your passport, scanning your bank statement or utility bill, scanning your face, waiting a day, getting an ask for another scan of a bank statement, scanning that one too, waiting 2 more days, then getting approved. Then you must buy minimum $25 worth of Sats, then after that you must figure out how to send these to your Nostr app, and of course understand the underlying plumbing of it all to at least some extent so you don't fear you'll do something wrong. (The Strike UX is not easy for newcomers.) Nobody looking to grab a few Sats on a whim is going to go through that.
Or you could go the Primal route, but 30% goes straight to Apple. If you're thinking about the person providing the experiences (say a creator) it makes no sense to use Primal over say Patreon. On Patreon it's 8% and they just use their card. Primal it's 30% to Apple and the drop-off from having to still KYC and buy Sats, there's no creator business model there.
USDT is of course far easier, and maybe USDT Taproot integration will help depending how swaps develop. But at the moment simply "getting a hold of Sats" is a massive barrier for most people.
Very valid. Not sure that will change, since it is and will remain a currency exchange, and not just purchasing some diamonds in a mobile game.
Yeah if only it were diamonds in a mobile gameâbut commission free diamonds.
I think the best shot is USTD via Taproot. If someone can buy USDT on Revolut or whatnot, then send any amount to a Nostr wallet (say TRON to Taproot) and that Nostr wallet can swap any amount of Taproot USDT for Sats, then we may be getting closer. Right now all sorts of minimum amounts and barriers in that chain.
Or even just accept USDT zaps over LN, have both options.
What are the fun things to do on Nostr that I cannot do elsewhere?
Bitcoin can't be a "uniquely special feature of Nostr" because it is not contained by Nostr, right?
Any platform anywhere can add Bitcoin features like Nostr apps do.
Zapping being only in Nostr-compatible apps is partly cultural and probably also partly a lack of demand or interest elsewhere.
No?
Sure thing. Everyone else can add zapping, too. And maybe they will. But right now they don't have it. So Nostr can push the boundaries, which I'd love to see.