‘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.
Discussion
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?
Almost everyone starts with a custodial lightning wallet. Just saying.
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.
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
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.
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
👀
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
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.
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.
Yes, especially as it's so abstract and novel that we will always have to "show and then tell".
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
I just wanna make a wallet that’s easy for anyone to pay for something and/or prove something.
That actually is much easier to get funding for.
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".