Nostr Web Client

I’m going to talk about Ethereum, hear me out.

Ethereum is a Turing complete consensus blockchain tokenised by its own currency Ether.

This idea by Vitalik Buterin was incredibly compelling and still is today, even though few real world use cases have emerged.

For example, as a company, I could pay a carbon tax in Ether, locked into a smart contract. If the temperate rises by more than “n” degrees year on year based on a known agreed external (blind) oracle, say a weather station located near my factory.

Fantastic, we now have an automatic climate tax.

In reality, few realistic applications exist, however the idea is very compelling and many flocked to Ethereum as a promise of the future. This inflated its utility token “Ether” into stratospherically high prices.

This, in turn, attracted speculative investors and traders only looking at the price signal of the token and no longer considering the utility. This created a bubble which has gradually deflated over time.

This is why we are seeing Bitcoin, which only attempts to be money, succeed relative to Ethereum.

As Ethereum fails, and Bitcoin development strides on, an opportunity arises to try to do what Ethereum and all the other related altcoins have so far failed to do. Computational utility. And to do this on Bitcoin, the most successful “Crypto”.

The first unintended hijack of Ethereums utility are the JPEGs we are seeing on our blockchain.

This latest drive to make Bitcoin Turing complete is potentially the final destination for developers keen to explore the potential of Bitcoins eco-system.

Perhaps Bitcoin is going to absorb all the altcoins. Perhaps that is the goal of Bitcoins developers.

I don’t comment whether this is good or bad, I’m just exploring whether this may be the agenda.

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Discussion

Melvin Carvalho 8mo ago

With taproot, the Nostr + Bitcoin stack is effectively Turing‑complete and comes with an instant social graph. In theory it can do everything Ethereum promised—but the truth is, there hasn’t been much demand for on‑chain computation once you strip away token speculation.

Ethereum’s launch seeded a large insider premine while branding itself “decentralised like Bitcoin.” That skewed foundation is a bit like charging eternal royalties on a proprietary database: every layer built on top inherits the tilt. No surprise many apps devolved into pump‑and‑dump schemes.

Bitcoin / Nostr give us a shot at building on a non‑rigged base layer: a genuine free market. Of course, entrenched players prefer systems they can bend. The real contest isn’t technical capability—it’s whether we’re willing to choose open rules over rigged ones.

So far rigged markets dominate.

mike 8mo ago

CompuServe and AOL both had their own networks before they embraced the Internet.

𝕞𝕪𝕡𝕒𝕥𝕙𝕥𝕠𝕗𝕚𝕣𝕖 8mo ago

I worked in tech support for then back in the day. Some really great people were there then. dial up days! Lol 😂

mike 8mo ago

Yeh, I RAS ISDNs were the best 😂

Melvin Carvalho 8mo ago

I member. When Tim asked browsers to connect to the internet, they said, "Why would we do that?". Bitcoin and nostr can already build turing complete free markets. But we are in the "why would we do that?" phase. People are used to rigged markets, and the incentives that go with them. There is no appetetite for truly free markets. Sadly.

mike 8mo ago

I know you work for Tim, so no offence intended, but I preferred the Internet before the web came along 😂

Melvin Carvalho 8mo ago

I dont work for Tim. He is a colleague. I do build stuff that we both use and vice versa. No offense taken, everyone is entitled to their prefences. I'm not one to judge. I do see the web as not yet finished, however. And I think that is a good thing to spend time on completing.

mike 8mo ago

Also Xanadu, that's not finished yet either 😂

Melvin Carvalho 8mo ago

Yes, I know Ted Nelson. I helped orange pill him. He's at internet archive now. Xanadu is a neat system, but lacks the same network effect of the web. So you can spend your time making a big difference to a small number of people, or making a small difference to a large number of people. There's actually the story of when Tim bought Ted's book "Literary Machines", and could not pay for it because he could not cash a check in swiss francs. I eventually paid Ted in BTC to show it could be one. It would be nice to add some xanadu ideas to the web such as transclusion. In fact the web operating system that we are working on does much of this now.

mike 8mo ago

I tried this same joke on you about a year ago with the same response.

I'm glad you enjoy working with the old guard, must be nice memories.

Tim Bouma 8mo ago

I lived through that web phase shift which happened in 1996. I worked for a company that sold the search engine software for the backends of AOL, Compuserve, etc. The web hit like a storm in early 1996 when Bill Gates decided to pivot. I was on the Microsoft campus at the time and saw the internal memo. Within two years, we saw our market disappear for search engines to be replaced by webcrawlers. Then Google hit with their PageRank algorithm.

ᴛʜᴇ ᴅᴇᴀᴛʜ ᴏꜰ ᴍʟᴇᴋᴜ 8mo ago

"smart contract" chains are like commodore 64 computers, the shitcoiners are so utterly deluded about computation capability

try and implement a (N-1)N comparison matrix on a shitcoin chain

it'll cost you a million dollars worth of shitcoin gas fees to do it once with a 10000 element data set, and take about a day to complete the computation

𝕞𝕪𝕡𝕒𝕥𝕙𝕥𝕠𝕗𝕚𝕣𝕖 8mo ago

That may be their agenda, and it will then probably fork from the original Bitcoin that just wants to be money.

Ironically with storing jpegs, the only viable uses I can think of is in games, and there you would want it done cheaply and with tiny transaction fees, so bitcoin would be totally not useful for this, just like ETH isn't.

Svetski 8mo ago

Sounds a little dangerous

CitizenPleb 8mo ago

“If the temperate rises by more than “n” degrees year on year based on a known agreed external (blind) oracle, say a weather station located near my factory.”

It’s not hard to see why ETH was a scam.

mike 8mo ago

The unintended consequences of ill considered examples 😂

CitizenPleb 8mo ago

🤣👊

btcttombola 8mo ago

I agree ETH was over his real price.

But it is not the only one to have been a speculative value for a time.

I don't think for ETH it is over, because if BTC want to stay a "money" value, it needs some "side" blockchain to host other "dirty" content.

Now that ETH is again to a reasonnable value, it can built again another future.

Remember with the web it was the same, a speculative period at the beginning, with business angels that have invest in stupid web project just because it was "web". This speculative bubble exploded and some true web project have born from the ashes.

I think with ETH it will be the same, and as i said a way to exit for a different reason next to BTC.

Keep BTC for money and secure / stable / value usage.

Keep ETH for experiment and new possibles usages of blockchain.

There is no need to have a fight or one winner here, just different purposes and usages.

mike 8mo ago

I had similar arguments in the late 80’s.

Keep the Internet for academia, military, research and the government, and make X25 for business.

btcttombola 8mo ago

The usage will have the last word, over our toughts.

btconboard #LNHANCE or #CTV 8mo ago

How do they propose to get Turing complete at the BTC base layer? That would take multiple gigantic forks. We can’t even multiply or concatenation for gods sakes

mike 8mo ago

Multiply is OK, but division on a floating point is a nightmare 😂

I’m no expert but as I understand it, existing Bitcoin scripts combined in Merkle trees through taproot give a Turing close engine already.

Vveerrgg 8mo ago

Ultimately. If ppl start spamming the chain. Fees go up … Lightning & Cashu step in … balance is restored.