A panel of people from a few different countries.
The UK, where the event is, and the US currently have money which perhaps is good enough that the people there don't see much need to replace the money. Running global reserve currency helps exploit other poorer countries. The problems are fairly invisible.
But in other countries, poorer countries with even worse money, countries more exploited by debasement of the global reserve currencies, the problems with government money are more evident. They see the need for an alternative more strongly.
Adoption is important though. Money is only money if it's widely accepted. So given the choice of more users or higher price, the panel would all pick more users.
#bitfest #bitcoin
Despite much opinion to the contrary, the government money we use is crappy.
I'm at bitfest in Manchester to find out if Bitcoin could be a better money.
It could hardly be worse.
The mood is still good, people are joking about recent devaluation rather than crying. Those who aren't all in are trying to buy more at the discount.
After an introduction by Mad Bitcoins, Joe Bryan explains the problem with government money.
He imagines an island on which two types of money are tried, with a dividing wall between them.
When economic problems hit, government can just print more money on the fiat side. Everyone now using money which is worth less. Distorting prices, inflating asset prices, making the rich (who hold assets) richer and the poor (who have to pay inflated prices) poorer. Driving wealth inequality.
On the hard money side, government must tax properly. Take in more from the rich rather than inflating to take it from the poor. Reducing wealth inequality.
On the government money side, the wealthy monitize houses, stocks, resources. Saving in money is impossible, its inflated away. So they save in assets and hording resources. Capital is misallocated. The youth can't afford houses. Poverty traps are caused. The only way out is printing more for benefits. Making it all worse. More economic crises, more printing. More government debt.
Eventually, the wall is broken. Government money people can save in the hard money instead. It reduces the value of government money further. More printing. More inflation.
Eventually, war. Funded by printed money.
The dollar is the best of a bad bunch all other government money is falling in value even faster.
I wonder, is bitcoin really this better money though? It's limited, hard, and can't be printed without energy investment.
I'm still unsure that fixing money fixes the world.
--
Note: "crypto" is mostly more like government money than bitcoin. It can be printed indefinitely by it's makers, does not cost it's makers to print. Crypto is usually just a scam people to get more bitcoin. Bitcoin is not crypto.
#bitfest #bitcoin
I was looking at this with Ben when I told him I was Starship Schrödinger's Destiny and he bluffed like he knew what that meant quite convincingly. Good man. He's figured it out now though.
Eugene points out that in the current centralised social media, your identify is held by the provider.
On nostr, the user holds the keys to their own identity.
One identity works with many apps. It can't be revoked deleted or taken over by the service provider.
This gives you a credible exit, you own the account so you can move it elsewhere if the web host is toxic or abusive.
#nostr #nostrshire
https://cdn.nostrcheck.me/2016291e18d29163d8dfc6199cd86b020fa3a8fadd805a0af4d676328a3ebc68.webp
Panel talking about dark markets on nostr.
Nostr can be quite anonymous and encrypted and connected to payment via bitcoin. Can it therefore do Silk Road? Allow anonymous markets?
Nobody wants to publicly advocate for selling illegal drugs, but yeah, sure, people could do that. There's even protocol types for market places.
Relay owners might get into legal issues if they are forwarding illegal market listings. But this is true in general, there are also illegal images and even illegal text.
Nostr relays and Devs might find themselves in legal trouble anyway, due to the general legal crackdowns on internet requiring age proof and id on websites obstensively to protect kids. These are freedoms we all need to fight for. Perhaps brains will drain to more free jurisdictions? Devs move to where open development is legal? Not the panel at least. They want to say at home.
#nostr #nostrshire #darkMarkets
https://cdn.nostrcheck.me/cd50ce75f3f65544bbb9a538b5166b305d9c14fac0a7e2db80698ba404da7719.webp
Angor is a crowdfunding protocol for nostr and bitcoin.
Dan here is building it. Kickstarter without middle men.
Accountability is key. What stops the fund raiser just fleeing with the coin?
Funds are programmed to be released in stages, time locked in a multisig.
So if they aren't meeting milestones, investors can withdraw. If the founders are buying lambos instead of building, just cash out at that point.
Permissionless and decentralised, no servers except nostr relays and bitcoin nodes. No third party's claiming 30 percent fees. The system is a nostr client scanning relays for investment object types. Allowing investment into the funding contracts and subscription to updates.
#nostr #nostrshire #angor
https://cdn.nostrcheck.me/b7ab5821977da4a1af2774b69556d45a844f195e25da9f76af6b685be5e650de.webp
Black Coffee from lnbits likes internet of things, but doesn't like the way it tends to work with centralised servers and spying companies running them.
But what if your coffee pot and lights and smart plugs were nostr instead?
Nobody can cut your machine off, it has it's own keys and encryption, you could even ruin your own relay to talk to it instead of using public relays.
Remote control without having to expose the home network.
You could even make it require zaps and so make a vending machine.
Demonstration by sending lightning requests to the coffee pot on stage works better than the mikes that have been feeding back this afternoon 😆
#nostr #nostrshire #internetOfThings
Speaking of kids, here if a kid who is building a nostr gaming system.
Not by vibe coding, by learning how to use unity.
Gamestr.io is the marketplace he's building. Submitting a protocol improvement proposal for gaming types.
His gaming market is first going to feature a Tetris clone that broadcasts scores as that new type.
Talented kid named Sam.
#nostr #gamestr #nostrshire
https://cdn.nostrcheck.me/44df9ade1a0822e04dc141b20393bd6ac46bf0a97475592d328884ad171c6886.webp
Wouter constant is talking about permissionlessness. Nostr is a protocol that doesn't need some central server to authenticate your requests. Which is good. But this means that, say, children can use it without parents permission.
Online safety act and others are closing down the internet to protect them kids. So can nostr have accounts that do need permission? Can it be made kid safe? Of only to satisfy crazy governments under parent pressure.
Weboftrustfoundation exists to try and build kidstr, some kind of nostr for children.
Mostly just asking questions so far. How can it work? How can it avoid labelling vulnerable people to exploit?
#nostr #permissionlessness #nostrshire
Panel asking what nostr doesnt fix?
Relay centralisation could enable censorship, and the UI asking users to manage private keys is tricky.
Could one app become a centralisation choke point? They say no. Agreed. Nostr has very good migration here, if one app goes bad it's easy to move.
Privacy is not solved here, since almost all content is public anyway, by design. But since so users have public keys, it's a step towards enabling privacy. Agreed, and at least clients won't generally spy on every mouse click and scroll pause.
No mention of the thing I think most important, that censorship resistance means poor moderation that means bullying, spam, and harassment. That's tricky to solve I think. The fediverse model seems more suitable for good moderation.
#nostr #nostrshire
Marti Malmi talks about cloud flare being down but nostr staying up.
Decentralised software isn't supposed to have these single points of failure, even though some clients failed due to dependency on it.
Media files in particular aren't as decentralised as we might hope. Can we decentralise that better? Content addressed media available from many servers should be better.
#nostrshire
Hummm. The machine written code I've generated often has memory leaks and poor input validation. Chances of unnoticed xss errors or similar or SQL injection attacks doesn't seem impossible to me.
Good talk though. Might try it out some time. Presumably it'd handle making a rust site, say?
Derrick Ross from Shakespeare reckons there open web is in trouble because you got to be a dev to build a website.
He seems to think his app Shakespeare can make it easier to make a web app by using ai 😕
"Build me a Twitter like website" is the kind of instruction he thinks it will handle.
A local app running on your own machine, though calling the big ai model apis. Including if you have the power at home to run deep seek or open models.
I find myself suspecting it'd be hard for vibe coders who aren't devs to tell if they had vibe coded buggy insecure software or not.
#vibeCoding #nostershire
Nostrshire panel talking about Adam Curry's podcast2.0 , more tags in your podcast rss for payments, in the hope it can fund producers. Did you know besos takes 75 percent of all Audible money? Actors and writers sharing scraps from Amazon's table.
Hot news is that keysend tags are out of fashion and the bolt11 lnurl invoices are taking over.
Podcast platforms can be bridged through nostr to enable cross platform comments and discovery but making users create key pairs is to complex the fountainfm guy reckons. Wants to hide and shatter l abstract away that complexity.
#nostr #nostrshire #podcasting2.0
AJ at nostrshire ding a good job explaining why security matters and why we have to get off the surveilled and privately owned media
#aj #nostr #nostershire
I'm at nostrshire, the first nostr conference in the UK. Ben arc kicks it off talking about the width of the ecosystem.
#nostr #nostrshire
Went to see [Rob Manuel](https://bsky.app/profile/robmanuelyeah.bsky.social ) doing his anon_opin show.
The very first one. And my opinions are officially so great I won the very first prize. A jar of his queen themed Maam-olade.
Mostly for provoking Doctor Who discussions and having head-shaving mistakes evident I suspect.
It was a fun night in a tiny pub with mostly old grey gen-Xers agreeing with each other about trivial things and laughing.
Excellent stuff. Nice to see you again Rob. Good times were had.
So everyone's wondering if there's a financial crisis coming from the popping of the dotcom bubble.
Here's a little chart of those events, projected as though repeated from last week's stock market top.
You'd be looking at 25 to 50 percent drop over a year or three, taking S&P index down to four to five thousand or so over 2026, since that's what they were.
I think it's at least 30% likely to play out roughly like that, and am positioned such that I'm happy either way.
Facebook turns out to know internally what we all knew from the outside. Like 10% of their money comes from showing your grandma ads for scams.
Hummm. Yeah. Internet may have turned out bad. Thinking of ditching my smartphone too.