I cut my wife's hair today...i know, i know, i'm the perfect husband Nostriches, don't mention it.

Stay humble

[777337]

Holy crap. Is the JPGing on bitcoin dead already?

Kids love fish eggs and sardines for breakfast 🥹

Btw I think sooner or later they will be possible via pure LN (+ send optional proof via nostr).

It's not possible now because when paying, the preimage (proof of payment) is only available in the LN wallet, which is a different app than the nostr client.

As LN SDKs get better, it will be easier to integrate a LN wallet in a nostr app, which will solve this problem at its root.

They hate religions yet are showing cultish traits.

Two ways:

1. As a receiver, you can emit the nostr event that means "zap received" without having necessarily received LN sats. You can create the invoice, use the preimage, and fake the contents of the zap note.

2. You can also use sockpuppet accounts to zap yourself. You could recycle lets say 100 sats over and over (send zap, receive zap, send sats back silently via LN, repeat). You can thus inflate the amount of zaps recived as high as you want, without having received that actual amount.

If zaps were well designed, the arrival of bad actors would mean little.

But they're not:

- they're easy to fake (encourages low-level bad actors, like scammers and grifters)

- they're easy to DoS: For every incoming zap, the receiver zap node has to keep state and monitor the new invoice until it's settled. This means it's easy for an attacker to overload a zap node by just initiating (but not paying) new zaps. With one simple nostr message, the receiver now has to remember and monitor a new invoice. Multiply x100, x1000 => at some point, the receiver zap node runs out of memory, or is too busy monitoring "pending" zaps, that it cannot accept new ones.

- this brings with it centralization tendencies: Only companies with beefy servers will be able to withstand such attacks. This means simple LN node runners are on the losing side, because they would risk getting their node DoS-ed anytime if they support receiving zaps on their nodes.

State-level CBDC-friendly anti-bitcoin bad actors would in fact encourage zaps because it directly attacts the decentralization of LN nodes.

Let’s try this again

An interesting critique of zaps. 👇

#[0]

I think zaps will incentivize the opposite.

If you want to reward people on nostr, you already can with simple LN tips. Nobody has to know, other than you and the recipient. If you want the recipient to know it was from you, you can send a DM, a reply or add a comment in the LN payment.

Simple, private, elegant.

Zaps, since they're public, bring other incentives (vanity, peer pressure, perceived importance of highly-zapped notes or profiles, etc).

Influencers are already pushing it. Some are shaming wallet devs into integrating it. Memes are memed into existence and hype is hyped to the sky.

Soon you will have a sea of people on nostr who see zaps as inherently valuable.

In such a world, whoever can fake zaps is king. Whereas "plebs" have to earn zaps backed by real sats, sent by real people -- such an individual could "print" themselves some, and get all the social clout for free.

Turns out anyone can do that. There are two ways:

1. Since zaps are not "anchored" in LN (the same way LN is anchored in BTC onchain), one can receive zaps without having received any LN payment. Its a matter of publishing the right kind of events to the relay.

2. A different way is you can zap yourself from different (sockpuppet) accounts. You could recycle 1 sat endless times, and increment your "zap counter" as much as you like.

So not only are zap incentives skewed, but they're also an unreliable metric. Anything that can be measured in zaps (appreciation? relevance of a post?) can be gamed, because received zaps can be faked.

In addition, they're distracting people from the simple and effective LN tips, which don't suffer from any of the above.

I have an idea for a Sci Fi story set in Antarctica where nuclear power plants have set up a thriving Bitcoin mining operation and have made that place hospitable. A libertarian place that becomes the home of the castouts from everywhere

Or perhaps it’s not possible because notes are related openly by default?

Voluntary zaps are cool but I assume we will also see something like “zap-to-read” with a predetermined amount.

⚡️⚡️⚡️

Доброе утречка 🥰

And this year I have already had enough of this snow. Can’t wait for summer and riding 🏍️