One of the biggest questions of our time:
Can we help fix this? https://video.nostr.build/99ccdf9d88390ea582c8f74470c0a9aa1018344ac22a7e9bb815d9a3432fe948.mp4
This narrative has been used as an excuse to implement socialist policies in third world countries for decades.
It’s these policies that are the primary cause of poverty not exploitation.
🍷 A Tale of Wine and Money 🪙
Just published "Watered Down: How Your Wine Cellar and Your Wallet Tell the Same Story"
During dinner with a friend defending "healthy inflation," I realized the perfect analogy: monetary expansion is like watering down fine wine.
A good bottle of wine, like sound money, gets better with time. Each year adds complexity, depth, and value. But when you print money, you're doing what a shady restaurant owner does by adding water to wine bottles - creating more quantity at the cost of quality.
And Bitcoin? It's the perfectly sealed bottle that can't be diluted. Like that rare vintage in your cellar, its scarcity is guaranteed. HODLing is just cellar aging for the digital age. 🍾
Time rewards patience in both wine and money, but only if you don't water them down.
#wine #bitcoin #economics #inflation
#stacksats #winetasting
Long-form piece available at: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/watered-down-how-your-wine-cellar-wallet-tell-same-story-bazterrica-epejf
Another banger!
A couple of hours before Bitcoin crossed 100k we had the first Bitcoin payment at my restaurant with my byddy nostr:npub1z53fj528392aks27x09rq6xdvmjcmw8yu3rdqfg9yjxvhnx7987sfqmf2a!!
A historic day https://video.nostr.build/fd2cdb5257d686e8d09b2789ae8378c4db2a00e58515e447ffe3a64904ebe09f.mp4
Let’s fucking goooo!
nostr has no global source of truth, and that is a good thing
Out of interest, I follow the progress of a lot of other projects similar to nostr, and a couple links surfaced today:
BlueSky has a big "firehose" connection that streams all updates (new posts, reactions, etc) to subscribers. Unsurprisingly, this is difficult to process except on beefy servers with lots of bandwidth. So, one proposed solution is to strip out all that pesky cryptography (signatures, merkle tree data, etc): https://jazco.dev/2024/09/24/jetstream/
And over on Farcaster, keeping their hubs in sync is too difficult, so they want to make all posts globally sequenced, like a blockchain. The details are still being worked out, but I think it's safe to assume there will be a privileged global sequencer who decides on this ordering (and possibly which posts are included at all): https://github.com/farcasterxyz/protocol/discussions/193
In my opinion, both of these issues are symptoms of an underlying errant philosophy. These projects both want there to be a global source of truth: A single place you can go to guarantee you're seeing all the posts on a thread, from a particular user, etc. On BlueSky that is https://bluesky.app and on Farcaster that is https://warpcast.com .
Advocates of each of these projects of course would dispute this, pointing out that you could always self-host, or somehow avoid depending on their semi-official infrastructure, but the truth is that if you're not on bluesky.app or warpcast.com, you don't exist, and nobody cares that you don't exist.
nostr has eschewed the concept of global source of truth. You can't necessarily be sure you are seeing everything. Conversations may sometimes get fragmented, posts may disappear, and there may be the occasional bout of confusion and chaos. There is no official or semi-official nostr website, app, or relay, and this is a good thing. It means we are actually building a decentralised protocol, not just acting out decentralisation theatre, or pretending we'll get there eventually and that the ends justify the means.
Back when computers were primitive and professional data-centres didn't exist, it was impossible to build mega-apps like Twitter. Protocols had to be decentralised by default -- there was simply no other way. We can learn a lot by looking back to protocols of yesteryear, like Usenet and IRC, and still-popular protocols like email and HTTP. None of these assume global sources of truth, and they are stronger and better for it, as is nostr.
nostr:npub1marcan0laywmjprf4m8d34dr8m724a6jxxa56a5wwygcgj23q7nskfwmfg
