GM Nostr. 🌞

I'm trying something new. I'm trying to stop thinking or saying aloud that I'm busy (in any form). Hear me out...

We're all busy. There are always more things we want to achieve in a day than we have hours for. And this is a good thing. It makes us prioritize. It gives those hours real value. Like Bitcoin, you can't print more hours.

Telling yourself (and others) that you're busy is a mental cop out, it's a way of trying to make yourself feel better about what you're not doing while also signaling that you're important in some way.

My new mantra is that I have exactly the right number of hours to do the things that are most important to me. It's just up to me to prioritize those things correctly.

BOLT 12 is merged into the spec

To applause at the Lightning Spec Summit dinner! ❤️

Gm nostr.

I have joined the 5am club.

Any client without a life-saving WoT filter is doomed. And it should be forbidden to suggest one to a newcomer.

Am i the only one who feels there is no one online. but at the same time, i see a ton of things happened during the last 24 hours that did not show up on my feed at all?

#asknostr

AI vs Bitcoin

The AI hype has been non-stop for the last 2 years ever since ChatGPT came out with its 3.0 chat. Since then, there's been an insane amount of investment into AI tech from every direction. There are hundreds of startups, every tech giant has been making investments and companies in between have been putting a lot of money toward it as well. It's not a small amount, either, as the AI hardware costs make Bitcoin mining look like discount bargains.

Yet after two years, what have we to show for it? Maybe some faster image editing on newer phones? Slightly faster answers to questions you would normally ask Google? Some productivity increase among junior programmers? The investment was enormous, as can clearly be seen in NVIDIA's growth, but the results are pretty underwhelming. As with any hyped technology, the possibilities have run past the actual use.

One of the supposed benefits of fiat money is that capital accumulation is unnecessary to create real value. You can build roads, for example, without having to save up for it. What this misses are many obvious drawbacks, but one of them is that there has to be someone that evaluates whether something will create value and create the money out of thin air to fund the project. This is not just inherently centralizing, but also deeply political.

For whatever reason, AI passed this political test and got the blessing of the money printers, which, to a company that sells, shovels like NVIDIA has been great news. But the drawback is that there's bound to be at least *some* that don't pan out. Maybe some segment of the economy can't use AI profitably, for example. Yet the powers that be, mostly Cantillionaires, have decided that this is worthwhile and have poured insane amounts of money into this bet.

But much like hyped tech of the past, it's looking more and more likely that there's little profit to be made here. Yes, there's some useful things that can be made, but the costs are simply too high right now to justify spending that much. It's a luxury item that mostp people simply don't need, and hence don't want to pay for. AI has become an expensive solution looking for costly problems to solve.

This was always my analysis with another hyped tech: blockchain. It never really made any sense as the cost was too high for what was really just a distributed, very redundant but hard to upgrade database. It, too, couldn't find costly problems to solve, with the exception of one. That, of course being Bitcoin.

What differentiates Bitcoin from AI is that people *need* Bitcoin. It's its own killer app. AI is not so popular that people will pay for what it costs right now. And that means that most of the investment will be wasted. Like most hyped things in a fiat economy, it's doomed to have significant malinvestment.

A lot of people complain about Bitcoin businesses and how hard it is to make them profitable. In a sense, I get it. You want more people to have steady jobs and so on. But in another sense, I think this is the market speaking. You're not going to get paid from Bitcoiners easily and there's no flood of printed money looking for a place to go. At least there won't be once fiat money has run its course. Building a profitable company is hard and so few meet that mark, especially in a new segment as AI has shown.

So in that way, I'm encouraged, because the companies that survive in Bitcoin will have something truly worthwhile. By contrast, the companies that survive in AI will probably be the ones that get subsidized the longest.

Good afternoon! Friday office vibes. 🫡🔥🔥🔥

Morning, 5am in são paulo. I'm on nostr since yesterday and was wondering the following.

Hypothetical: what if the level of engagement of nostr in Brazil was at the level of X or even higher. How would the supreme court be able to block the public's access to it due to a supposed "threat to democracy"?

I didn't follow the months long spat between musk and the supreme court justice but I believe they wanted 7 accounts blocked and musk didn't comply.

How could such demands be enforced here? Would they possibly demand nostr clients to be removed from app stores if deemed that the public's access to information available here should be limited? Force relay servers offline? Anything? Thanks and have a wonderful day #asknostr #brazil #censorship #nostr

Years ago, every week I drove past properties for sale in the mountains that were 100-2000 acres.

I would dream about ways to buy one of these properties with friends, since the idea of doing it alone seemed out-of-reach, or would turn into me being a landlord for people with nothing personally invested.

I looked for others with a similar desire, and found some, but they were often "all talk and no action".

I finally found a few folks that were willing to hold regular meetings, (which seemed like a miracle), and get tasks completed. I learned a lot, and it helped me fill in some gaps as to how it would all work.

The idea, for me, has grown in several ways. First, was realizing that the group would have to be an investment group first. This concept alone turns away a lot of the subculture that is attracted to the idea of sharing rural land.

The original idea was to secure a single property, now I see that a network of properties is better. Each plot specializing in what that land best provides, and trading with the others.

I see people on Nostr mentioning Citadels, and realized they may be describing this same desire. Please correct me if I'm wrong!

If I'm correct, then realize that there are enough people wanting to make a new and better reality to have multiple "Citadels" in most states.

Got my wallet fully integrated what other cool #nostr things should I do #asknostr

Gm ☕️☀️

You could spin your own family relay and curate its content

Nostr might just be a better effective way for parental control of the internet...

I literally ordered pizza through Nostr, mainly just to see if I could do a Nostr equivalent of Laszlo’s pizza buy, but also to test a near worst-case doomsday scenario.

I would say… Very useful.

please take care of me Nostr!

This would be my first zap! But not sure I’m zap-able

But communism isn't just about redistribution of resources. It is about public (state) ownership of the means of production. That's not possible without government.