"If there is hope, it lies with the Nostriches."

- George Orwell, 2026, maybe

All good points.

As someone else wrote, the biggest risk is a mathematical breakthrough. Since these are inherently unpredictable there is no way to hedge against something that might happen tomorrow or might happen never, other than to just give up.

On the other hand, it is the engineering difficulties in the practical implementations of these designs much more so than quantum error correction scaling that provides more fundamental limits on system size.

Issues such as thermal cooling, control circuitry and cabling, manufacturing yield, environmental shielding, and supply chains for components all present massive challenges to creating a hundreds of thousands of qubits system needed to produce error corrected logical qubits of the size necessary to put ECC at risk.

Surmounting these requires solving not just physics or math issues, but coordinating and tooling an industrial, financial, and political capacity I am deeply skeptical is actually achievable.

I maintain that the primary motivation to look at post-quantum cryptography now is to mitigate the "harvest and decrypt later" situation perhaps more important in communication systems like Nostr than in Bitcoin.

Hopium goes both directions, though. What's missing is an honest assessment and acknowledgement of the engineering practicalities involved in scaling the current state of the art. These will likely get solved, "eventually", as you say, but 1 yr. vs. 10 yrs. vs. 100 yrs. makes a qualitative difference in what current course of action is motivated.

GM ☕ Do we have any Nostriches who have done the #Camino?

Heh, that must have been Tim, the one guy older than me there. But I certainly agree!

We don’t need no steenkin’ keys

I don't know, seems a bit gimmicky:

https://www.pentagram.com/work/caligra-c100-developer-terminal

This is great. I had assumed something like this must exist. My current efforts started as a side quest to understand why the NIP-65 inbox/outbox model seemed so broken; I hadn't intended to build out a full relay crawler 😏

I haven't, I'm still building this thing out. Tracking NIP-65 events seemed the logical way to recursively expand out relay discovery, followed by actually connecting to newly learned relays from those events and requesting their own NIP-65 events, etc.

So far my relay crawling experiments show a steady state of about 800 nostr relays online and queryable at any point in time, while the collective unique relays extracted from recent NIP-65 kind 10002 inbox/outbox lists is nearly 3000. About half of the difference is down to DNS failures--relays that simply don't exist anymore.

There was a small but significant number of URLs that were discarded without trying because they were unroutable, including bare host names, localhost, .local and .private domains, IP address ranges that were for private use, and broadcast (!) IP addresses.

There were about 41500 kind 10002 events retrieved and processed to get the above, and the most common reasons for failure were failed DNS, connections refused, TLS handshake failure (bad certificates), or connection with no response.

Just coded up a recursive relay crawler using NIP-65 events for discovery. Over the course of a few hours it discovered a total of 2,761 unique URLs for relays (after discarding a variety of malformed or otherwise unusable relay tags.) Unfortunately, actually going out and attempting a connection with each, only *800* were online and queryable! Not sure what to make of this. Clearly many people need to update their kind 10002 relay lists...

Butthurt is a terrible disease, affecting millions.

International airlines are a treat to be savored. Somehow US domestic airlines have all become crowded buses in the sky.

I have to say that coming back into the world from seven years of self-imposed hermitage is both gratifying and horrifying. On the plus side, I have recently met and interacted with young people carrying the torch of a movement I had given up upon, yet the forces of humans at their worst remain arrayed as always against us.

Nonetheless, I am hopeful again.

Over two and a half minutes into it and I have no idea what's in it, and the reliance on memes and pseudo-humor has turned me away from watching any further. It sucks being older and informed.

Don't know anything about Flotilla, but my experience about such things is they emerge organically. People put stuff out there, sometimes it sticks, sometimes it doesn't.

I haven't found anything Nostr related other than Nostr itself. For bitcoin, the highest signal I have found is the "Delving Bitcoin" forums.

It pays to ignore the bleating and hysteria, and focus on signal.

Nerd sniped by so many new ideas in the last few days the day job is really gonna suffer.

GM ☕

🛬

✈️

And the wheel goes round and round, same as it ever was.

It was never "worthful". It was just a gentleman's agreement among a bunch of politicians to enforce power among themselves after overthrowing the previous bunch of of politicians, with a ton of effective propaganda that has kept it alive for a long time, until recently.

One of the disappointments of being in my late 50s is watching young people having to learn the hard lessons of life all over again, instead of learning from history only a generation or two old.

Especially now, where events before the Internet seemingly never happened, and events after the Internet get endlessly memed or propagandized into whatever currently fashionable ideology benefits the status quo.

There has been a thin thread of rebellion against this that has survived in the form of cypherpunk activism of the 80s and 90s through the invention and proliferation of Bitcoin in the 2010s and now the advent of distributed, uncensorable communication networks such as Nostr.

And yet, it's not clear to me whether this nascent drive towards individual freedom will survive. Too much of the public discourse is consumed by "strategic reserve" this, "legal tender" that, and in general the tying of Bitcoin to its relation to the State. Politicians seek political favor by making noises allying themselves to the Bitcoin community, and to great benefit. The vast majority of Bitcoin movement is between exchanges, not individuals. I won't even go into the absurdities on display at conferences ostensibly about Bitcoin but have turned into promotional grounds for grifters and influencers.

We are at a unique point in history where we have both the technology and the motivation to establish direct, peer-to-peer, mutually beneficial, and most importantly, voluntary, non-coercive relationships among each other that bypass existing systems of surveillance and control.

Let's do this.

I was marveling over this new flex of posting Steak 'n Shake receipts and noticed the Fiat Amount thing for lightning payments. But I'd be really impressed if they used that for *all* the receipts.