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nik ⚡️🟠🟣
30e5d3e6c998999c39b0a88024f85f07f2362c9e7589f7d28b399f29962978db
₿itcoiner, Engineer, Photographer
Replying to Avatar miljan

My Nostr predictions for 2025

Exactly one year ago I published my Nostr predictions for 2024. Some came true, but most were, shall we say, aspirational, and, if we want to be generous, directionally correct. Happy to continue in the same vein and go out on a limb for 2025. Here we go, ordered by likelihood of coming true:

1. Primal will become much, MUCH better. Primal 3.0 will be a bigger leap forward than Primal 2.0 was. We will surprise everyone by the features, speed, level of polish, and ease of use.

2. Many other Nostr clients will impress by their progress in a relatively short time frame. If I had to pick one, I have a really good feeling about Highlighter.

3. Way more bitcoiners will join Nostr. While we currently only have a small subset of bitcoin enjoyers on Nostr, the new features and unique content will make Nostr irresistible to anyone interested in bitcoin.

4. Bitcoin-adjacent communities will start to discover and join Nostr. This will include health & wellness, financial twitter, human rights, libertarians, and other communities. As a result, the network will grow and become more formidable.

5. Spammers gonna spam. With the growth of the network, spammers will return in force. They will be sophisticated and relentless, putting all of our spam mitigation services to the test.

6. The Blossom protocol will make media hosting on Nostr much more robust and resistant to censorship.

7. Long form content will start to hit its stride on Nostr. This includes textual long form content (blogs, essays, articles, etc.) as well as long form video content.

8. Multiple Nostr projects will find effective and ethical ways to monetize, marking a watershed moment for the protocol. We will witness the formation of the first cohort of real businesses on Nostr, signaling the inevitable changing of the guard and the eventual extinction of the Legacy Web.

9. Nostr will experience a glimpse of what a ‘suddenly’ mainstream adoption moment looks like.

10. By the end of the year, everyone - even the haters - will realize that Nostr is going to win.

11. nostr:npub1qny3tkh0acurzla8x3zy4nhrjz5zd8l9sy9jys09umwng00manysew95gx will accuse me of not being bullish enough.

One thing is certain: we will keep pushing until we will this thing into existence. 🤝

Anyhow, Merry Christmas, Happy Hanukkah, Pura Vida, and Peace and Love to you all! ♥️☀️

Buon Natale, Miljan!

Replying to Avatar HODL

When I was 18, I was severely depressed. With good reason. I’d fucked up high school. Drugs and drinking had a hold on me. My grades were shit. My friends were addicts. My mother, a schizophrenic, was having a serious year-long episode. She was institutionalized. Wrapped her car around a telephone pole. Almost died. The cops were at our house a lot. My father was dead inside. Burnt out, and numb. Numb. There was severe emotional neglect and chaos throughout my childhood. I had no hope for the future. Completely lost, purposeless, and drifting. Purposeless. Drifting. I wasn’t fully suicidal. Like there weren’t any plans in place, but I thought about it a lot. A voice in the back of my mind told me there had to be a way out. I know now that it was god speaking to me.

I listened to that voice. I stopped doing drugs. I drank less. I began to hike every day in the mountains by myself. The sun, the air, the solitude. I loaded up an old iPod. I listened to the Beatles, a lot of classical music, and audiobooks. I didn’t hang out with my friends anymore. I just hiked every day by myself. I got a shitty fast-food job. I used to stay late to clean and just think about my life. I enjoyed the structure. Soon, they made me the assistant manager. I was the only one who was dependable, I guess. I went to community college. I actually applied myself for the first time ever. I got straight A’s. I hooked up with a lot of girls, that was helpful for my mood and self-esteem. I used my grades to get into a good college. I wanted to get across the country. To get away from it all. I went to Chicago.

College was fun. There were lots of girls, lots of parties. I was in film school and actually interested in what I was learning. Everything was amazing. My family is from rural Illinois. I used to visit my grandfather on the weekends sometimes. He was one of my favorite people. In the winter, he got sick. We found out he had leukemia. I got depressed again. I stopped going to college. I spent a lot of time out in the country. It felt more important to be with him as he died. I was there when he passed.

I came home for the summer. The great financial crisis was going on. My friend got one of those Obama new home buyer loans, so we spent the summer having parties and playing beer pong in his garage. One night, the girl I was going to marry walked in. I knew it right away. I didn’t feel like going back to Chicago. So I stayed and went to state school. I started dating the girl that would one day become my wife. I still was partying too much. Binge drinking. I couldn’t escape the feeling I was wasting my potential. Fucked around and did DMT one day. Blast off. Full-on cosmic panic attack. The overarching message: “Your time here on Earth is temporary. So get to work.”

Fuck, okay. So I got serious about my life… again, and I changed everything… again. I had been lazy and unmotivated. I began to focus intently on my craft. I attended every lecture. I made connections. I worked on everyone’s sets. I won the school film festival. I started a production company with a friend while still in school. It took off. We were making good money. We dropped out and did the business full time. I asked the girl to marry me. She said yes.

I found Bitcoin. I took all the profits from the business and put it into Bitcoin. I convinced my fiancé to put her salary into Bitcoin too. We were frugal to the point of being weirdos. We bought a little condo, and we got married. Bitcoin went up like crazy. We had a kid. Bitcoin went down like crazy. My father got sick. We took care of him when he died. I assumed responsibility for my mother. We had another kid. My wife’s parents got divorced, and my mother-in-law was left penniless. I assumed responsibility for her as well. My mother had another multi-year schizophrenic episode. Cops, hospitals, chaos. Then she got cancer. We had another kid. After a short battle with cancer, my mother died.

Then Bitcoin crashed 80% again. We had our fourth kid. For the first time in a long time, nothing happened. It was quiet. Bitcoin steadily rose. I spent time with the kids. There was no chaos. Just peace.

When Bitcoin hit 100k. I took a look around at my loving wife, our warm home decorated for Christmas, my four beautiful children, and I felt that it had all been worth it.

Whatever you’re going through…

Keep going.

🫂