So there's this progression. First you see something like Cashu when you say, "Oh, it's a custodial lightning wallet with better privacy for users and no accounts." And then you realize, "Oh, I can use this to pay someone who is offline. I just send them a string and that’s the ecash note.” And then you realize, "Oh, this works over long range radio with very low bandwidth. And then you realize, oh, if we trust the same mint, we can actually use it to route lightning payments without open channels to the mint (the channel is the trust). And we can use it as a lightning wallet for ourselves. And then you can say, oh, we can create these community mints for “islands” that are not connected to the internet.
And then you realize, "Oh, there can be more than one Uncle Jim, and we don't have to trust this one person. We can have shared custody, and this thing has better privacy." And suddenly you realize you are were not expecting anything like this at all when you first saw it, when it began. It has completely different implications than what I was expecting previously.
It's the same with Nostr. It's like, "Oh, this is not a very good protocol. It depends on a few relays and you can’t even store images on it and who would use it." And it's cumbersome. Now there are blogging platforms and communities and marketplaces and AI communicating over it. And there's this innovation that no one was expecting when they first started. It was like thinking about the protocol and trying to judge it by its design, but its use (and implications) is discovered, not designed. Same way you can send a calendar invite over email, or do encrypted group chats over it (DeltaChat).
It’s interesting to see, how we use technologies that in theory should not have worked, but in practice, they do. Bitcoin is one of them. The probability of its success was very low.
A friend of mine said in a podcast with me that Bitcoin’s risk adjusted value is actually better than a decade ago. Yes, you could have bought cheap Bitcoin. But its success back then was very improbable. Now you are buying the asset of the parallel financial system, back then, it was a membership card in a club of geeks. After several that have failed…
