My aunt asked me what I thought was going to happen this U.S. presidential election. Here’s what I told her:

1. Irrespective of who’s declared winner, about 30% of Americans will think it was rigged.

2. If Trump is declared winner, there’ll be protests and rioting from blue team. We saw a preview in 2020. A few downtowns will be ransacked. Store windows broken, looting. However, it won’t last long, and won’t bleed over into the suburbs. The suburbs are a jungle, and guns would come out of everywhere to stop the rioters from progressing.

3. If Kamala is declared winner, there’ll be peaceful protests, perhaps like the farmers in Europe, or the truckers in Canada. A few will be arrested, the rest quietly dispersed. Red team equates patriotism with support of the State (police, military), and so will not put up much of a fight when asked to return home.

4. In either case, two years later, the houses of Congress will flip hard the other way. Nothing much will change, legislatively. The swamp will remain undrained. Alive and well.

Any carpenters here?

A traumatized wealthy old man and a shapeshifter are arguing over who does a better job at keeping the American people disillusioned.

#cashu + #nostr for digital commerce is about as significant as combining rubber and compressed air that revolutionized the transportation industry.

what could a data scientist sell? 🤨

would love to earn!

Heh, I applied for a $20k grant to do a proper analysis of Nostr's decentralization on Saturday. Same idea (and similar cost) as my recent L2 Covenants article. Only took them one business day to reject it (took them 6 weeks to reject my grant request to keep OpenTimestamps running).

I'm not surprised. I strongly suspect there isn't much good to say about Nostr's decentralization and I hear OpenSats is funding a bunch of Nostr. Nostr needs a serious redesign.

Also, the reason we’re using follows and mutes to build the baseline grapevine WoT score is that that’s the best available source of raw data. But the grapevine is designed so that you can pull in multiple sources of data into a single score’s calculation. So if bad actors start to weasel their way into the networks, and people care enough to want to weed them out, then we can start to employ NIP-58 badges or NIP-32 labels or NIP-51 lists to help us distinguish the good vs bad actors. And those datasets can be worked easily into the score. In this way, you neutralize the strategies of the bad actors as they implement them. My expectation is that you will be able to modify your grapevine more easily and more quickly than the bots can implement their attacks. Which will hopefully make it less profitable to create bot farms in the first place.

That’s always a possibility. If it becomes a problem, like if you see your extended WoT network grow by 20k bc someone 4 hops away from you followed 20k spammers, you just unfollow and mute that pubkey. Or maybe one or more others in your network find the problem before you do and unfollow / mute the bad actor, and the problem is solved before you’re even affected.

Everyone’s score is zero by default unless there is at least one path of follows from me to the user in question. So the wannabe spammer would probably also have a score of zero, which means it doesn’t matter (from my point of view) who the wannabe spammer is following.

Hope that addresses your question

You know you're deep down the Bitcoin rabbit hole on a side quest when you find yourself reading Bitcoin Core source code for answers.

The GOP would rather live their lives constantly finding mental health issues in the histories of random people, than simply regulating products designed to murder people.

In theory yes, in practice you will need more memory to keep the list of keys while processing. :)

Definatly less possible on a phone :)

The grapevine algo would ignore those 10000 npubs, because their grapevine WoT score is zero by default.