Avatar
Jivan Pal
492f692960108797ac07f34d67bdd74fdfea767284ad7140c65705182f7089b4
Software dev, Linux sysadmin, DevOps engineer, and more; with a Master's in mathematics and computer science and a strong interest in cryptography, distributed systems, and finance.

You should probably remove the Lightning address from your Nostr profile, so that people aren't sending money into the void.

A list of stable Lightning address providers can be found here: https://lightningaddress.com/#providers

A large portion of the population is already familiar with bitcoin and its price in dollar terms. Suddenly shrinking that by a hundred-million-fold is going to be nothing but confusing. "Yeah, you saw bitcoin was $100k each last week, but now it's just a tenth of a cent. No, no, it's not because there was a price crash, it's just because we changed the definition, you see."

By contrast, saying, "just like there are 100 cents to a dollar, there are 100 million sats to a bitcoin, so it's usually more convenient to talk about sats than bitcoin," is not at all something I've ever had difficulty getting across to people in my 10 years of using and explaining bitcoin.

It's confusing for no good reason. Same situation as with the Russian ruble being scaled down by 100, except that issue was confined solely to the Russian populace, and communicated clearly to Russian residents by the Russian government before adoption.

The words "satoshi" and "sat" are already well-established, so just adopt a standard symbol and abbreviation that, and encourage exchange platforms etc. to adopt it as the standard. "BCS" or "SAT" works for an abbreviation/ticker, and we already see "≡" with a vertical line as a prevalent symbol, though alternatives such as "$@" are also somewhat common already.

The point is that you shouldn't make changes to the spec that don't result in changes to the UX, just because you feel that the data structure is cleaner. The reason is that making such a change means there is now new development work that needs to be done in existing apps to support your new spec.

You keep saying, "it will take devs 5 minutes," but the point is that it should take them *zero* time wherever possible. Unless there is community agreement that the structures/protocol should be changed in a manner that isn't backwards-compatible, you shouldn't make such changes, because such changes just cause the app ecosystem to become needlessly fractured.

That definitely wouldn't be a useful model of "contact" in the sense of "entry in an address book".

A contact should simply be a record of a public key and an identity, perhaps with your signature attesting the extent to which you believe the key is associated with that identity. This would provide a practically useful system similar to PGP's model. Whether that record remains local, or is published/broadcast as in PGP's public web-of-trust model (which is now largely considered societally broken), is a choice for the person that creates/holds that record.

ITT: No-one understanding that this is about Facebook merely submitting *requests* (and seemingly frivolous ones, at that) to the EU, not about the EU actually agreeing with those requests.

Explain the use case, not the protocol. You don't explain Facebook's infrastructure to prospective Facebook users, you just show them how to post pictures of their cats and tag their friends, because that's the value proposition. That's what makes that platform useful and relevant to their life.

The primary distinguishing features / use cases for Nostr vs. something like Facebook are that Facebook Inc. decides how to curate your feed, it's centrally owned/controlled, and might end up defunct in the future, whereas Nostr has none of those qualities and puts control back in the user's hands.

If the person you're talking to about Nostr doesn't care about those things, or even has good or personal reasons for *preferring* Facebook's qualities, then so be it; let the network effect do its thing and just tell them that you can be found on Nostr rather than Facebook. If you fancy taking a stab at persuading them to change those preferences or just sharing why you have your own preferences, feel free to go for it, but appealing to the technology is rarely relevant or persuasive. Appeal to the personal impact instead.

Passkeys are starting to become commonplace nowadays. A good integration with a passkey manager like Bitwarden in order to store one's name would be fantastic. Perhaps something to hold off on until FIDO finally standardises passkey exports, though.