Just so long as it’s clear to people that nostr isn’t anonymous and that govts could track us whenever they want. I suspect that, because all messages are broadcast without encryption (like emails), they are being logged for future analysis (like Snowden revealed).

IMHO, this is nostr’s biggest flaw. We can’t have censorship resistance without privacy. I expect people will start censoring themselves as soon as someone is punished for posting something.

We shouldn’t tell people that it’s anonymous.

Your IP address is associated to your posts. If I were the govt, I would be running nostr relays collecting all the good stuff: eg. Who DMs whom, what you post and your IP address, etc.

A strategy of tension (Italian: strategia della tensione) is a political policy wherein violent struggle is encouraged rather than suppressed.

The purpose is to create a general feeling of insecurity in the population and make people seek security in a strong government.

Feature or at least just an unchangeable reality. Bitcoin is globally universal money. There will never be a time where all users agree on everything about money. The common ground we all share in bitcoin is the consensus rules on each of our own nodes. We don’t need to agree on anything else.

None of this shit about Bitcoin Magazine's 360 degree return to shitcoining is surprising.

If there is degen money on the table, they can only leave it there so long before investors or stakeholders or simply their own piggy piggy greed start pulling them into Planet Shitcoin's orbit.

It pains me to say it after 3 years of building on it but I think lightning is ngmi, at least for non custodial pleb payments.

I think ark and liquid are fundamentally a more sound approach to L2 for end users.

If it REQUIRES the end user to run infrastructure, even if that is just a phone, it's going to be too janky to actually scale.

Not to mention that somehow lightning is already more ossified than L1...

If we continue down the custodian route people will get rugged or KYC d

I am ready for your hate, but this is my current take. Also would be happy to be proven wrong.

Now back to sshing into my node and working on chantools to recover a force closed channel utxo that lnd didn't report.

Totally easy for everyday users to solve if they run into this problem...

🎯

This just seems like the same kind of not quite accurate marketing as the people who used to say bitcoin had "cheap, anonymous transactions."

It all depends on your threat model I suppose, but unless you're taking extra steps to not dox your network connection and shield your use from your ISP, "anonymous" is a bit too strong of language for my taste.

Focus on censorship resistance, that's not a stretch and won't get people in trouble for taking the meaning literally.

I keep thinking about Gary’s nervous interview about the bond market’s 26 TRILLION dollar treasury market, so I asked GPT to visualize:

Stack of Dollar Bills: Imagine each unit of the 26 trillion is represented by a single dollar bill. If you stack these bills one on top of the other, the stack would reach approximately 2,710,800 kilometers high. This is more than seven times the distance from the Earth to the Moon, which is about 384,400 kilometers.

Grains of Sand: Suppose one grain of sand represents one unit in the 26 trillion. The average beach might contain about 100 billion grains of sand. This means you would need approximately 260 beaches, each with 100 billion grains of sand, to represent the enormity of 26 trillion.

Distance Travelled by Light: Consider the speed of light, which travels at approximately 299,792 kilometers per second. If you equate each unit of the 26 trillion to one kilometer, the distance light could travel would be around 26 trillion kilometers. This is equivalent to light traveling from the Earth to beyond our solar system and into interstellar space, a journey that would take light over 24 years to complete.

The Age of the Earth: The Earth is estimated to be about 4.54 billion years old. To comprehend 26 trillion, imagine a timeline where each year represents one unit. In this scenario, you would need to replay the entire history of the Earth nearly 5,730 times to reach 26 trillion.

I don't think we should set any expectation of anonymity.

People should come to Nostr with already some idea of how Nostr works, like at least a picture of a diagram of clients connecting to multiple relays. Is that asking too much?

Bitcoin Magazine has been pumping the ordinals scam from the beginning. Too bad.

Yes, it's decentralization theatre

If you sell sandwiches for 5$ and I voluntarily buy one, it means I value the sandwich more than 5$ and you value the 5$ more than the sandwich. With every voluntary transaction, both parties are more wealthy. A greedy and ambitious person in a free market can only acquire wealth by providing people with what they want, only by serving, only by bringing value.

In a corrupt system, a greedy ambitious person can and must use the monopoly on violence to force or prevent certain transactions or take advantage of their proximity to officially sanctioned money counterfeiting. They don’t have to provide value. They can just lobby to prevent competition, or force everyone to buy their products, etc.

Don’t hate greed. I don’t think you have an economy without a small percentage of highly ambitious, competent, greedy sociopaths. Hate violence. It’s buried so deep in assumptions that people don’t notice there’s a gun in the room preventing you or forcing you to do many things you wouldn’t voluntarily do.