If you are just getting started, I suggest https://coinos.io/
It's custodial, so they hold onto your zaps for you. Don't store huge amounts there for that reason.
The beautiful thing about nostr is that you can't be censored for your political opinions here. Disappointed Trump won but guardedly optimistic about some of his policy proposals. The future belongs to those who build it and voting is mostly a scam anyways. And important scam to participate in, but a scam nonetheless, especially if you don't participate in primaries.
Next step once you've got comfy with using lightning custodially would be a non-custodial wallet. If you are in the US, I highly suggest Zeus. Outside the US, I would suggest Phoenix (easiest) or Zeus (more powerful but still pretty easy). It sounds more complicated when it's described than when you actually use it. If you described how venmo worked it might sound pretty similar, it's this app and you need a phone to use it and it connects to your bank account or your debit card and well what's a debit card and how do you get a bank account and so on and so forth. We're just used to that complexity. Lightning will become second nature to you in time as well :)
Just zapped you. Welcome to the future 😎
More or less yes.
> is a much faster version where we don’t have to wait 10 minutes for confirmation
Exactly. You wait < 1 second in most cases, and the fees are much lower too, since you don't have to pay for space in the block. 1% or less in most cases.
Basically, when you move Bitcoin "into lightning" you lock it up into a "smart contract"/"channel". This "channel" is just a ledger between you and somebody else which states the "balance" of the channel. For example, you lock up 1 BTC into a lightning channel. Since you paid the BTC, 100% of that BTC belongs to you, so the balance is 100:0. If you send .1 BTC to the other person, now the balance is 99:1. You and this other person track the balance of this channel over time. And you can chain these channels together, so you can send a lightning payment to somebody you are connected to through somebody else. At any time, you and your channel partner can close the channel and get back whatever portion of BTC is "yours", via the blockchain. But you never have to actually do this. I have lightning channels that have been open for years. That's how it works on the technical side.
On the user experience side, if you are using a custodial wallet (they have the private key), you don't have to think about any of this, it's all managed automatically. If you have a self-custody wallet, you benefit from keeping track of your current channels and how much space they have in them. If you don't, that's fine, you'll just sometimes pay an on-chain tx fee (10c-$1 most of the time) to receive transactions you don't have room in lightning.
Here's the way I describe it to people. Think of a lightning channel as a bucket full of water, and the water as Bitcoin. When you buy the bucket, it is full of water. The amount you paid for the bucket determines the size of the bucket. Since it's full of water when you first buy it, you can't put any more water in. Instead, you have to dump out some of the water. Once you dump some out, you have room to add water back in (receive a payment). You can dump out and refill as infinitely so long as you never try to add more to the bucket than it can hold or pour out more than it has. And you can have many buckets.
it's an open source operating system calm down bro
It uses the Bitcoin blockchain for security. Lightning is Bitcoin.
Bitcoin's blockchain is analogous to the court system, lightning is written contracts between parties. 99% of contracts never see the inside of a courtroom because a well-written contract helps make the courtroom outcome predetermined and people generally don't sign contracts they don't think they can fulfill. But the court is always there to enforce it if need be. Bitcoin enforces lightning contracts perfectly without any off days, holidays, or mistakes.
Welcome! The easiest way to get started with zaps is coinos. They store your zaps, so don't store huge amounts there. https://coinos.io/
Once you have a "lightning address" like oldcryptodude@coinos.io, then you can paste that into your nostr client and you're off to the races.
Zaps are a lot of fun. It's sending small (or large!) amounts of BTC to people. If you set it up, reply to lmk and I'll send you a test zap to verify it's working.
I would absolutely contribute to development bounties for a replacement app. Nostr can do this, it just hasn't been done yet.
This graph is wrong. Carter pardoned 200,000 for draft evasion. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proclamation_4483
6500 of those 8064 are for marijuana possession. If you subtract that, you get 1564, which is closer to parity w past presidents. Fuck the war on drugs. Liberty forward 🗽
Unfortunately, clients for this are being developed but not really there yet. Video hosting is expensive, P2P solutions exist but require work to get integrated with nostr. If you want to support development of these critical features, consider donating to opensats https://opensats.org/funds/nostr
#introductions Welcome new nostr users! If you are finding your nostr client isn't working as expected, use the asknostr tag. Remember you can change clients any time you want and your notes, DMs, and other content will follow gracefully, so feel free to experiment.
If you have some change to spare, donate to your app of choice and/or the opensats nostr fund. Meta won't fund nostr. The government won't fund nostr. Elon won't fund nostr. We are funding nostr because nobody else will. The future belongs to those who build it, build it with us.
Welcome back! You not have to understand how relays or the underlying protocol work, most nostr apps just work out of the box. Here's the important things to know at a high level.
1. You control your identity. You can login to any nostr app with it and your notes will seamlessly follow you within that app.
2. Nostr is decentralized. That means nobody can censor your posts, stop you from following who you want to follow, or stop people from seeing your posts. Nobody but you can decide what goes in your feed.
3. Any given nostr app you use can decide what it displays and when. If you don't like how it does that, go back to step one, pick a different app
4. Nostr is a decentralized protocol, not a centralized social media platform. There is no official "customer support". Anybody claiming to be so is a scammer.
I'll follow you lmk if I show up. Would be helpful if you posted what client and system you are using (like Primal on OS X or whatever)
Every time you post, I will zap. It may not always be a big zap, but I will always zap. Onwards.
You should do your own research and make your own decisions. You will find some of the brightest and most well-informed minds on Bitcoin here.