TCP is binary. TLS is binary. QUIC is binary. Casual developers are not locked out of them.

If a developer is casual, they won't care about the binary details. They will just call a function and get a JSON blob out of it. I think the insides can be binary and the API can be JSON and we can have both.

You aren't saying XHTML was the "efficiency" option, are you? XHTML had lots of problems, XML and DTDs being just the beginning. I was very much on the html5 side.

Yes it is better to be useful than perfect and I don't think I'm aiming for perfection.

With binary protocol it really was just because nostr events have not changed, and so it's no longer too early to optimize.

I value order, efficiency, and reliability. I don't value simplicity or chaos quite so much. My effect on the nostr protocol has mainly been proposals to improve the reliability, efficiency, and orderliness of it, and the pushback has come mostly from people that like the freedom that the chaos gives them.

Some examples

* long ago I proposed that relays remember when an event arrived, and clients could query "all events that arrived after I last asked" to get a perfect next batch.

* long ago I proposed gossip/outbox model which specifies where events are expected to be, while many still choose very different and innovative ways to choose and use relays.

* I've been pushing for DHT usage to be more fully distributed and uncensorable, and to allow people to kickstart/bootstrap without knowing any relays or any nostr people. We get 99% functionality without it and so as you could imagine other devs don't really embrace the idea. I'm the guy who is never satisfied with 99%.

* I've wanted a rigorous standard that doesn't change

* I've wanted a binary protocol to juice up efficiency by avoiding JSON parsing

I feel like the black sheep in this regard (hence my avatar) because I gather that most nostr developers (and users) more highly value chaotic liberty.

Chaotic liberty is a great space to innovate in. But it is not a good space to build a solid user experience which requires a firm standard and compliance for interoperability. Hence I see hundreds of only somewhat compatible half-ass nostr applications that generally scare users off (which one? why are so many of them broken? and so different?).

This is all fine. But it means I'm not seeing nostr as the protocol that becomes the social media framework that the Internet eventually adopts. I see it more and more as a playground. Which is critical and innovative and wonderful. I just don't see how it can also be a stable user experience that draws in lots of users and creates substantial network effect value.

Mosaic is where I scratch my itch for order, efficiency, and reliability, and my attempt to create a solid user experience. I will be working on both Mosaic and nostr. Mosaic risks being too idealistic, the "betamax" of social media, but it is a risk I'm taking. Take joy knowing that I won't be bugging nostr devs as much about the chaos.

Should I post this or edit it more? Fuck it. I saw a meme that said to just post it.

Ok fine, people took authenticated data structures to retarded degrees, most famously the linked list.

But Bittorrent already works as I described, you have a merkle tree over the full torrent file, and you can use Mainline to update the latest hash of your mutable torrent.

So I think we agree.

I tried to understand your BD but don't see the benefits. It sits somewhere between Cashu, Fedimint and Liquid but doesn't solve the rug-pull risk at all.

Cashu: You trust the mint to honor your random strings for bitcoin payments later but you have no idea if there is any bitcoins at all.

Fedimint: At least you know there is no single point of failure. One machine catching a virus won't empty the mint.

Bitcoin Deposits: You know the reserve of the "mint" and your balance and can proof to others if your balance is not being honored. They can still steal your deposit but if some "neutral parties" actually act and do the right thing and the mechanism works as advertised, users can be made 20% whole? Why not make the security deposit 100%? $10000 is a good return on a $2000 investment.

Liquid: You know all the transactions of the "mint". They can still rug pull you.

This idea that servers are easy to shutdown if they have static IP is soooo overrated... Signal and similar services have been using reverse proxies to play a cat and mouse game with ip black listing to great success for long time.

If your DNS layer is on Mainline, then you can basically play this game even better since the harder attack (at icann level) won't affect you either.

You are right, servers offering data integrity is OBVIOUSLY better.

Also, this is not either or... even if data integrity got in the way, just sign a single file and gossip it... what is the big deal?

Why are people rejecting structure and integrity and reliability is beyond me.

Really? I don't see any way to get censorship resistance without it. It enables users to switch servers without permission, and servers to switch IP addresses without permission, and encodes how clients can follow them when they move. And moving about freely and even rapidly lets people and servers evade censorship attempts by Internet providers, DNS providers, etc.

Partitioning really only happens where you have this "transmit it in any way possible" thing. If outbox model were universal, you wouldn't miss anything someone you follow says. Nostr is scattershot, maybe you hear some stuff, certainly no guarantee to hear it all.

I agree that sovereign identity with the fallback of "transmitting in any way possible" provides a kind of resistance, a resistance to identity loss. But I want ALL of somebody's posts, not just hopium.

I think the battle for free speech is going to seriously heat up. So far in the West they are making a few famous examples out of people, deporting them, or famously cancelling them somehow. This has a chilling effect on everybody else who becomes afraid to speak openly. But the technology to cancel certain ideas could easily become far greater with AI and automation. The CCP in China puts a lot of effort into controlling what people say, and they are pretty successful at it. And that is prior to AI and automation AFAIK.

So I am of the belief that we need to use this short time that we have to leapfrog them, to become seriously and deeply uncensorable, not just "censorship resistant". And to me that means things like (1) linking to previous events so you can at least detect if an event was censored, like scuttlebutt did, (2) avoiding placing trust in DNS and CAs, (3) avoiding any kind of centralization, even the "where should I look for your relay list" semi-centralization of NIP-65 (which I meant as a temporary stop-gap measure). And of course ensuring IP privacy techniques are usable.

I think nostr would stand up against a lame censorship attack (taking out a single relay, then another, then another), but not against a sophisticated one.

as the internet gets further infested with ai slop, the nostr webs of trust we are building out today become much more important

A phased array antenna can be used for both communication or sensing across a wide range of frequencies. Beamforming allows them to focus their energy on small areas. This leads to unexpected combinations like:

- WiFi can see things in your house

- 5G towers can produce realtime 3d terrain maps

- radar can be used for high bandwidth communication

And we can speculate even weirder things like:

- 5G can connect to your WiFi

- 5G can be radar

- 5G can see the weather

- 5G can *influence* the weather

- radar can pretend to be a 5G tower

- radar can hack targets

- radar can connect to your WiFi

It's all one big electromagnetic party out there

nostr:note1e0zkv229c6jaswqwtsj7l67ykt30ehsfhmss3lqte5tu9pfahy9scapsc3

I remember when they would call you a lunatic for saying this kind of tracking was possible.

Now it’s in commercial products as a feature.

My buddy pointed out to me that he could small the detergent in his mugs after using the dishwasher and now I'm hand washing all my plates until I find an alternative that doesn't do this.

Consciousness is great isn't it

Much faster. I will never become 2x more efficient at hand-coding in my lifetime. However I've become multiple x faster vibe-coding within a few years simply because the tools are getting better, and we're just getting started.

You could make a lightweight LN implementation that adds a slight bit of trust (for in flight payments, and provable disputes) but is still mostly self-custodial to run on them

Developers make this mistake all the time: It's a fallacy to compare a good coder against an AI. The coder will always be better. This is how many professional justify their hesitation to use these new tools. I've had this conversation dozens of times, mostly with the older generation.

📢 The comparison you should be making is between a good *coder without and AI* against a good *coder with an AI*.

You're not competing against the machine. You're competing against humans that master the machine.

You will either learn to use the machine or you will be replaced. There's no nice way to say this.

Devs of Nostr:

What would you do with a secure element that is easy to write software for, required no NDAs and had an open source development toolchain?

(Please renote for visibility) #asknostr

I love the flavor but, citation needed. Never attribute to malice what can be attributed to incompetence

Why do you need CloudFlare in the first place? Get rid of them. They are the antithesis of Nostr.

this is the coolest part of this paper. But the results are still overall terrible. 50%? Every second question will get a wrong answer.