wen shipping?

that sounds great — using all these responses to convince her to let me post it when she’s done.

Wife (not on nostr) is working on a restaurant/sight-seeing/tourism guide for Portugal because so many people come here and ask us for tips, the email we used to send out is now seven years old and it’s easier just to make a comprehensive one once, and then send it to everyone.

She’s really good at these, has good taste, knows food and wine (in the wine business), so I told her she should post it on Nostr somewhere.

She said she’s not interested, but I told her people who used it would probably zap her.

What do you think — could she make $20 (she very cheap, so $20 might move the needle for her) in zaps over the course of a year?

Also, where would content like this reside? Highlighter is good for essays, articles, but you’d want a guide to stay at the top of your timeline. Maybe we can create an npub just for the list, write it in Highlighter and just leave it up there, and update periodically.

Maybe there’s a niche on nostr for the people who are really in the know, posting local knowledge. What do you think?

What new in Nostr? What’s excited you?

why is Svetski there?

Just watched. Great idea. Slick UI.

Is there a plan to incentivize writing reviews?

🔥 🌀 🇮🇳

What a greeting at the Uvita farmer’s market today! We stopped by with some shirts and keychains and there just happened to be visitors from different parts of 🇨🇷 and international tourists. It turned into a #Bitcoin  party fast.

Loved your goosebumping talk onsite in Prague @Svetski

Love your Vision, guys!

Sure, happy to read it.

Some people have grown cynical with democracy (and various types of representative government broadly, e.g. including constitutional democratic republics that enshrine certain rights to protect liberty against the masses), viewing this method as promoting short-term leadership with bad incentives.

I have a different take.

Prior to the printing press and then the telegraph and radio, running a democratic society over long distances wasn’t even feasible. The concept of having people democratically participate in their government relies on people being relatively connected information-wise so that they can use their access to information to know what’s happening and to then select between different options, which you couldn’t do across the entirety of a country before people were literate and election materials or other publications could be mass produced. In the pre-press age of handwritten books, making written documents was expensive, and so literacy was a niche skill.

So, that era was ruled by kings and queens, council oligopolies, and so forth. Representative government, to the extent that it existed, only applied to small city states where people could literally gather in a town square, or to “elites” in a capital. There was literally no way to run an election over very broad distances on a regular basis. The printing press helped change that, and then the telegraph, radio, and other tech further reinforced it.

But ironically, as I discuss in Broken Money, those technologies also started to break our money. The printing press and telegraph allowed the transaction layer (the movement of IOUs between individuals and entities) to grow exponentially more efficient both domestically and globally, while our settlement layer (gold) remained basically unchanged. This broadening gap between fast transactions and slow settlements was increasingly bridged with centralization and credit, and the gap eventually became so wide that every nation dropped the settlement layer of gold almost entirely, except as a reserve asset.

So the same technologies that enabled widespread representative government also enabled the proliferation of softer money. Prior to these technologies, broad democracy wasn’t possible. And after these technologies, sound money was too slow to keep up. Oof.

But over a long enough timeframe, our technology became good enough that we finally figured out how to do fast settlements as well. Bitcoin. People can send value to each other quickly over long distances, in ways that no central entity can prevent or reverse, and with a unit that no central entity can debase. The first sound money of the Information Age.

If Bitcoin is successful over the coming decades and becomes a much larger and less volatile money, than it is now, fully entrenched in society, then that would be the first era where technology is at such a state where broad democracy and fast sound money can coexist. Or put more universally, it will be the first era where information spreads quickly without breaking the money, and thus both fast information and good money could coexist.

I, for one, would be curious to see how that develops.

where can we test it?