A *very* beautiful day to be alive. nostr:note1h6342cgsm6l46jdlmc43jdr4kxsjw7rkxxdh5mn5klafa6verjdshsrk23

Let's see if I can make chuck taste good for once

running gif buddy

Sometimes I accidentally follow someone who's into monero - sorry about that, rest assured, I'll block when I realise.

its tricky because to do it right it would need to be tied to web of trust, because people can fake zaps to their own notes (you can't fake zaps to other peoples notes)

is nostr down?

never.

Can someone zap me some ETH?

“But… but… that’s risky”

Everything is high risk if you’re a fucking pussy.

Is there a relay that allows me to post longer videos?

I was just walking down the street, coffee in hand, suddenly realizing how "normal" it all is already. Like most days, I went to a coffee shop that accepts lightning. Like most days, I paid directly with sats that someone zapped me here on nostr. Like most days, neither the merchant nor myself thought twice about it, or took a minute to marvel at what just happened.

So, allow me to do just that. Marvel at what just happened. While everyone is having a fantastically crazy time at #nostriga, uncountable people are using bitcoin in a myriad of ways. Some for savings, large and small; some for transactions, large and small; some for other stuff. Bitcoin is slowly but surely entering the world stage. Some commentators will tell you that this is good. Some commentators will tell you that this is bad. Whatever the case may be, it is unavoidable.

I see nostr under a similar light. As platform-based manipulation and censorship ramps up—which it inevitably will—the usage of nostr will ramp up too, and with it the usage of zaps and everything else that comes with it. And soon enough, buying a coffee (or breakfast, lunch, and dinner) with zap-based income will be normal. Just like it's "normal" to be an "influencer" today, or a "YouTuber" or whatnot... It's not everyone's cup of tea, but it's a normal thing. Anyone can do it.

Back to my coffee. I remember when I had the "oh my god, I can live on bitcoin here!!!" experience for the first time. It was in Bitcoin Jungle, a couple of months after the initiative was launched. I stayed there for 2 weeks or so, buying the necessities of daily life with sats outright. And it worked. Flawlessly. I had zero payment failures, and was exclusively using Zeus with my own node. It was incredible.

Why is this incredible, you ask? Shouldn't stuff just work? Yes, it should. But building out the tech and the infrastructure to make it all work is BLOODY HARD. I remember the first Lightning Conference in Berlin, in 2019. Everyone came, everyone had all their channels and wallets and everything prepared, and ~50% of payments failed. For... reasons.

Fast-forward to today: I go to one of the 100+ merchants in the city that accept bitcoin, a quick tap on the PoS device & QR code scan, boom, done. Is it always perfect? Of course not. Will it get better still? 100% it will. Very soon these merchants will have NFC-enabled devices, and the tap-to-pay experience that people are used to with cards & Apple pay will be normal for bitcoin payments too. If you are in Riga right now, you'll experience this first-hand thanks to Bolt cards and BTCPay Server. It's awesome, it's open-source, and it works. And it will get better still.

We are truly living in the best and weirdest timeline; a timeline where shitposting on the internet can buy you lunch and dinner; a timeline that spawns amazing technological movements like #nostr; a timeline that, every ~10 minutes, allows for a small miracle to happen. A timeline where "magic internet money" is a normal thing; a timeline that, thanks to the magic dust of cryptography, enables anyone to speak about anything, without having to ask for permission. I'm grateful.

Thank you, Satoshi. 🙏🧡

> How important is it to select relays that are close geographically?

It's not all that important. Choosing relays geographically close to you might give you somewhat faster response times. I don't have any data on it but I think that's a negligible performance gain. In fact, I could argue that distributing your notes in different geological zones could increase censorship resistance as no government institution could shut down all your relays at once. The same goes for choosing relays in different cloud provides too for that matter.

Short answer is: For new users, choose popular relays and then just curate it to whatever fits your need afterwards.

> How many relays is optimal and is there a performance trade-off from having too many?

Hard to give a definite answer on this one but I think somewhere between 3 and 10 relays makes sense. Having too many relays does have a performance trade-off because you have more connections downloading more content (and often the same content). Let's say you're on a metered connection such as a mobile data subscription or have maximum data usage at your home wifi (I think that's a US thing?), fetching content from many relays might drain your monthly data plan in a whim because you fetch mostly the same data from each relay. So let's say you get 100 MB of events from one relay, if you have 10 relays and they all have the same events, you've used 1 GB of data.

> Are paid relays deemed necessary at this point in time for a new user?

No, not in my opinion. Set them up with the popular free relays (Damus, nostr.band, Primal, nostr.wine, or my own relay) and let them choose if they want to use paid relays or not. However, it could be good to remind them that free relays might just delete your data whenever (like when Damus nuked the entire relay db) so opting in for a paid relay that actually offers better data retention policies could be beneficial if you don't host your own relay. They're likely to get less spam too which could be nice if you like to browse global feeds.

> Do Nostr clients have the ability to change which relays you use without specific user intervention, or are relays entirely client-agnostic?

Relays are entirely client-agnostic. When you select a relay to read from and/or publish to in a client, a nostr event is sent to your relays containing a list of the relays you've selected. To do this, you as a user have to "sign" the event using your private key. In other words, clients cannot specify which relays you use without user intervention. That said, a bad client could just be programmed to use whatever relays it wants without caring about the relays you've already specified (that's highly unlikely though). I'm not sure if this answered the question though..? Short answer is: no, clients cannot change your list of relays but they can speak to any relay they want (depends on the implementation).

Gigi (or anyone) - what is considered best practice when it comes to selecting relays?

This is something that I don't often see mentioned but feels like a critical yet unintuitive element of the Nostr user experience.

Some questions to illustrate the point:

- How important is it to select relays that are close geographically?

- How many relays is optimal and is there a performance trade-off from having too many?

- Are paid relays deemed necessary at this point in time for a new user?

- Do Nostr clients have the ability to change which relays you use without specific user intervention, or are relays entirely client-agnostic?

Cheers.

Yeah, it's just one private channel to Start9 HQ and I can pay, receive, and zap from it. Super easy. There really is no "channel management" because it's not public. It's just your sats to worry about. Zeus connects right to my node like if you connected it to your custodial Alby wallet.

In StartOS you fire up the BTC node, LND, Ride The Lightning, and NWC. You can add Lightning Terminal for liquidity looping and LNBits for some managed lightning wallets if you want. All that stuff is installed like it's an app store. All in GUI, no CLI haxor crap.