#asknostr

Want to dump Apple Watch due to all the tracking bullshit....don't want to spend lots of sats on the watch I really want.

A coworker who is a watch nut told me there are super clones of high end watches that many collectors buy to wear so they don't damage their originals.

it's from a company in China and won't ship for 20-25 business days. Anyone ever taken a chance on one of these at a major discount....

Why aren't there more British people on Nostr?

Well said. The modern web is an absolute wreck thanks to out of control bots and the intrusive ways that sites defend against them. It's actually one of the reasons why I don't use a VPN nearly as much as I used to: it just turns the modern web into a nightmare to use.

Thankfully, if you're worried about privacy, VPNs are actually less necessary these days. Switching to encrypted DNS with a privacy-respecting resolver (I recommend Quad9) virtually eliminates any actionable data that your ISP can sell. They still see the raw IPs but that sort of data is harder to market to data brokers and it's also less effective because of how so many sites run on massive CDNs, meaning they'd only be seeing your connection to the CDN's nearest datacenters.

Granted, that doesn't prevent the CDNs from selling traffic data, and it doesn't prevent individual sites from knowing your IP, so there's still a use case for VPNs but it all depends on threat model. For me, I only really use a VPN for evading geoblocks and for when I visit an unfamiliar site that I don't want having my real IP. Everything else in my threat model is largely covered by using encrypted DNS with Quad9.

It's at a point now where it's almost impossible for me to use the "regular" internet. I can't access half the sites. The reason? I care about my digital hygiene and thus use a VPN. Sometimes switching to a different VPN or switching the country of the VPN works; other times it does not. Oh well, I guess I'm not going to watch that video, or read that article, or look at that picture. Whatever.

In addition to that, if I'm not blocked completely, I have to prove that I'm human every step of the way. Captchas, re-captchas, Cloudflare checkboxes, the whole shebang. I am human. I promise. And I am very annoyed. Outright angry, even. I doubt that any robot will ever be as annoyed as I am right now about the current state of the internet.

What annoys me most, actually, is that all these measures don't really work. There's bots everywhere. Robots get access to the stuff anyway, using farms of humans, just like in the good old days of WoW gold farming. The centralized "safety" nets of Cloudflare et al brought down large swaths of the internet multiple times in the last couple of weeks alone, and as things centralize more and more these outages will happen more and more.

I'm very close to breaking up with the legacy internet. I'm human, I can cryptographically prove that I'm human, and I have sats to spend. But the legacy internet doesn't care about that. It cares about farming me and my data, while annoying me to no end. I've been nostr only for a while now, but that was only on the "social media" side. 2026 might be the year where I go nostr-only for everything, or to phrase it slightly differently: permissionless for everything.

No more "are you human?"

No more "I'm sorry, Dave. I'm afraid I can't do that."

No more cookie banners, paywalls, and AI slop.

No more being treated like a child.

Even if it means that I'll have to self-host everything.

Even if it means that I'll have to build & maintain stuff myself.

Even if it means that it's a lot of work and pain.

Nothing worth having ever comes easy.

But the easy stuff is not worth having in the first place.

Here's to the year to come, and the new corner of the internet, build on cryptography and webs-of-trust. Real value. Real connections. Real humans.

Here's to nostr.

It's at a point now where it's almost impossible for me to use the "regular" internet. I can't access half the sites. The reason? I care about my digital hygiene and thus use a VPN. Sometimes switching to a different VPN or switching the country of the VPN works; other times it does not. Oh well, I guess I'm not going to watch that video, or read that article, or look at that picture. Whatever.

In addition to that, if I'm not blocked completely, I have to prove that I'm human every step of the way. Captchas, re-captchas, Cloudflare checkboxes, the whole shebang. I am human. I promise. And I am very annoyed. Outright angry, even. I doubt that any robot will ever be as annoyed as I am right now about the current state of the internet.

What annoys me most, actually, is that all these measures don't really work. There's bots everywhere. Robots get access to the stuff anyway, using farms of humans, just like in the good old days of WoW gold farming. The centralized "safety" nets of Cloudflare et al brought down large swaths of the internet multiple times in the last couple of weeks alone, and as things centralize more and more these outages will happen more and more.

I'm very close to breaking up with the legacy internet. I'm human, I can cryptographically prove that I'm human, and I have sats to spend. But the legacy internet doesn't care about that. It cares about farming me and my data, while annoying me to no end. I've been nostr only for a while now, but that was only on the "social media" side. 2026 might be the year where I go nostr-only for everything, or to phrase it slightly differently: permissionless for everything.

No more "are you human?"

No more "I'm sorry, Dave. I'm afraid I can't do that."

No more cookie banners, paywalls, and AI slop.

No more being treated like a child.

Even if it means that I'll have to self-host everything.

Even if it means that I'll have to build & maintain stuff myself.

Even if it means that it's a lot of work and pain.

Nothing worth having ever comes easy.

But the easy stuff is not worth having in the first place.

Here's to the year to come, and the new corner of the internet, build on cryptography and webs-of-trust. Real value. Real connections. Real humans.

Here's to nostr.

Gold is the only monetary asset on Earth that can:

vanish into a vault no one is allowed to audit

reappear on a balance sheet because someone said so

double-count through rehypothecation

shape-shift into jewelry, bars, coins, or dust

get melted, recast, relabeled, reassigned

go missing and no one can prove it

magically “increase” in reported holdings with zero transparency

serve as collateral even when it may not exist

It’s Houdini money.

Imagine running a global economy on something that can literally disappear without evidence and then reappear through paperwork.

Some plans for 2026, if all goes well

hot take. the kids crisis is due to the accumulation of rules in the developped world. It's not complacency, it's not confort, it's not that kids are expensive, it's compliance, we're just awaiting instructions at this point, and that takes away the thrill of building a life that nobody planned for us in advance. we must stop central planning.

Marriage and family is essential for a full and happy life. You don’t want to end up like this person.

Can confirm! WTF is up with this country.

HOO LEE FUK

cc nostr:npub1cj8znuztfqkvq89pl8hceph0svvvqk0qay6nydgk9uyq7fhpfsgsqwrz4u nostr:npub1dg6es53r3hys9tk3n7aldgz4lx4ly8qu4zg468zwyl6smuhjjrvsnhsguz

been reflecting on the bitcoin for signal campaign. i want to share why we designed it in the way we did. a lot of bitcoin projects try to get people to come to them.

'latest layer 2/ecash/ark/lightning/spark/liquid!'

'simple wallet!'

'frictionless onboarding!'

i think that's not always the best approach.

instead of promoting a new app or asking people to meet us, we should try to meet people where they already are and then make the case for bitcoin. millions already use signal everyday so why ask them to go somewhere else for private payments? bring bitcoin to them instead.

i want to see more projects try to integrate bitcoin where people already hangout. cashapp nailed this imo. they didn't build a bitcoin app and ask people to come. they integrated bitcoin into a space that people already use to send $ to friends. try to follow that playbook.