📣 Announcement time! 📣

As you might have guessed (from the photos I keep posting, mostly), I really love the place where I'm fortunate enough to live. It's a small town in northern Italy. We're surrounded by 3000m peaks, Lake Como is a short drive away, and the people are warm, welcoming, and hard-working.

My wife and I moved here 14 years ago with no more expectation than trying to figure out how we could live in the alps to climb and ski right outside our backdoor. Over those 14 years, Valchiavenna has become our home.

For a long time, I've been plotting and scheming about how I could give more back to this community that has given me so much and over the last few months, with the help of many local friends, all the pieces have started to come together.

Bitcoin Chiavenna is aimed at building a stronger Chiavenna using Bitcoin but; more broadly, it's a project focused on exploring how small, often marginalized, rural communities can benefit from adopting Bitcoin.

Chiavenna is the perfect petri dish for experimentation. We have local hydro power generation (run by a local coop). We are a stone's throw from Switzerland, which brings both tourism and shows local government how sane (and very minimal) regulation of digital assets can be beneficial. And, unlike many small towns in Italy, we have a large population of young entrepreneurs who haven't bailed for the big city and have started dozens of local businesses.

My hope is that our education and our learnings will be beneficial for other towns across Europe and North America. Many of whom, facing the death of their traditional industries, are having to find new ways to thrive, and do so without becoming wholly dependent on the central government for handouts.

I grew up in a small town. I live in a small town. I want to see tens of thousands of vibrant, wealthy, interesting, weird small towns across the planet. And I want them all to run on Bitcoin.

If you're with me, I'd love your support. We've just launched a Geyser project to raise funds for the first phase of several projects. We've got some cool rewards listed there, with more coming in the future.

And if anyone is coming through the area, let me know. I'd be happy to show you around and help you leave a few sats behind at local businesses!

Onwards and upwards! 🏔️🚀

Today I'm launching Flare, a video sharing site built on Nostr! 🎉

Like YouTube, Flare lets you upload, view, comment, and like videos from your favorite creators. BUT unlike YouTube, we can't strike, shadow-ban, or demonetize you just because we disagree 🤗

Since Flare is built on Nostr, you are free to serve your content from anywhere and consume content from any kind 34235 client you'd like.

Blog Post: Introducing Primal for iOS

I just shared more details about our iOS release, including our wallet approach:

The latest version of NostrSync is now live. Create a copy of your Nostr data from all existing relays. It will also broadcast your data to ensure it is updated across all the relays & store it in an in-built databases.

BIG NEWS: Primal for iOS is now live on the App Store.

This release comes with an integrated lightning wallet, ability to zap and get zapped, send & receive lightning payments, and buy small amounts of sats via an in-app purchase. I will talk in detail about our wallet approach soon.

We worked really hard to make the Nostr onboarding experience as smooth as possible, and give new users the ability to send and receive zaps without friction. Please try the app and let us know your thoughts! 💜🤙

Boom. It took a while, but the audio version of Broken Money is now available:

Boom. My new book, Broken Money, is now available on Amazon:

Very true! There is GDPR compliant alternative from Bunny, if self hosting is not an option 🐶🐾🫡

someone I don't know and have never communicated with has built a full proof of concept Data Vending Machine. I randomly bumped into it on birdapp.

I expect a whole lot more of this as the vast amount of use cases (and the endless composability possibilities) are explored

Just pushed build 17, this adds event preloading! Images, previews and translations will be automatically loaded by the time you scroll into view. This reduces the overall jankiness when scrolling. Check it out: