There’s a lot of groups.

People belong to them.

The groups want you to believe lies.

Because those lies benefit that group.

I believe none of it.

ben is 100% right here

❤️

Mejor

Necesitamos un bitaxe por persona

Are there still places with vibes anymore? Or did the internet kind of kill it?

I feel like digital spaces have vibes. Nostr has a vibe for sure, but everywhere I go (in America at least) feels flat, steril and homogenous now.

People like to pretend otherwise, romanticizing local charm and it’s fun to do so, but in reality there is no meaningful difference between New York, LA, Chicago, Austin, Miami etc…

The differences feel increasingly superficial. Miami with its neon pink and bad Latin art. New York with its identical minimalist cafes selling identical oat lattes. These aren’t cities anymore, they’re brands. “Keep Austin Weird” feels less like the rallying cry of a bohemian collective and more like a safe corporate brand slogan.

It wasn’t always like this. Cities used to incubate true subcultures that couldn’t thrive anywhere else. Seattle once had grunge music emerging organically from local clubs, distinct in sound and attitude. Detroit was a birthplace for techno and industrial grit that couldn’t have been manufactured. New Orleans had jazz clubs and vibrant local traditions that permeated every street corner authentically. Before the internet collapsed distances, you could sense deep authenticity upon arriving somewhere new. The vibe wasn’t something designed by marketing departments; it was organically woven into the streets, the people, the music, and local myths.

Now, vibes feel engineered and commoditized, reduced to Instagrammable moments and easily replicable aesthetics. I once watched from the balcony of my hotel in Nashville as 200 women waited in line to take the same stupid picture with the same stupid set of angel wings.

Digital spaces, ironically, have become refuges of uniqueness, fostering communities unburdened by geographical homogenization. Platforms like nostr host unique niche communities, from hyper-specific gaming bitcoin cultural milieu to obscure philosophical discussions, that retain genuinely distinctive vibes.

Perhaps we’re now entering a strange inversion, where real-world spaces chase digital popularity, adopting blandness to maximize broad appeal.

In this inversion, digital worlds might become the primary spaces where unique vibes survive, thrive, and multiply—leaving our physical world as little more than a flattened reflection of what used to be.

Nostr is where the vibes are at.

A lot of people in the Silicon Valley tech community and similar tech communities have historically been drawn to newer blockchains because their perception of technology involves rapid change and disruption. Thus many of them implicitly assume that older (eg. Bitcoin) is being and/or will be disrupted by newer.

In my experience, a good way to circumvent that is to remind them of communication protocols. Things like Internet Protocol, Ethernet, SMTP, USB, and others tend to have very long lifetimes once they reach dominance. That combo of simplicity and network effects lasts a long time and pushes most rapid change to the edges or higher layers, and that the underlying foundation moves more slowly.

That seems to effectively recategorize it in their perceptions with a decent success rate.

The system change the world

Is going through must be chaotic because the true change is within each one of us.

#bitcoin

Yeah, there are a lot of benefits and a lot of drawbacks as well.

Having worked at and invested in number of ‘bitcoin’ companies, the great problem you will always deal with is fiat people, fiat policies, and fiat politics. While this isn’t a problem when the company is small, it becomes more acute with growth for various reasons until it pretty much becomes unbearable. Then it becomes a fiat company that just happens to do bitcoin stuff, and usually sacrifices the real ethos and values that started the company in the first place.

The only real solution is to build totally bitcoin-only (as in no touching fiat) ‘companies’—which there are very few, and as it becomes more successful, the harder it is to keep it that way.

The good news is that soon there will be more of these ‘companies’ if we can really call them that. Over the next epoch, these will provide some of the greatest opportunities (and risks) to build extraordinary new products and services for the whole world and will truly be ‘bitcoin-only’ services that will likely be real pieces of infrastructure of the future internet. These will also provide the greatest investment opportunities ever, as they will be ‘forever’ and ‘everywhere’ companies.

GM nostriches 💜