If your protocol isn’t a cryptocurrency but you need to issue a “digital asset” to incentivize people using it —
Perhaps your protocol isn’t very useful.
Bitcoin is a complex system that is a lot of things at the same time.
It’s interesting to understand them separately and together, and how they relate to each other.
We can for example think about in layers of added properties.
1-it’s a global permissionless p2p network
2-it’s a system for broadcasting messages globally
3-it’s rate limited by a variation of HashCash
4-it uses its own chain of hashes as a beacon to prevent pre-computation attacks
5-it uses the rate of its chain to adjust the amount of PoW required for “posting”
6-it allows for global consensus on a set of posted messages
7-it prevents reordering of messages
8-it allows for arbitrary restrictions to be imposed on top of the previous layers
So far I haven’t even mentioned anything about a ledger, and it’s already quite an impressive set of properties that are obviously useful.
What if we remove some properties?
I don’t see how any of the above could be removed without making it useless *for implementing a ledger*.
But what if we wanted other applications?
Then it might still be useful — and possibly less costly.
Many projects have tried to reuse the insights in Bitcoin by piling other features on top of it.
I think *removing* things first is a better approach.
If you want to use the “underlying technology” for something that isn’t financial — the first thing that should go is the token.
Yet how many projects have done the exact opposite?
#[2]​ proposing (maybe joking?) a DAO-like relay with shares issued in a blockchain and votes for accepting notes.
I’m sure. I’d pay many sats for that. Very expensive delicacy.
I’ve seen that before. Like 100,000 times.
There are probably 1,000 defunct projects who tried something very similar.
But I bet you’d make some money
That sounds a lot like Augur.
I think it’s a bad idea.
Why would you need a DAO-y thing to have a high-signal relay?
Why would anyone trust some random people voting on “high signal notes”?
Much easier to just filter by PoW. If you think your note is worth it, spend a lot of resources to publish it.
Otherwise just have on or more editorial staff pick what they lack — or buy a newspaper.
One the beautiful things about PoW is that it allows for near perfect collaboration without any coordinations.
For example if you’re spending BTC, then there are a number of people around the world who don’t know each other or you — all collaborating to get your message (your transaction) broadcast to the entire word now and forever.
In a messaging system, using PoW means millions of people who don’t even know each other exists can easily collaborate to spread a certain information.
That’s true even if each of them don’t have the resources for publishing one message.
Payments don’t allow that in the same way. Unless you sell lottery tickets for publishing messages — which is sort of the same but with a trusted third party.
And of all the CO2 generated by humans, the portion directly resulting from burning fossil fuels isn’t that big.
Anyone who ever drove through the smoke of a forest fire understands how stupid is the idea of stopping climate change by driving an electric car or giving up beef.
I’m not sure how accurate, but I saw estimates that 1/2 of forest fires are accidentally man-made.
A tiny effort in managing those would reduce more CO2 than all the world deciding to be poor and starve.
Yet all we hear about is that we should give up everything to “save the planet”.
And all CO2 in the atmosphere is but a minuscule fraction of all other GHG.
More water evaporates every day from the oceans than the volume of all oil reserves in the world
Today when we climb to the top of a mountain, our first instinct…
Is to grab our phones and take a picture.
Instead of feasting our senses on the magnitude of the irreproducible experience,
We choose to reduce it into a microscopic, meaningless sample we can “share”.
We are afraid of looking at the world and actually seeing it, while others inhabit distant shadows of reality.
We are afraid of being alone in our freedom — we’d rather spend our lives in crowded prison cells.
Don’t do that.
Keep that experience for yourself. All of it.
Then invite a friend to climb that mountain with you.
Share the world — not its ghost.
When I was a kid, books were a way to expand my world beyond what people around me knew and talked about.
Then the web became a way of further expanding my world.
Today talking to my neighbours is the best way to expand my world beyond what is available online.
Most people live in world much smaller than the one I inhabited in my childhood.
When kids get together they watch their phones and talk about what they see online.
A slave in ancient Rome who couldn’t leave the plantation saw more of the world than most people today — even those who travel around, go to school, and watch documentaries
You might think this is an exaggeration.
Look around you.
Think about the past few years.
Even if the technology doesn’t change, there are some antidotes for that sort of manipulation.
Go out of your way to find other entry points.
Always compare what you see on the web with your direct experience — not what you see on TV or what an “authority” says — what you see with your own eyes.
Whenever you talk to people IRL try to find out about their direct experiences— not what movie they watched on Netflix, or the news.
If they want to talk about how their kids cried all night or how their knee is aching — listen to them! — that’s information you can’t learn anywhere else, and form your frame of references for judging things you see online.
Cultivate real life connections as much as you can.
Be optimistic. We will invent better ways to connect online.
Be skeptical. Probably someone telling you they found it is lying or mistaken.
A brief history of the web and its fundamental limitations.
Decades ago the concept of hypertext was invented: documents with links to other documents.
Then people thought we could have a single gigantic, global, living hypertext document — and the authors would be the entirety of mankind. Billions of “pages” linked to each other, allowing everyone to see the entirety of human creativity.
That’s the web.
Then the web grew exponentially and the limitations in it became obvious:
1 - you need a starting point to “navigate” the web.
2 - even if it is all connected, there are so many hops that you can’t in practice reach everything from every starting point.
3 - in practice each starting point gives you a completely different web.
4 - there’s no objective way to choose a good starting point.
Nothing invented after the web has even started to solve the above issues.
Not Yahoo, not Google, not social media, not Nostr.
All of them work by creating a good enough illusion the problem doesn’t exist by hiding behind various curtains the fact it isn’t possible to verify how your “slice” of the web is generated.
If the web is how you see the world —
***whoever controls your entry point to the web controls your mind***
That includes Nostr relays and people you follow.
Thank you for fixing the issue. AFAICT the updated protocol fixes that issue.
I’m happy to help protect uses by reporting issues I find.
Just a quick reminder/disclaimer that reporting issues doesn’t imply endorsement of a project, or any guarantee that the issue has in fact been fixed.
The issue with censorship has never been about hosting your content.
Since the 90s anyone can run their own web server and host whatever content they wanted.
If you were banned from Twitter there was a bunch of platforms ready for you to post your content to.
The problem is if people will actually find and see your content.
Everyone post to Twitter because they have a chance of being seen. You post to other less popular platform and nobody will find you.
That’s where the censorship is relevant. Twitter might not ban you, but you don’t show up on people’s feed. I don’t see what I think is relevant but what somebody else decides is relevant for me.
When I point out Nostr doesn’t actually solve this problem people accuse me of wanting to force others to see my content.
Makes zero sense, but happens again and again.
It’s quite ambiguous how relays should be used in this regards.
That’s certainly not how most clients do things right now.
I’d like to also point that it is exactly how RSS works.
Each blogger has one url for their feed which can be hosted in any platform or in your own server, and people can read all their blogs on the same reader app of their choice
On the other hand very few of the people I followed on Mastodon seem to be here (or I can’t find them).