The movie CITIZENFOR is worth watching by everyone, even if they know how powerful the government's surveillance and censorship system is, ordinary people are vulnerable. Snowden is also willing to stand up for citizens' rights. And he only has one weapon, a small Rubik's Cube. Tribute to the heroes #[0] 🫡

I can't agree more. "The tech wave is driven more by" killer apps "than the technology itself." #Nostr is now particularly like the Homebrew Computer Club, and the Nostr client App is like Apple I-1976 and needs to continuously improve the experience. We're just a fringe app right now, but the demands of the core freedom tech revolution will make this mainstream.

Needs like the textile machine for the steam engine revolution, the automobile for the internal combustion engine revolution, the light bulb for the electric revolution, and the iPhone for the smartphone. I believe that time is coming.

I will not. Happy to catch up online any time.

Will you two be at #nostrasia?

I don't use Twitter so I don't have the context. De-cloud is the trend.

This article will also be the talk I will give at NostrAsia Tokyo.

Traditionally, people (tech & non tech) associate decentralization with blockchains, mostly because blockchains (including Bitcoin, the first ever blockchain) introduced the concept of decentralization to the mass audience.

__Blockchains, regardless of types, are created to solve problems that require global consensus.__

However, most types of applications don't need global consensus. I argue that 99% of the applications don't need global consensus even if they are networked.

Your chat with your friends don't need to be agreed by all computers globally. As long as the participants of the conversation agree on the same chat history, it works.

If you share some files with your colleagues in a collaborative editing software, such as Google Docs or Notion, this file & its editing history don't need a global consensus of all computers. As long as all editors/commenters/viewers can agree on the same file, it works.

Besides chat and office software, most softwares just doesn't need global consensus.

__Global consensus, at its core, is to address problems around limited resource, such as Bitcoin's limited quantity of money.__

Most softwares is just not about limited resources at all. This is why building decentralized applications on top of blockchains don't work in general. They are solving the wrong problem with the wrong tool.

Nostr solves the missing part of decentralization infrastructure. I am not saying that the current implementation of Nostr is the true and only solution. But its philosophy, generic relays + specific clients, is the right way to go.

There are 3 major areas of decentralization problems:

1. Identity

2. data manipulation

3. data preservation

### Identity

Nostr's private key + public key makes it possible to locally verify identity with algorithms instead of relying on centralized servers to tell you if this person is this person, in contrast to OAuth.

### Data Manipulation

Because of No.1, all clients can independently create & manipulate data without needing to communicate with servers.

### Data Preservation

Relays only act as the long term storage layer and communication layer instead of the authority of business logic.

A normal relay is vastly simpler than traditional cloud-first server software. Therefore,

1. it's cheaper to develop. The best relay, `strfry`, is only developed by a single person with only 15K lines of code, yet it's more useful than most centralized cloud software.

2. It's cheaper to operate.

3. Because business logic developers don't need to write server code anymore, it's much faster for them to release their features.

We can call this decentralization, or we can call this local-first software. The key takeaway here is, by reducing useless server code, we can save money, save time, and create better software so that the whole society benefits from it. Some of us can probably get rich because we save so much money, even if we operate in a 100% fiat way.

### What's the opportunity for us?

Because most people, especially decision makers in most companies, still think __decentralization__ == __blockchain__ and they fear the regulation complexity of blockchains, they are blind to see this other part, the major part in fact, of decentralization.

They will miss a huge opportunity to reduce cost and boost productivity.

Therefore, our opportunity is to build better software & services in a much more efficient way and actually beat them in the fiat world. We don’t even need to unleash the superpower of zaps.

High signal: Skipped or dropped out of college to work.

Low signal: Graduated a 4 year University.

Red flag: Degree from an Ivy institution.

It was already becoming clear that college was low signal when I graduated in 2006. By 2011 when I was hiring lots of software engineers, designers, and product managers I’d completely ignore college status. Now I’m convinced it’s a net negative.

I think I'm okay, I only started buying #bitcoin, stacking sats, acquiring the one and only cryptocurrency, securing mankind's apex asset, and I'm accumulating the money of the people.

EBITDA = earnings before interest, tax, depreciation and amortization. It is a proxy for cash flow, but not a perfect substitute, especially for capital intensive businesses. The preferable metric in my view is EBIT, which would take into account the capex requirements of the business, but you always have to be mindful of potential lumpiness of capital outlays which may not be perfectly reflected in D&A. Why does this matter, and who cares? I expect cash flows (sats flows) are going to become more important than they have been in recent history. Sounds business models with sustainable profitability will be the focus.

That seems like a pretty good description of what I always understood to be outside capital.

I was thinking more of money that is outside of counterparty risk.

IE, bearer assets. Monatery metals, collectables, bitcoin.

When I think of outside money, I think of money that is outside of anyone else's control.