I learned a cool trick in #rust recently. You can modify standard types like Mutex to give them superpowers. Like every time the mutex drops, you can get an event and do something with the data. So cool. 😎

Too funny! 😂

https://x.com/marycatedelvey/status/1818961740261982236

I agree with your characterization of the risks: ones that could harm the technology itself, and those that could harm the network’s decentralization.

Why we should be conservative for both:

➡️ Bitcoin is not merely a technical system. It’s also a social and economic system where incentives drive behavior. Over time, the incentives will either push the system to greater decentralization or greater centralization. Satoshi’s original incentives have been pushing the system towards greater decentralization. However, if we change these incentives, we could break what he gave us.

➡️ Devs understand technical risks but they generally aren’t experts in predicting the third order effects in dynamic systems. They have a huge blind spot. We’ve seen what happens when devs play around and mess things up (ethereum, witness discount).

➡️ You’re right, we shouldn’t try to stop abusive transactions. But we should try to prevent new classes of transactions which harm decentralization. This is a hard problem which is why we must be patient, long-term thinkers.

My perspective on CAT / CTV:

➡️ Every change to the core protocol has unknown risks. Therefore we should only make a change if it is both necessary and safe. “Necessary” means solving an existential problem that we believe cannot be solved in any other way. “Safe” means that we believe it to be safe and have reduced the attack surface as narrowly as possible to limit unintended side effects.

➡️ We can’t make risky changes to fix a potential future problem (“premature optimization”). Maybe someday there will be an existential scaling crisis, but we don’t have one right now. The mempool is clearing at a few sats/vbyte.

➡️ There are also alternatives that devs haven’t yet explored. We should exhaust all reasonable alternatives before proposing a core protocol change.

➡️ Even when we have a real problem, we should wait and see whether the pain of it can motivate creative solutions without a protocol change. Necessity being the mother of invention.

➡️ Both CTV and CAT were designed to maximize capability, enabling unknown use cases where we don’t know how they might be abused. This design philosophy is inappropriate for bitcoin (the world’s money and our hope for the future). We should instead identify key use cases (vaults?) that are absolutely essential (that can only be solved with a core protocol change) and build specific solutions, scoped as narrowly as possible to prevent unintentional side effects.

Appreciate the discussion ✌️

On chain general computation, and even covenant systems like CAT / CTV, are dangerous. They open the door to future mining centralization.

It seems proponents generally mention the “benefits” but never fully cover the risks.

Interesting that the word “risk” is never even mentioned ONCE in that paper. 🤦‍♂️

Best to experience the system via standard unmodified apps to understand the average user’s experience.

Red sky at night, hodler’s delight

✅ called it

https://techcrunch.com/2024/09/17/socialai-offers-a-twitter-like-diary-where-ai-bots-respond-to-your-posts/ nostr:note1fxkq7er2smqmuej053d9xdaprye6s2la5fxrxg6x5u0n5tzy7jtst659mk

Curious about that. Why do you think that was?

“what does PoW require here?”

Are you asking about how to technically implement it?

Devs would probably need to make protocol changes to attach a hash “proof” with each message.

Each proof would have a “difficulty” meaning the computational effort required. Presumably this would be dynamically adjusted over time.

Your phone or computer would do this in the background. All you would notice is the delay, the battery consumption, and your phone getting hot.

Take down meta? 🤔🤷‍♂️ Does it need to? Personally, I’m happy chatting with a few freedom loving bitcoin maxis. 😊

There’s nothing technically wrong with the strategy.

A few things to consider:

Spammers can also do PoW so it would slow them down but not stop them completely. Also, they could target specific accounts to focus the abuse. For example, all large accounts or only new users.

A lot of people use their phones and PoW could have a deleterious effect on phone batteries. 🪫

It might be better to have the PoW upfront so the “price” is larger but paid once to create the account rather than each time to send a message. Especially if there was a way to quickly blacklist their accounts everywhere.

I’m still thinking about a WoT model where new users must be sponsored (followed) by an existing user. The nostr clients offer a few guided options on how to get “into the club”.

Some ways of getting sponsored:

Attend a meetup / conference / real life and find an existing nostr user.

Do a large PoW and send a DM to an existing user.

Send a zap to an existing user.

Etc.

It’s a really hard problem for devs because spammers can use AI to create profiles that are practically indistinguishable from regular users. The fake profiles could be filled in complete with avatars, background image, etc.

Imagine if every post with hit with 100 replies that you’re pretty sure aren’t real but you don’t know for certain.

Spammers will use TOR and VPNs so if relays block those, they’ll harm the privacy of real users. (Eg I’m using TOR right now)

Spammers can also target larger accounts or new users for abuse and can also flood your DMs with spam to make that unusable too.

It’s a hard problem. No easy solutions. I’m personally in favor of the WoT model with a guided onboarding process for new users to get into the web of trust.

I must be missing a ton of context. Such a strange situation. Getting mad for someone helping out and promoting nostr? 🤨

Derek’s message has a lot of “me” and “I” in it. 🚩🚩🚩

I don’t think it works under a bitcoin standard where you borrow bitcoin and pay interest in bitcoin.

Where does the interest come from? You can see problem at the extreme. For example, if I could borrow 21 million bitcoin (all of it) it’s impossible to pay any additional interest because nobody can create more.

As more and more bitcoin is borrowed, it becomes more difficult to repay interest.

Fiat solves this problem with liquidity injections whenever the banks run into problems.

People did lend gold but it was centralized and fractional reserved making this easier. And still banks were constantly failing. Bitcoin is more readily held in self custody so the this would make banks fail even faster.

😂 nostr:note1apx4zfygs6n7r444mxtaly59f8th6wdpf2y4stgay7ssdvmljpas5qvkxg

Donate some blood. Win win 🩸

IMHO, using recaptcha would be like using “Sign in with Google”.

Sure, but how do you know the difference between a spam bot and a real user?

It seems we’re exploring the bounds of a new “pick two” trilemma:

1) free to post

2) free of spam

3) free to connect with anyone

The fundamental problem is that new users and spammers will be soon indistinguishable. LLMs will make sure that profiles are properly filled in with icons, the posts are unique, etc.

I worry that IP filtering, rate limiting and anti-spam algos will just consume your time as you fight one fire after another and spammers quickly adapt to whatever you just did. With every fix, new users will lose visibility without recourse.

I’m just thinking it’s best to solve the problem at the deeper level. eg. WoT plus an onboarding process for new users.

Dunno, I just saw Peter’s “notes coming from certain IP addresses”. Assumed pattern matching of IP addresses.