I noticed I don't post on here half as much as the I do centralised algo apps. I couldn't figure out why.

And now I know why.. I pick my phone up, doom scroll, then 20/30 minutes later I'll put my phone down. Within about 30 seconds the centralised algo app will buzz me with a notification to say "You might like this from Karen"

So my stupid monkey brain is intrigued. Picks the phone up again (like it's a banana) and I'm not even interested in what Karen is doing. I notice 'Tony' has a new role at work and click on his page with my monkey paw. Then suddenly an hour has gone by. I notice an article, I'll read that. It was rubbish (most of the time) - I'm frustrated.

But keep going back.

And I've not even thought about Nostr once, even though I think I know it's value - it represents what i think i represent - freedom, self sovereignty, Bitcoin etc.

I'll sometimes even flick through the other centralised algo apps before I put my phone down and not once go through my Nostr feed, even though I love it.

The other apps are like crack (i imagine). But the crack is not even good. And I keep chasing the cheap dopamine hits from them. Like a social media junkie.

I've quit so many things before, like smoking and drinking. Toxic women. Shitcoins. Social Media is one thing I truly struggle with.

So I'm going to wein myself off it - one day at a time. I read somewhere that it takes 3 weeks to form a new habbit.

Or 21 days.

So here it goes #21daysOfNostr

Posting everyday. 🫡🧡

This photo was taken by the owner of the hive. The beekeeper forgot to put the frames in which the bees collect honey, and the bees built their own architecture from the honeycomb, which takes into account natural ventilation, so that the air can flow freely and maintain a stable temperature. This is the heart!🐝

I've had a similar outcome as mandrik, but with a somewhat different context. It's something I still think about a lot.

When I was an engineer/manager, I worked in person, and had a great social group there. After I left it, I became inherently remote-work based in my home office, which has a lot of advantages but also some social isolation-related challenges.

I then gradually drifted away from work-friends I knew for a decade. Between work and family, we just gradually could barely find time for a group lunch anymore. Actually it was more on their side than mine; they have longer commutes, children, etc.

And my US family is small and dispersed around the country. So aside from my husband, a lot of my social interaction is online and at events within the past few post-covid years. The big exception is the part of the year I spend in Egypt, where I am surrounded by in-person family and friends every day, but have less overall productivity (bad internet for starters, problematic time zone, plus it's also vacation time and social time).

And the most notable part of each year is when I come back to the US first to take care of things here, and my husband is still in Egypt for another month to finish taking care of things there, where I risk turning into a solo cat lady.

So that makes me really focus on genuine internet dynamics, treating people online similarly to how I treat them in real life, building real connections there, going to events to meet my "tribe" despite the travel hassle, etc.

It also has prioritized having children to me recently. I've been focusing on work, focusing on elder care, etc. Due to my starting point, I have been in the position of having to support a parent and then in-laws since my 20s, while also being a workaholic to reach the positions I've gotten to. For years I was simply too busy for anything else, but increasingly the next generation is an element of life I think about a lot.

nostr:note19mw0jrl49tl3zmrketchgm3kfluc96na26k5p4yk7tvg95eya23sazn0c7

Nothing to do with your note but, You were missed last weekend 🫂

First up, I want to recognize that this is an uncomfortable topic! Bitcoin is inevitably changing towards user-pays, and that's not all positive. But facts we don't like are still facts: can't engineer a solution if we can't think about the problems.

There are three kinds of bitcoiners.

A. Those who can afford any fee.

B. Those who can afford a UTXO, but not often.

C. Those who can't afford a UTXO.

Nobody worries about the A group (and in the early days, that was everyone). Obviously Lightning (my area!) caters to the B group, and we want it to be as large as possible. To do this we can (1) make lightning as resiliant as we can so onchain spends are rare, (2) make bitcoin as efficient as possible so we can cram as much as we can into what we have.

(1) Making lightning more resilient and reliable is engineering. Lots of people working on this, even before we get soft-forks which could help further.

(2) More efficiency has two benefits: obviously if your own onchain spends are 20% smaller, that's 20% cheaper. But if *everyone's* onchain spends are 20% smaller, that means fees are lower *for everyone* too (and it's non-linear). So we really care about all Bitcoin usage! Some things are obvious wins: Taproot so you can avoid even putting the script onchain in many cases, FROST so you can cram your 2 of 3 or other scheme into a single key and signature. We know we want to get more aggressive with sharing one signature across multiple inputs (Cross Input Signature Aggregation), but that needs a lot more research, and a soft-fork.

But even with all these, the math is clear: some people, even if you somehow gave them their wealth in a UTXO, it couldn't afford its own fees to spend. The C group is real. Spoiler alert: we don't have an answer for this! But let's look at some approaches people have tried.

Firstly, there are attempts to move these people into the B group: give them long enough that maybe fees will reach a point they can afford. This seems unlikely to me:

1. As fees increase everyone will start doing the work to take advantage of low fee times, and that itself means that low-fee times won't be so low.

2. These schemes tend to increase onchain footprints, so they need fees to drop a lot to overcome that (typical is 2x the transaction size, so you need fees to halve to gain anything).

3. If you really can't afford the fee, you probably also can't afford to wait.

4. You still haven't actually dealt with those who really, really can't afford the fees. Ever.

Another suggestion is that someone (e.g. a lightning service provider) will lock up funds which would cover fees, in case something goes wrong. This doesn't work economically, because nobody is paying $100 for a $5 user (not at scale), but it doesn't even work mathematically: the reason some people will have small UTXOs is because there are not enough sats for 10 billion people with any realistic distribution.

There are two basic approaches left:

1. Group people, so they fall into the B category (i.e. onchain tx is possible, but expensive).

2. Trust someone, but rely on incentives.

1. Grouping people is possible, but they need to work together if somenthing goes wrong. So grouping inside a community is probably better than grouping with randos.

For example, there are various tree-of-transaction schemes where you go onchain only if the coordinator fails/goes rogue, and how much it costs you depends on whether anyone near you in the tree pays to get themselves out. These are basically free if nothing goes wrong (one UTXO required for thousands of users!). But this is subject to ghettoization, where the coordinator makes sure all the C people are grouped together, knowing none of them can afford the transactions they need to get their funds back. It's particularly bad because the coordinator can insert its own fake "whales" to make it look like it's not ghettoized.

You can play with incentives here, too: more research needed. The details matter!

2. Relying on incentives.

As a simple example, lightning-connected e-cash mints. They can't rug individuals very easily, they have to rug everyone together (or go fractional and rug the last ones to exit). Maybe with enough anonymity and reputation, these would be Good Enough.

More ambitious would be a single UTXO held for multiple people by a coordinator. Can we make it so that if a coordinator is dishonest, you can force them to burn your funds? Maybe burn more than your funds (ie. a bond)? Won't get your money, but it aligns incentives so they're not motivated to rug you. The details here really matter!

There's a cute scheme which has been proposed where the coordinator pays a temporary bond, and asserts that they actually have everyone's signature to transfer the funds. If nobody challenges within a week, they get the bond back and the funds move. If someone challenges, all the signatures are put onchain, and if they're not all valid, the bond gets half-burned and half-given to the (successful) challenger. This is hard to make work, though. Someone needs to get the money to challenge (hard if you don't have the money in the first place, plus it's hard to prove to someone you *didn't* sign something!), and then make sure nobody gets the challenge bond before them (in particular, a dishonest coordinator, seeing the game is up, completes the successful challenge *themselves* and gets half their bond back), and make sure someone can't grief and delay the settlement indefinitely or bankrupt the coordinator.

More research needed, here, too.

Summary

A longer post than I had expected to write. And it's buried in the middle of a thread nobody will read. (I do this sometimes. I suck at marketing I guess!)

Sub-fee bitcoin amounts will have tradeoffs, involving trusting someone who has more money than you (at least, in someone's competence, even if their *financial* incentives can be made to match yours). This is difficult to build well, and not a very exciting thing to build today, so it hasn't really happened (custodial things are much, much easier!).

This is also a key reason I believe we need to make Bitcoin more expressive: if we can do *more* with our own UTXOs, we can build better solutions. And by "we" I mean "someone smarter than me" of course!

Feedback welcome!

Had a batshit insane moment happen in Nashville:

Heather Morgan AKA Razzlekhan had the gall to show up. She's one of the people who pleaded guilty to hacking Bitfinex in 2016.

I've asked around and folks have told me she has also showed up recently at events in NYC and Stanford.

Suspicious AF that she's walking around freely... smells like she's flipped to working with the feds.

I literally just got on nostr 20 minutes ago and my mind is seriously blown right now.

I literally just got on nostr 20 minutes ago and my mind is seriously blown right now.

Bad marketing for Nostr clients to position as “wallets.”

Being money-obsessed is low-status. And social media is all about status.

Hi I’m new here 🪷🫶🏽

Very surprised and grateful for the people and help I am finding here. I must say that I still think it seems like a strange place. a mix between people who do not show their face or their name, where porn is uncensored (thank you), and where they talk about cryptocurrencies and bucks and where anyone can say whatever they fucking want. I think I'll start to settle in…. 🫡⚔️

We don't have a structure to accept individual donations as a legal non-profit, we're working on it.