Where is this?

I’m just going to ask it because it’s been on my mind….

Does anyone here think that #bitcoin existed previously like when they built the pyramids or am I being the weird new girl?

Yesterday I looked at strfry, but couldn't find any information about a paid option. Is there any?

Are there any paid relays that accept all events that simply tag a paid user?

It's one thing to be skeptical of Bitcoin when you first hear about it. It's hard to believe that such an odd architecture could survive the test of time.

And yet, the folks who have by far taken the biggest L are those who were on the cypherpunks mailing list, said it would never work, and continue to deny the past 14 years of evidence to the contrary.

#asknostr

Does it make sense to build a kill switch note type that effectively tells relays to block anything related to a specific user id?

The "If I can't have it, no one can" feature.

Question: How to identify who zapped my post if there is no exact matching the received amount, despite of I browsed my posts and replies?

#asknostr

Yesterday I had my first coding lesson :D soo…. I am currently working on a relay 🤫💚 I told my man I want to do it on my own, so I learn something new. He offered some time to help me and I had sooo many questions 😝 oof so many shortcuts 😁

After renting a server and selecting a

domain last week and successfully logging in, it seems like my cute 1GB on the server are not enough for using Nostream! 👀

What relay-software can I use as a bloody beginner, one that fits on my little server? I want to make it paid and for payment, using a website :) (like nostr.wine for example)

Or, also, and this question might be a little high for me but: how do I connect a website to my relay (with npub input and payment)

Any other tips for me? #asknostr 💜

bitcoin is great but if Rogan invited me on I would probably spend the majority of the time talking about nostr tbh

If you somehow send the right bitcoiner or panel of bitcoiners on Rogan that vibes with him and makes him get it:

For reference, here are my main thoughts on the current Bitcoin softfork ideas/dramas to those who care.

For context with regards to wherever it might matter, I have a 12-year background as an engineer initially and eventually an engineering manager, including overseeing electrical/mechanical/software for an aviation simulation facility, but although I have written code here and there in my early days, I am certainly *NOT* a software engineer. My career work is on electrical engineering and multi-discipline engineering management, and my master's degree is in engineering management, with an emphasis on systems engineering and engineering economics. Any viewpoint I have is from an engineering/systems management perspective or an economics perspective, not a programmer perspective.

I follow multiple software Bitcoin experts on various topics, many of which disagree with each other, similarly to how I followed my various lead engineers when I was working in engineering management.

The U.S. Constitution is well-written but of course not perfect. It's a good document, especially after the amendments it has had. The most recent amendment was over 30 years ago, and it is minor enough that most people don't know what it is. The second most recent one was over 50 years ago, and that one is also pretty minor, imo, and most people don't know that one either. The Constitution, the Bill of Rights, and a then a handful of key amendments after that to fix key issues with race and gender voting and so forth, have been the foundational aspects of this whole Constitutional project.

In order to change the U.S. Constitution, you need both a supermajority in Congress and a supermajority among States. Good luck getting that. And that near-immutability is exactly why the Constitution is valuable. Even if it was better written and included all sorts of things I liked, if it were easier to change, I would consider it to be a *worse* foundation than it is now. The near-immutability is the critical part. A nearly-immutable good document, is a great document, if it serves as the foundation of something important.

When it comes to Bitcoin, the aspect that I view as being the most valuable is its near-immutability. We have a global open-source ledger foundation that gives us savings and payment/settlement technology. It makes hard trade-offs in order to remain reasonably decentralized. And yet, Bitcoin can settle more transactions per year than Fedwire does, which is the U.S. base settlement layer, which handles (not a typo) 1 quadrillion dollars worth of gross settlement volumes per year. Bitcoin does that function but is global, open-source, and has its own scarce units. Various layers can expand that scalability, (Lightning, sidechains, fedimints, custodial environments, etc). Certain softforks to the base layer may also add some new scalability options (covenants, drivechains, zero-knowledge proofs, etc). But those softforks present risks to the whole project, unless they have a supermajority of support and are considered to be of low technical+incentive risk.

When I was an engineering manager for my aviation facility, if I were to approve a major new change and help fund it, it would be because the supermajority of my senior technical leads supported it, and because they could convince me of it. Objective truth tends to be easy to share between rational people that listen to each other. In contrast, subjective things that are more contested of course tend to be harder. If I liked a new change but it didn't have a supermajority, I respected these divergent opinions and wanted to know why they saw it differently. Unless it was in an area where I was *specifically* the facility expert in (in my case, the electrical/control aspects within our organization's aviation simulators), I would never go with a minority opinion among my technical leads and override the majority of my technical leads.

One of the most common problems I encountered in my career was over-engineering. Not a single person knows every detail about how an aviation simulator works (which was my field of work). There are software experts, graphical design experts, mechanical experts, electronics experts, pilot experts, and then business experts that have to figure out what is valuable to clients and how to get the required stuff and how to make the whole thing economical and thus well-incentivized. Systems engineering, practically by definition, is the science of managing a project that is more complex than any one human mind can possibly understand. Any major project engineer/manager has to deal with this dilemma.

As it pertains to over-engineering, many people often have pet projects that they care about, or want to make really cool complex things, that are not economical or not robust. Endless changes can create endless complexity, which are hard to maintain, are less reliable, and so forth. The most beautiful engineering designs are often the most simple at the foundation. Complexity can exist in layers or silos built on or around that foundation, which reduces contagion risk to the simple-but-robust foundation.

In short, if you you can't convince a supermajority, then maybe your idea isn't right or needs more work. Maybe the problem is on your end. Especially if the supermajority that you need to convince are intelligent relevant people (in Bitcoin's case: software developers, node-runners, miners, capital allocators, etc).

And of course, foundations like the U.S. Constitution or the Bitcoin base layer are far more important than the engineering frameworks of some random aviation simulation facility, so the standards are higher.

So, how do I assess proposed softforks as someone who hasn't written code in a decade but tries to follow the designs and economics of various proposals where possible? I look towards technical leads, and look for a supermajority of serious stakeholders, and need the proposal to clearly make sense to me technically and economically.

I view Bitcoin as being valuable due to its near-immutability. That is the source of its monetary premium. And so as follows, from a project management perspective regarding what is among the most serious of all possible projects:

-The first rule of Bitcoin is you do not break Bitcoin.

-The second rule of Bitcoin is you do not break Bitcoin.

-The third rule of Bitcoin is you do not break Bitcoin.

-The fourth rule of Bitcoin is that, around the margins, you try to find conservative ways to improve Bitcoin that are clear enough to get a supermajority.

Therefore, my view on softforks is that I defer to the supermajority of experts I trust, while also needing it to make sense to me personally. I'm agnostic towards many softforks, since I don't have the detailed software expertise to be relevant between similar proposals. As proposed softworks gain momentum, I check to see if they make sense to me, and then look for a supermajority.

Bitcoin is valuable due to its near-immutability. If it can be changed by minority factions, then the relevance of the project over the long arc of time is limited. To the extent that it's going to be any sort of important base layer, that near-immutability, much like the U.S. Constitution, is critical. To that extent, any proposed change to Bitcoin is not just a software thing; it's an economics thing as well.

Therefore, if proponents of a given softfork try to find a way to push itself on the network without a supermajority of technical experts and economic actors, then whether or not I like it, I will oppose it. That's a way to turn me from neutral to opposed. Because that near-immutability is what I would fight for. I only support highly agreed-upon changes. Whatever small piece that my node, my voice, and my money can do, I err towards the near-immutability.

Another interesting question (probably not interesting and solved millions of times before me) is what exactly is a trending note on nostr. Is it one with a lot of replies? Reactions? Reposts? Zaps? All of the above? Any of the above? A specific combination of the above? How much does it matter WHO did the action? nostr:note1wglva934zxlpvfsgq93vfqc6w6r33c89zkf3h6da9jn7tw3yw2wshuthqa

Bitcoin allows one to transact without middlemen.

The good: you can transact with anyone, including people without access to fiat rails, etc.

The bad: you can transact with anyone, including scammers etc.

Middlemen did check your counterparties and would cut many of the bad actors. Without middlemen, we're on our own.

Enter Nostr.

Nostr allows identities to accumulate trust signals from other identities, and then allows everyone to evaluate their counterparties. Don't trust middlemen (KYC), verify yourself (WoT).

If Nostr and Bitcoin succeed, the threshold for 'safely transacting online' drops to zero.

What kinds of marketplaces and online transactions could flourish if accepting payments and paying safely became free and frictionless?

Just thinking.

you’re thinking about phone relays the wrong way. They don’t need to handle heavy traffic. They are local caches with the ability to sync with remote relays efficiently.

I feel lucky as hell that I can work on freedom tech full time. Wouldn’t be here without y’all sharing the same vision of a better future where individuals are in control of their data online. There is so much more cool tech to build. Imagine if every phone was also a relay. This is the direction that damus is moving in. So many possibilities are unlocked after this. Thanks everyone who has ever zapped damus, it keeps us moving forward 🙏

#nostrdb will have a query interface identical to the current nostr query format. This will provide a unified query interface to local and remote dbs, as well as enable damus to contribute to the relay side of the protocol via relay nip extensions. It will support COUNT for efficient local lookups of stats (likes, etc), no caching relays required.

I hate AI.

cache.centralized :P

can it handle over 100kb files? I need it for jquery :)

Good to know, thanks!

Have you ever since issues with VPNs ? I did a bit more testing and it seems like my issue reoccurs whenever the VPN refreshes/changes location

You're the nos.lol master? Interesting.

Where can I learn more about what nostr.mom is doing?

I need a nostr dictionary

Cool, because I just realized something: we use lowercase `a` for event addresses. I don't think the NNS use-case warns of the use of single-letter tags (which are the indexed ones by relays). So, we might want to rename `A` and `v` to something more verbose. Since A stands for "address" in the DNS spec, we could use "address" or more specifically "ip_address" tags.

Simpler. Maybe we start with a "wss://IP" in a "connect" tag? You just need to push that replaceable event to all other relays. Then a client connecting with one of them can see the IP change and update it's records accordingly.

Makes sense to move to "DNS over Nostr", in fact I may start publishing relay IPs with kind 103 soon

I asked the bots how we should defend against the bots.

Why is my follower list nuked every time i try a new nostr app?