Woah… wait, can an npub have the same functionality as a token would for voting on decentralized networks?

Ie, instead of proof of stake or vote per token in your wallet, your npub just counts as 1 valid vote per voting epoch?

So I realize yall mostly came here from X but I mostly left X in like 2021 lol …

So, coming here from Instagram feels like culture shock…. I used my brain more in the past 8 days than I have combined since 2021 lol 😂

I wish my life came with instructions.

ANYONE CAN STORE, DISTRIBUTE, AND VERIFY NOTES IS SIMPLY A BETTER MODEL THAN ONLY ELON CAN STORE, DISTRIBUTE, AND VERIFY POSTS.

EVEN IF NO IMPROVEMENTS ARE MADE NOSTR SCALES BETTER THAN X.

My DMs this morning 😂

An llm only understands the relationship between tokens.

My DMs this morning 😂

Those concerned with personal privacy in the AI era will require tools that not only protect their data but also poison data streams.

A few months ago, I started ‘Bitcoin Bitches’, an italian telegram group for “my girlfriends” to talk about Bitcoin in a more personal and feminine way.

Today, it has 361 members (and I had to make it private because it was losing its initial intimacy).

In no time, some of these girls created the fork "Bitcoin Bitches Turin," and today I attended one of their meetups in this beautiful city.

I couldn’t be happier to see how this community is growing and to hear women passionately talking about Bitcoin 🩷

I’m more concerned about the people in denial of AI than any threat from AI.

Will you guys be mad at me for stacking Ag ,Au & Pb along with stacking Sats?

(silver, gold & lead)

I’m into…

#carnivorediet

#medicine

#nutrition

#bitcoin

#homesteading (sheep)

#geopolitics

#history

#anthropology

How about you?

We added 10x the training data. Working on another 10x now.

Chat.BitcoinJungle.app

AI vs Bitcoin

The AI hype has been non-stop for the last 2 years ever since ChatGPT came out with its 3.0 chat. Since then, there's been an insane amount of investment into AI tech from every direction. There are hundreds of startups, every tech giant has been making investments and companies in between have been putting a lot of money toward it as well. It's not a small amount, either, as the AI hardware costs make Bitcoin mining look like discount bargains.

Yet after two years, what have we to show for it? Maybe some faster image editing on newer phones? Slightly faster answers to questions you would normally ask Google? Some productivity increase among junior programmers? The investment was enormous, as can clearly be seen in NVIDIA's growth, but the results are pretty underwhelming. As with any hyped technology, the possibilities have run past the actual use.

One of the supposed benefits of fiat money is that capital accumulation is unnecessary to create real value. You can build roads, for example, without having to save up for it. What this misses are many obvious drawbacks, but one of them is that there has to be someone that evaluates whether something will create value and create the money out of thin air to fund the project. This is not just inherently centralizing, but also deeply political.

For whatever reason, AI passed this political test and got the blessing of the money printers, which, to a company that sells, shovels like NVIDIA has been great news. But the drawback is that there's bound to be at least *some* that don't pan out. Maybe some segment of the economy can't use AI profitably, for example. Yet the powers that be, mostly Cantillionaires, have decided that this is worthwhile and have poured insane amounts of money into this bet.

But much like hyped tech of the past, it's looking more and more likely that there's little profit to be made here. Yes, there's some useful things that can be made, but the costs are simply too high right now to justify spending that much. It's a luxury item that mostp people simply don't need, and hence don't want to pay for. AI has become an expensive solution looking for costly problems to solve.

This was always my analysis with another hyped tech: blockchain. It never really made any sense as the cost was too high for what was really just a distributed, very redundant but hard to upgrade database. It, too, couldn't find costly problems to solve, with the exception of one. That, of course being Bitcoin.

What differentiates Bitcoin from AI is that people *need* Bitcoin. It's its own killer app. AI is not so popular that people will pay for what it costs right now. And that means that most of the investment will be wasted. Like most hyped things in a fiat economy, it's doomed to have significant malinvestment.

A lot of people complain about Bitcoin businesses and how hard it is to make them profitable. In a sense, I get it. You want more people to have steady jobs and so on. But in another sense, I think this is the market speaking. You're not going to get paid from Bitcoiners easily and there's no flood of printed money looking for a place to go. At least there won't be once fiat money has run its course. Building a profitable company is hard and so few meet that mark, especially in a new segment as AI has shown.

So in that way, I'm encouraged, because the companies that survive in Bitcoin will have something truly worthwhile. By contrast, the companies that survive in AI will probably be the ones that get subsidized the longest.

...and then I understood #bitcoin and #nostr

Wait, wut?

Is it in Settings?

I am hearing lots of people saying that we are hitting a plateau with LLMs. They keep getting better but their pace has significantly slowed down to the point that they might never actually fulfill the level of "intelligence" people are expecting. Thoughts?

NWS will not break nostr.

NWS works with and without encrypted transport. There are lots of different flavors to explore.

When used without encryption, the entry node must be run by the user themselves because public entry nodes would be able to listen in otherwise. Two options in those cases: run the entry node locally in tandem with your (unmodified) client, or skip the entry node and modify the client so that data is sent through nostr to the exit node directly (the client is the entry node).

When used with encryption, the entry node can also be public. If the encryption doesn't rely on certificate authorities, it just works. You have to make sure you're talking to the right person, but that problem is as old as computer science. For example, ssh will ask you to confirm the fingerprint of the server when you connect.

If the encryption is https and the certificate was issued for a normal domain, your browser will complain (do you trust this website?) and the user will have to say "let me pass, even if insecure". Without ugly hacks (issuing your own root cert for example), I don't know ways to circumvent this. Note that Tor services doen't support https and they don't have to since transport is always Sphinx-encrypted (even hidden from the entry node).

How do you make sure you're talking to the right server if you use https? Couldn't the entry node just send your traffic somewhete else? We can actually do something that is unique to Nostr here: the exit node can publish its own TLS certificate on nostr and sign it. That's right, you don't need an authority to do that for you if you remain within the NWS system. Clients can fetch the cert from nostr before talking to the entry node and verify against that cert.

Here is another cool part that we haven't talked about yet: the exit node can also be configured to reach the global Internet and not only a local service (we call this NWS v2). In those cases, NWS can be used a bit like a VPN. You can type "https google dot com" in your browser and your encrypted traffic would flow from your machine to the entry node, to the exit node, then to Google and back to you. on those cases, nobody complains about the certificate because everything is fine.

Exciting shit. Gm.

Observation:

On Nostr I follow a bunch of indie hackers building open source stuff creating immense value, most notably in nostr and bitcoin. They’re all grant funded.

On X I follow a bunch of indie hackers building proprietary stuff creating immense value, most notably in AI. Many are making insane monthly recurring revenues (MRR) and are all bootstrapped/self-funded.

Question:

How do we create a culture of open source indie hackers in bitcoin/nostr that are making self-sustaining MRR?

my phone

One of these days, Egyptair’s cross-Atlantic flights will join the modern world and introduce wifi. But today is not that day.

In the meantime, I don’t mind that much. It’s time I can set aside to read books and papers on my backlog.