After hours of meetings with our client, they are now calling me after hours telling me that their clients are experiencing unreproducible issues. Meanwhile I'm on a highway waiting for a tow because my fuse box started smoking. Hows your day going?

#plebchain

yeah, i had some funny visions at various points... as i walked along the road not far from the Balaton my mind was filled with images of personal gravity control devices and a war

i personally believe it is coming soon... and that the rending of the earth by fire and flood is within 20 years... and that the angels are going to fulfill the promise they made to Enoch

well, i have been reading some apocrypha lately, just got done with The Book of Jubilees, and more than a few times such misery happened... first cain and abel, and then jacob and ... i forget who it was, and the mother who suggested the furry trickery to steal the blind man's blessing, and then there was a third incident

each incident leading to bloodshed between brothers

don't waste your time, prepare your family

Finally finished my atmospheric lamp.

Wired a light strip into an inside channel and covered it with epoxy to act as a difuser.

Learned a lot and the next one will be more refined. But all in all, happy with this first effort.

#art #woodworking

I posted last week about how fast the number of users on Nostr was growing and had a bunch of clarifications to the number I pulled from Primal, essential saying the number was too high.

Been thinking about this problem/opportunity all week.

1) I understand that it is really hard to get accurate numbers in a protocol like this - similar to how lightning growth is difficult to accurately gauge. (But are we making the problem worse by fighting over the number - that we can’t know?)

2) We all know and take for granted that the other bird app wildly overstates their users because it leads to more users. We know this from the court docs on a) Elon transaction, b) Elon constant drumbeat on “how fast it’s growing” c) our own user experience - ie - engagement per # connections (followers) is much higher here d) All of the bots and scams needed the reply to posts on x.

And here’s the thing - it is going to get far worse on X. I still pop in on X to see what’s going on (even though I rarely post) and besides all of the bots and noise, now most of what you see is AI driven clickbait to “win” more followers, drowning out some of the great voices I used to find there. Searching for real content is becoming increasingly difficult.

3) I suspect many of the early users here are early adopters in other areas of their lives. They could see the risks of the other centralized services and/or they wanted to be on the leading edge of something far better.

That being said, a core driver for the majority is that they feel comfort in “what everyone else is doing” meaning that a) if they think Nostr is stagnant (because people here are more honest/critical with real #’s) while b) X is growing (because of “marketing” - I wanted to use a different name for it but stopped short) then c) they will stay for longer on X, because they won’t investigate what you already know…….this is a far better experience, that is getting better every day. (While the competitor(s) are getting worse)

Users and Developers are much more likely to move their valuable time and content here if they think there is a growing community of engagement (there is) versus a stagnant one.

What restaurant are you attracted to? the one with a line of people or the empty one?

Our natural biases are hard to break and for all of Elon’s faults, he sure knows how to use these triggers to drive people to do what he wants them to do.

The solution to fixing the world is soo simple, yet nobody seems to grasp it.

Fix yourself, spread your message, pursue love. It seems cliché, but then ask yourself whether Benjamin Netanyahu is thinking the same thing while dropping his warheads on children. Or whether Trump’s promise to make America great again will actually make America great again, or just make his bank account great again. It doesn’t matter what side of the conflict you stand on—Israel/Palestine or Russia/Ukraine—flags divide, ideologies divide, and power divides.

The lips of the righteous teach many, but fools die for want of wisdom.

#cosmic #love

The amount of lost time and productivity due to dealing with income taxes nationwide is insanely high.

The number of accountants, lawyers, and auditors that work full time on it, plus the percent of time that small business owners and individual taxpayers have to dedicate to it each year, costs an uncountable total number of lost hours per year. And just as bad, it requires a ubiquitous massive surveillance apparatus on all sorts of income to enforce itself.

No taxes are enjoyable, but income taxes are really the most counter-productive and onerous ones. Taxes on properties, imports, and retail sales have so much of a lighter touch to track and collect than income taxes.

Summarizing my thoughts on ecash

For some reason this ecash trend seems to be gaining steam instead of going away, so I'll try my best to detail my thoughts on ecash into one post.

1. The incentives are broken

Ecash finds itself between a rock and a hard place. For users to trust the mint, they need to know that the people behind the mint are trustworthy. If the people running the mint reveal their identities (or even just nyms), they're a trivial target for regulators and law enforcement as it's clear a mint is an MSB.

If the people behind a mint don't reveal their identities or nyms, users of that mint are subject to trivial rug pulls with no recourse. Which do you prefer as a user? Mint operator rug pulls or government rug pulls?

If a mint had been targeted like Samourai Wallet was, instead of just a potential privacy loss, all users would have lost all of their Bitcoin.

2. Ecash is not "self-custodial"

For some reason this concept of ecash being "self-custodial" is a thing, merely because the tokens themselves are self-custodied (and require proper backups of seed phrases etc.) While the lines get a bit weird, it's important to separate two things:

1. The asset people want is Bitcoin, not ecash tokens.

2. The asset people give up custody on is Bitcoin.

The ecash tokens themselves are completely worthless IOUs without the Bitcoin behind them, so even if I can take custody of my ecash tokens, I have 100% given up custody of my sats to a third-party.

Because of this, talking about ecash as self-custodial is disingenuous -- no one wants empty IOUs, they want Bitcoin. When they use ecash they do not have custody of their Bitcoin.

3. Ecash still requires all of the hurdles of Bitcoin self-custody

The hardest hurdle for many people to adopting Bitcoin is the simple first step -- writing down 12 words and making sure not to lose them. With ecash you still have this single greatest barrier of entry as you must backup a seed phrase or secret in order to restore your ecash tokens.

4. There is no incentive for custodians to implement ecash

While a custodian could switch to ecash out of the goodness of their heart, the incentives are broken for custodians. Not only does ecash harm the UX their users are used to (not having to store a secret seed phrase), it also introduces additional infrastructure complexity. Instead of just running a database, now they have to run additional mint software to provide their users with tokens, and handle support cases where users lose their tokens.

In theory a custodian could just also store the seed phrase for their users, but then have we actually improved on custodians at all? They even have custody of the ecash tokens in that case.

5. Custody is a line that cannot be crossed

The core of what makes Bitcoin unique is that we can actually take custody of it ourselves, gaining immense freedom and self-sovereignty through a bit of personal responsibility. Even though I am a massive proponent of building better privacy tools, sacrificing custody to get better privacy is a non-option for me.

Surely we can do better and build privacy tools on top of Bitcoin (or directly into Bitcoin's consensus layer) that allow us to have both privacy and self-sovereignty via self-custody.

I will not give up custody of my Bitcoin, no matter what, and you shouldn't either. "Better custodians" are just custodians with extra steps, and still strip us of self-sovereignty and thus freedom.

6. Time is a more scarce resource than even Bitcoin

Even though I have been very outspoken on what I view as a pointless venture, I am not here to stop anyone from building what they enjoy in the space. Devs working on ecash are free to do so as of course I have no control over them, though I fear that time spent on improving custodians is time that we will not get back. It's clear that the US gov and many in the EU are seeking to ramp up their attacks on Bitcoin privacy and self-custody, and our time to build tools to route around them is growing shorter and shorter.

P.S. - None of what I write is a direct attack on any ecash dev, and I have immense respect and personal relationships with most of the people working on this stuff. Respect for an individual doesn't have to mean I agree with them on every avenue they pursue.

Christ is King

Wrong. It’s folding a fitted sheet. Or mopping. That’s attractive 🤤 nostr:note1mu9790tafzxpcy7x8zh50k5n8elgxphsukrcnckamsfkpq8hvx6qwjh3rl

I don't see ANYTHING remotely like that on that freaking thing, but good for you xD

Now we talkin