Avatar
SBW
c5cdd5737e47f5426c9dea243012112ed62fba7b534788681606f79f5ab9682a
An OG Simple Bitcoin Wallet, it's been through a lot but it's still rolling and the best is yet to come. Proudly made in Ukraine.
Replying to Avatar Thunder

Today marks 25 years since my country was bombed, in the operation called “Merciful angel” or “Angel of Mercy” - whatever.

In 78 days of air strikes:

- 420k bombs were dropped on us

- 4k died (81 child)

- 25k homes destroyed, plus:

- 14 airports

- 18 kindergartens

- 39 hospitals

- 69 schools

- 176 historical sites

- 500+ kilometers of roads

Etc

I was nine. I remember my nose bled from fear. I don’t know how me being scared caused my nose to bleed, but it happened.

I remembered the duffle bag packed next to the door, with a few cans of food inside of it, some clean clothes, passports, and all gold jewelry we had- cuz we didn’t know if it would get worse.

I still have ptsd triggered every time I head air strikes sirens. Luckily, I don’t hear them much- only when they are testing if those still work, or when are paying tributes to the casualties.

Anyway, for years to follow, my father would use any opportunity to gift us gold jewelry. Why? Because: “If it gets bad again, money won’t worth much. We learned that in 1994. You exchange these ear rings/bracelets/necklaces for food or anything you need.

Nowadays, I don’t have a run away bag prepared. But trust me when I tell you, I could pack one in jut a few minutes.

Nowadays, I don’t buy my kid gold jewelry, I stack sats.

It could be one of the reasons why I’m bitcoining. It gives me a hope. An escape plan, among other things.

As for the first part of my note, let’s stop for a second to think about all kids around the world, their traumas, bleeding noses from fear and sleepless nights. Let’s pray for their beautiful souls and innocent lives.

🇷🇸

do you have an opinion on russia/ukraine war?

Replying to Avatar HODL

A story that illustrates why I will never orange pill anyone ever again.

2015- Attempt to orange pill friend multiple times. No dice. Totally uninterested.

2019- He asks me if now is a good time to get into bitcoin. “It’s always a good time”. I set him up with a HW wallet and tell him DCA and chill.

2019- Friend calls me a few months later, he wants to put the down payment money for his house into bitcoin, but he’s nervous. I say no worries I will backstop your investment. What’re friends for?! I want you to succeed. He now has a no risk investment. Financed by me.

2020: Friend is doing well. Has been stacking hard and has 2 coins. A great stack for his income.

2021: He starts watching cringey YouTube videos about shitcoin trading. Gets into a private telegram, trades his 2 bitcoin into 4 and then gets rug pulled and loses everything.

2021: He’s near suicidal, very dark times. He doesn’t tell me anything because he knows I warned him about trading and thinks I’ll be disappointed in him. Finally he tells me. I help him get a personal loan so he can take advantage of the remainder of the bull run. He sells at 55k and manages to break even. He’s not up but he’s got his house money back.

2023: We’re out drinking with some other friends from high school. He expresses some jealousy towards me in a semi awkward fashion. “Every time I see this dude (me) I think about bitcoin.”

2024: I meet up with him so the kids can play at the park. Vibe is off. Lots of insecurity and tension. They’re going on a trip to San Diego and I ask if they might go to the zoo while there. “I can’t afford that. That’s for rich people like you”. Odd interaction, but I shake it off.

2024: A few weeks later he gets drunk and hits on my wife via text messages. She shows me immediately and I confront him. He’s like “sorry bro I was drunk I didn’t mean it”. I tell him off and make clear this is the last time we will ever speak.

No good deed goes unpunished. I could not have been nicer to this dude and more helpful along the way and he is fully consumed by envy towards me.

Unfortunate.

Consider yourself lucky he did not rob you, also think about your security more since the word is out and the more price goes up the sweeter target you are.

Work where exactly? While normal people build careers and useful connections, do you do the same or just wait for mega-pump?

what are you retards bragging on about today?

nostr:note16372dw5zsd334nw4l4c2rqvznwp7jn2nw4gznn678pg4gn9pmgvskka5e6

The detection of AI-generated content is an area of active research and development, motivated by the increasing sophistication of AI models in generating text, images, audio, and video that are indistinguishable from human-created content. These detection methods are crucial for maintaining authenticity, preventing misinformation, and ensuring trustworthiness in digital communications. The detection mechanisms can be broadly categorized into text-based and multimedia-based approaches, each with its unique challenges and techniques.

Text-Based Content Detection

For text-based content, detection models analyze various aspects of the text to distinguish between human and AI-generated content. These aspects include stylistic features, consistency, the presence of certain patterns or artifacts unique to AI models, and more. Detection techniques can be as simple as looking for repetitive patterns or as complex as using sophisticated machine learning models trained specifically to distinguish between AI-generated and human-generated text.

Techniques and Challenges:

Statistical Analysis: Early methods involved statistical analysis to identify patterns or anomalies in text that would be unlikely in human writing but could occur in AI-generated text, such as unusual repetition of phrases or overly homogeneous sentence structure.

Machine Learning Models: More advanced methods use machine learning models, including deep learning, trained on large datasets of both AI-generated and human-generated text. These models can learn to recognize subtle differences in syntax, style, and content structure.

Fine-Grained Analysis: Some approaches focus on fine-grained linguistic features, such as the use of specific types of words, grammatical structures, or coherence across paragraphs, which may differ between human and machine writing.

Adversarial Training: In an arms race between generation and detection, some detectors are trained using adversarial methods, where the detector and the text generator are trained simultaneously to improve each other's performance.

Multimedia-Based Content Detection

With the advent of AI models capable of generating realistic images, videos, and audio, the detection of AI-generated multimedia content has become equally important. Techniques vary widely depending on the type of content and the specific characteristics of the generation model.

Techniques and Challenges:

Digital Forensics: Techniques such as reverse image search, metadata analysis, and examination of digital artifacts (e.g., compression patterns, noise distribution) are used to identify AI-generated images and videos.

Deepfake Detection: Deepfake videos, where a person's likeness is replaced or synthesized with AI, pose significant detection challenges. Detection methods focus on inconsistencies in facial expressions, lip sync errors, and unnatural movements or textures.

Consistency and Context Analysis: Analyzing the consistency of lighting, shadows, and reflections in images or videos, as well as contextual incongruities, can help identify AI-generated content.

Machine Learning and Deep Learning: Similar to text, sophisticated models are trained to differentiate between real and AI-generated multimedia content, focusing on the subtle artifacts introduced by generation algorithms.

Challenges and Ethical Considerations

Detecting AI-generated content faces several challenges:

Evolving Technologies: As AI generation techniques improve, detection models must constantly adapt to new strategies and more sophisticated generation methods.

False Positives and Negatives: Achieving a balance between accurately detecting AI-generated content and minimizing false identifications is challenging.

Ethical Use: The development and deployment of detection technologies must be balanced with ethical considerations, including privacy, freedom of expression, and the potential for misuse.

Conclusion

The detection of AI-generated content is a complex, evolving field requiring ongoing research and multidisciplinary approaches. As AI technologies continue to advance, the tools and techniques for detection must also evolve, encompassing a wide range of strategies from statistical analysis to cutting-edge machine learning models. The effectiveness of these methods depends on the continuous collaboration between researchers, developers, and policymakers to ensure they are used ethically and effectively to maintain the integrity of digital conte

Replying to Avatar jimmysong

# Ordinals are a Fiat Scam

The past two years have seen a flurry of productive activity in the Bitcoin space. Taproot has brought in lots of new interesting possibilities from Schnorr Signatures enabling smaller on-chain lightning channel transactions to TapScript Merkle Trees bringing the innovative way to prove the execution of a program through BitVM. These are truly new and novel things in Bitcoin and they have been genuinely good for the Bitcoin ecosystem.

But that's not the full story of the last two years in Bitcoin, and as much as I'd love to write about the actual innovation, I have to deal with the fake, stupid, immoral and fiat scam that is ordinals. It's not a job that I enjoy, but given the asymmetry of the arguments, one side that's incentivized to pump it against an unfunded debunkers who talk about it objectively, there's some much-needed cold water that needs to be poured on their prospects and I'm here to deliver.

For most normal people, the idea of NFTs, unique digital property seems pretty dumb on its face. Whether it's a jpeg or a short video clip or whatever, they rightly ask after having the whole concept explained to them, "wait, that's it? I'm not missing something here?" I've written about them in the past, how they're a vehicle for scams in much the same way altcoins are. I'd go so far as to call NFTs altcoins, as they're an alternative and the T in NFT marks them as a coin. What's especially confusing for normies is this concept of a bitcoin NFT or ordinals. Does that mean that somehow it's better or purer than the ones on Ethereum or Solana? They're not, but we're getting ahead of ourselves. Let's start at the beginning.

## Trolls Gonna Troll

The whole "fad" started with Rod Armor, who inscribed a skull in using the witness discount in late 2022. It wasn't really even noticed by the network as it was a mere 793 bytes, well within the normal range of transaction sizes.

What really got it going was Taproot Wizards group, who are a disaffected group of "former" Bitcoin Maximalists that wanted revenge after getting humiliated supporting a whole bunch of affinity scams like BlockFi, Celsius and of course, FTX. Their intent wasn't to create a new asset class, they realized that inscriptions were the perfect vehicle to fill certain blocks with noise for the sake of making Bitcoiners angry. So they inscribed a 4MB jpeg in early 2023 and a new market to make Bitcoin Maximalists angry began, which by August 2023 was an insane 21 million inscriptions on the Bitcoin blockchain. Though the rhetoric now is that inscriptions were some sort of new thing being "built on Bitcoin," nobody really noticed until this very obvious and continuous troll.

Also in early 2023, ordinals began, and given that there were a lot of degenerate altcoiners that would buy and sell pretty much anything, what got attention as a troll quickly pivoted to a business. BRC-20 tokens started soon after and stamps not much longer after that. Trading activity picked up and soon, they traded in various exchanges. And these trolls have definitely made some money, especially from VCs who are all too willing to sacrifice their Bitcoin bona-fides for the prospect of some ROI.

The troll put on a business suit and began arguing with Bitcoiners that they were a legitimate part of the Bitcoin ecosystem.

## Ordinals, the argument

Ask any ordinals supporter why they think ordinals are good for Bitcoin and they immediately change the topic to "rights" and "you can't stop it" and so on. Instead of telling Bitcoiners what they bring to the table, they focus on why the protocol doesn't stop them. Like shop lifters in San Francisco, they don't bring anything good to the table, so they focus the discussion on how there's nobody that's going to stop them from doing what they want. But of course, just because you can do something doesn't mean you should. To paraphrase Chris Rock, you can drive with your feet, but that doesn't make it a good idea.

In other words, they don't have a good answer. They have bad ones, though, if you press them. Somehow it supports miners by giving them money. Or it undermines other altcoin launching platforms. Or making Bitcoin "fun." All these are very weak arguments and they don't talk about how their projects change the incentives or undermine the monetary use-case, which is why they don't make them that often. The discussion they want to have is that they "can" inscribe or put ordinals or stamps on the Bitcoin blockchain, which as stated above is confusing could and should.

## Why Are They on Bitcoin?

My gripe with NFTs in general have been that there's no technical reason for them to be on a blockchain. They're already clearly centralized. They have an issuer. You can't look at the ordinal without some other software which decides what it represents. Some other trusted entity decides whether you have the ordinal or not. If they change the rules in the future and you get the short end of the stick? Tough luck for you. They're no different in centralization than the run-of-the-mill forgotten altcoin from 2011.

So if they're centralized, why are they on a blockchain? A blockchain is a horribly cumbersome database to hold digital data. It's hard to develop, hard to scale, costly to maintain, and difficult to upgrade because they're voluntary. So from a purely technical point of view, a centralized project on any blockchain, let alone the decentralized one in Bitcoin, doesn't make any sense. It's much easier, faster, cheaper and more maintainable in a centralized database.

Technically speaking, a centralized project becomes more difficult in every way on the Bitcoin blockchain.

So what's the real reason why ordinals are on the Bitcoin blockchain? Because there's a large market of people to market to. Because it's easy to hype by associating it with Bitcoin's historical success. Bitcoin represents, hope, freedom, self-sovereignty, sound money, and a better world. It's an amazing thing and to even be slightly associated with it, as altcoins have over the past 13 years. But altcoins have a long history of going comatose, so ordinals are the new argument, a new way to sell old, outdated, failed ideas. In other words, ordinals are on Bitcoin because it's a new way to scam a market that has wised up a bit.

## Anticipating the VC-funded Responses

Now the ordinals people will undoubtedly make excuses for why it needs to be on Bitcoin. You can't manipulate it! It's less work and requires real payments! Both of which are true. Bitcoin is secured by proof-of-work and that means anything embedded in it requires astronomical amounts of hashing power to change. But you don't need to use Bitcoin to do that. There are timestamp servers and receipts and backup services all of which are way cheaper and provide the same service without bloating the Bitcoin blockchain. And Bitcoin's blockchain is no real protection. You have to use other software to figure out whether you own an ordinal or an inscription or whatever. That software can change the rules anytime they want, just like any altcoin software. And these things aren't generally backwards compatible. So if you're running something old? You're not following the centralized "consensus."

Ordinals, like NFTs and really every altcoin, are a glorified spreadsheet that can just as easily be run on a $500 website while providing cryptographic proof that it hasn't been manipulated. Again, the only reason ordinals are on Bitcoin is to create more demand through marketing it as something that "helps" Bitcoin, which is like saying that spam helps email adoption.

## Conclusion

For many years, altcoins have ridden the coattails of Bitcoin to scam lots of people. It's getting harder to scam the same people and indeed there are currently only two paths left. There's the post-modern nihilistic tactics most fully realized in memecoins. Altcoins no longer purport to have real-world utility anymore. That ship sailed back in 2019. They are forced to go to memecoins because the market doesn't appreciate being lied to. Memecoins have no utility, no disruption of any industry, no innovation and no prospects, but at least they're honest about it.

The other way is to associate closer with Bitcoin than altcoins have been. It's not enough to be a "cryptocurrency" anymore, to affinity scam now, you have to pretend you're a Bitcoin Maximalist.

The actual technical reality of these projects is not new. Colored coins were live back in 2013, as were MasterCoin and Counterparty. But the cultural pivot is. Ordinals, inscriptions, BRC-20, stamps are all trying to clothe themselves with Bitcoin so the general public associates the benefits of Bitcoin with these projects. But of course, the values of these projects are antithetical to Bitcoin. There's no self-sovereignty, financial freedom, decentralization or really any hope for the future in these projects, just straight gambling. So they borrow the good values as much as they can from Bitcoin.

Fiat in English literally means creating something by decree. And these new types of altcoins are fiat in that strict sense. They're decrees by a centralized authority masquerading as a decentralized project by associating with Bitcoin.

Meet the new altcoins. Same as the old altcoins.

your mom is fiat scam

Twitter (and social networks in general) is an inherently centralizing idea, a proverbial town square (focal point) for users to come and find each other.

I'm not sure if Nostr desire to build a town square without having a town square is sound and not self-defeating.

GM

every russian who voted for putin is a legitimate target for armed forces of Ukraine.

centralized georgian

nostr:note1xz5r680jlk83xqz8p0ycgp8ftrc8a4qldzwms8pll3yqwzy60qts6mwxjs

Woke in a middle of the night due to panic inflation thoughts