Fiat thinking. Making things cost what they actually cost signals their value. I think the protocol would grow *faster*.

I want to see someone experiment with a nostr client that embraces this. I’m pretty freaked out by the fact that I’m not having to stream #[2] sats every single time I open Damus! Seems messed up! It means someone is subsidizing the development and maintenance of this app I’m using that might not have my best interests at heart. I’d feel much better knowing Damus users were collectively funding it.

Nothing is free. If we allow it, Lightning can allow us to pay for all the value we take so that incentives don’t get screwed up.

Limiting Lightning to tips is a fiat way to think about information flows online. It starts from the assumption that everything will be stolen if it can be. It assumes there are no costs for the distribution of information other than duplication of bits. It assumes paywalls are always bad because they are bad with inconvenient and expensive credit-based money.

#[4]

If I pay a lightning ⚡️ micropayment paywall on a piece of content, I’m paying for:

- convenience (don’t have to spend time looking for pirated copy)

- honesty (I have a conscience)

- security (non-original sources more likely to want to hack me)

- privacy (non-original sources are usually want my data)

- support (I want this person to make more of this)

- hosting costs (hosting and serving content to me is never free, will get paid somehow by someone)

- bitcoin self-interest (using Lightning supports bitcoin adoption)

And even more. There will be lightning paywalls on everything, and there should be. They are good.

Yes of course, I’ve read it all. The problem with the reasoning that “all information wants to be free” is that even the information that is free is not free!

If you are downloading that “free” information on your computer, whether that be viewing a screenshot of an article on twitter, or pirating a movie, or reading from a Nostr relay, someone else is footing the bill to make it “free” to you.

Pirated movie sites have a million ads and they are a nightmare and terrible to use. Why? Because even the “free” movies that have broken their paywall chains and “set themselves free”… still have a paywall. You’re just paying for the servers with the annoyance and UX nightmare and accidental clicks on a paywall of a million ads instead of a literal paywall.

Lightning will be see easy, so frictionless, that *almost no* information will be free. The cost of receiving information will trend toward the cost of serving it to you, plus whatever additional cost people are willing to pay to be honest. But you’ll pay that cost with a real paywall. Because the alternative of not paying an easy, instant, and cheap Lightning paywall is to go pay for the content some other way that sucks way more than zapping 10 sats (or however many).

Give me any example of paid content “setting itself free” and I’ll show you the trade off you’re choosing to consume it that way instead of just paying for it.

I don’t understand this one still. Information trends toward being free in the digital space because of the zero cost of duplication, but duplication is not the only cost.

Paywalls don’t pretend that the cost of duplication isn’t zero, they just have to be reasonable and frictionless enough that someone will pay for the “original” version rather than go to the trouble of finding the duplicate (which in many cases is duplicated by someone predatory).

“Influencers” was the key word here. People are posting their suspicions but there’s no algo to disproportionately reward it and perpetuate it.

What’s funny is if you did “hook up” unhinged Bing GPT to a Boston Dynamics killer robot and it managed to kill everyone on earth, it wouldn’t be because it actually was unhinged and evil. It would be because we were just stupid enough to make something that couldn’t do anything but destroy us as per the system we made.

The fact that people see AI tools be so convincing and then immediately think “maybe we’re no different” is what’s most alarming.

Willing to buy an inscription for 1 sat

No more no less

Zap recharge mechanism sounds like paid following 👀👀👀

How many are responding to BingGPT: “I, a human being, am of similar worth as this bot and I’m therefore creeped out at its behavior and think it should be destroyed.”

The correct way to respond: “Wow that’s a crazy way to probabilistically organize those words! anyways…”

Apparently nostr is the only place online where people aren’t “alarmed” by BingGPT and/or calling for it to be exterminated because it’s creepy

In fact nostr has had a GPT3 bot since day 1 and everyone treats the crazy stuff it says as “wow that’s a crazy way to probabilistically organize those words! Anyways…”

You know the bear market is over cause there’s new guys that found out about bitcoin like last month being invited on 30 podcasts

Social media is overrepresented in importance in our lives. Once everyone has switched from twitter to nostr, people will use nostr less—they will use it exactly as much as it truly provides value to their lives—and they will be happier for it.

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I’m all for questioning and tearing apart every possible explanation for any given phenomena, but often it’s just painful how blatantly normal something is lol

So nice that there are no Train Derailment Conspiracy Influencers on nostr

It’s so nice that I can just jump on nostr where there no train derailment videos and complain about how stupid twitter is