In my imagination, Satoshi is a time traveler and this is what his coins were always going to be used for. Pay off US debt, soft landing for the fiat system, avoid WW3.
The silver lining to that would be if the next President (Lummis? Saylor? Keiser?) ends the dollar by an executive order that closes the Fed, forbids the US Treasury from issuing new dollar-denominated debt, and pays off 100 percent of outstanding dollar-denominated debt using confiscated coins. The softest possible landing to the global fiat system, one that avoids WW3.
nostr:npub1excellx58e497gan6fcsdnseujkjm7ym5yp3m4rp0ud4j8ss39js2pn72a said this in the interview with nostr:npub1cj8znuztfqkvq89pl8hceph0svvvqk0qay6nydgk9uyq7fhpfsgsqwrz4u the Max Payne theory is that if bitcoin goes up to quickly then it won't be as transformational to poorer countries. Even though all of us would benefit from bitcoin going up, the focus is still on getting more people into the ark. This is why I will always be a bitcoiner.
Iād agree with that and add: Max Payne would be that price skyrockets bc ETFs gobble up tons of it, all of which gets confiscated by executive order.
Youād think sorting products by an average rating is a simple enough thing to do, but nope. Hereās an article I showed to the Open Bazaar team about a wrong way and a right way to do that.
https://www.evanmiller.org/how-not-to-sort-by-average-rating.html
Hereās an article the OB team wrote (damn, 9 years ago! Time flies!) about their reputation system where they reference that Miller article.
https://medium.com/@therealopenbazaar/decentralized-reputation-part-2-6233cf2127bb
Again, the lesson here is that there are lots of ways to implement reputation. Often thereās no one obviously ābestā way. No schelling point. So who gets to decide how to do it? Current answer: a repo manager, a dev team ā in other words, a digital steward. Better answer: your web of trust.
Here's an article where he goes into QTS: https://yakihonne.com/article/naddr1qq25gnzpveay5jns29z9xdrkdgehw5mvv46k6q3qarkn0xxxll4llgy9qxkrncn3vc4l69s0dz8ef3zadykcwe7ax3dqxpqqqp65wuucp8v
Thanks for the reference. It reminds me of when I was following the OpenBazaar team and spitballing with them a little about their product rating system, which ended up being a 5-star system along a handful of dimensions: quality, delivery speed, a few others. There was no way to make everyone happy. Something like this that seems like it ought to be straightforward from a distance ends up getting really complex, really fast, when you sit down to build it. So many choices. So many design decisions. And as a builder you have to pick exactly what is best for your consumers. Which turns out to be impossible, bc everyone has different needs and wants and opinions. And different rating systems may make sense in different contexts, different applications, for different people.
The lesson I took is that we need a system that allows the rating systems to be designed by the community. Seems impossible but I think it can be done. Itās a consensus problem: how can a decentralized community arrive at consensus on a language? On the digital tools of communication? It works for the spoken word ā why canāt it work for our digital tools? This is what the tapestry protocol is designed to do. In this instance, the community might come up with multiple rating systems and your grapevine could help you select which one is the best for any particular context. Different systems for different applications. As a user you could attest to your opinion regarding the rating system, or just let your grapevine figure it out for you, depending on your level of interest.
If you could pay one or more people a few sats to flag notes based on the criteria you specify, then have an algo that boosts or blocks notes based on the flags, would that be of interest to you?
Itās not enough for your web of trust to curate content, facts and information.
It needs to curate the very digital tools and languages that we use to communicate about those things.
Three reasons this has not been done yet.
1. The idea makes no sense.
2. It makes sense, but it wonāt work.
3. It would work, but why do it? We have experts for all that.
But the time has come. Nostr will make it possible.
It will win when we figure out decentralized web of trust.
Which weāre going to do.
#100aDayUntil100k
#100aDayTil100k
Day 13 āļø
On the topic of privacy: the general idea is going to be that you will have the ability to reveal exactly what you want, to whom, and under what circumstances you choose. You already have that ability, in theory. But the grapevine will give you tools to fine-tune your choices. And you wonāt have to publish your trust list in the same sense that you donāt have to publish your follows list. You may choose to give your follows list to a relay for the sake of performance, but thatās a tradeoff you can decide whether to make.
These are all good points. Which is why the big picture is that the entire protocol will ultimately be curated by your grapevine. Not at first, but eventually. Every single aspect of the protocol can be replaced with something better. As many different algos for as many different contexts as you need.
The tapestry protocol, as written by me (before your grapevine takes over from me), cannot and will not be perfect. It only has to be good enough to get to the point where it can be handed off.
What constitutes āgood enoughā? It needs to be capable of a handful of quasi-complicated things, and transitivity is definitely one of them. Iām not an expert in all things, and I canāt hand-pick the experts in all things, but if I can pick the people who pick the people who pick the people etc who are experts in some particular thing, then i can delegate anything and everything to a small handful of people who will probably be pretty good choices for the topic in question. And if itās not controversial, my grapevine and your grapevine will probably settle on the same small handful of people who know and care about the topic in question. Or at least their opinions will likely overlap. Iām thinking about niche questions about our digital tools of communication, like whether a nostr note timestamp should use created_at or createdAt. No one really cares, provided weāre all on the same page, and the grapevine will usually get us all on the same page. (Unless there is controversy, which there isnāt in most cases.)
Other than transitivity, management of category trees by my grapevine is another one of the quasi-complicated but necessary things, I think. Which is why thatās also in the tapestry protocol, and goes by the acronym DCoG: decentralized curation of graphs.
The grapevine will use two dimensions to define a context: an action and a category. Your grapevine will curate actions and categories as lists and will arrange them into hierarchies, so trust can be inherited down the hierarchy.
A follow in nostr would be represented by the grapevine by an attestation that translates loosely: I trust you to curate my nostr feed in the category of everything. If I really like your curation of topic X but not topic Y, I can attest accordingly, but no need for me to dig into subcategories if I donāt want to.
Any given attestation can be made public or kept private, at your discretion.
Your follows list is already public. So yes, you are willing to put at least some of it out there.
You are correct: no one is going to rate all their friends across every trust domain that exists. Because there is no upper limit to the number of domains that can exist! Which is why this method doesnāt expect you to rate everybody on everything. A few ratings in a few general categories will be enough to get the system up and running.
My proof of concept demos curation of simple lists. Next on the docket: curation by your grapevine of a graph. In theory, any graph, defined as a set of nodes connected by edges. But importantly: we will use graphs to represent context. Your grapevine will curate graphs of context-categories that will be arranged in a hierarchy. This will allow default influence scores to be inherited down the hierarchy.
Suppose Iām in the mood to watch a drama. Alice recommends you as having good taste in movies, but she didnāt specify dramas specifically. Thatās ok; dramas is a subcategory of all movies, so my grapevine pays attention to your recommendation on dramas bc it defaults to your trust score in the more general category of movies, higher up in the tree of categories.
This article discusses in more detail what I mean by context and how influence is inherited.
Glad you liked it! To answer your questions: yes I do envision nostr users rating other users. The linked is an article with screenshots from my proof of concept app, where users rate other users as trustworthy or not in the context of curating a specific list of interest. It doesnāt implement the entire tapestry protocol, just the very early stages of it. The next step in the protocol will be to curate a graph of categories associated with each list. I have not yet built a proof of concept for the graph, but the methodology will be pretty similar as for simple lists.
https://github.com/wds4/pretty-good/blob/main/appDescriptions/curatedLists/overview.md
I havenāt seen the QTS system but Iāll take a look. Iām using kinds 39901 and 9901 as per the part of the tapestry protocol which interfaces with nostr. The article I linked to shows examples with technical details.
The tapestry protocol is technically independent of whatever network is used to store and send data. I was building it on top of IPFS before nostr was born, but technically you could use either or both at the same time. I think nostr is the best place for me to start. There is a section of the tapestry protocol that describes how to interface with nostr, but I have a stub for IPFS and anyone could add a section for whatever other network they might want to use.
Great article. To make sure I'm clear, are you envisioning nostr users rating other users? If so, have you seen nostr:npub1arkn0xxxll4llgy9qxkrncn3vc4l69s0dz8ef3zadykcwe7ax3dqrrh43w's QTS system for scoring products? I'm extending that in a project now for ranking places. Would you use kind 1986 for reviewing users or would you use another NIP?
Glad you liked it! To answer your questions: yes I do envision nostr users rating other users. The linked is an article with screenshots from my proof of concept app, where users rate other users as trustworthy or not in the context of curating a specific list of interest. It doesnāt implement the entire tapestry protocol, just the very early stages of it. The next step in the protocol will be to curate a graph of categories associated with each list. I have not yet built a proof of concept for the graph, but the methodology will be pretty similar as for simple lists.
https://github.com/wds4/pretty-good/blob/main/appDescriptions/curatedLists/overview.md
The Grapevine allows your web of trust to calculate influence scores (that are NOT proportional to follower counts; see my article on that), the purpose of which is to help you decide who is worthy of your attention for any given context. It will allow you to set threshold default scores for users. If spam is not a problem, set the defaults so you can read or listen to what anyone and everyone has to say. If spam is a problem, dig into the control panel, find the slide bar, and adjust the defaults to screen your content as rigorously as necessary.
I have the protocol and an initial proof of concept for curation of lists. Just gotta build it out more, that's all.
šÆ open source. But it needs more work.
I have an open source desktop nostr app which is linked in my bio. Proof of concept that your grapevine can curate the items on a list. But it crashes and needs to be rebuilt with better UI, which is why I have an article with screenshots to show what it does. Curation of a category tree to go along with each list is on the roadmap. I think my existing proof of concept is enough to show that this can also be done. But itās more than I can code by myself. So, Iām going to need a team to make it happen.
Thank you! Getting one of them running is on my to do list. Kinda procrastinating while I decide which one. Was leaning towards startOS but maybe leaning towards umbrel now.