Avatar
Bitcoin Wizard 🧙🏻‍♂️
f69a576c57a17e967882520b6bacd3f7135f4c9abd4d058585cfc7efa8e2c697
Replying to Avatar rabble

We don’t need a Nostr marketing team

We do need a Nostr growth team.

nostr:npub1kuy0wwf0tzzqvgfv8zpw0vaupkds3430jhapwrgfjyn7ecnhpe0qj9kdj8 just published a good essay discussing whether Nostr needs a marketing team. I believe the answer is yes—but not marketing in the same way cryptocurrency projects have typically approached it.

https://www.curiousdk.com/p/6885aeab-251e-412b-bbba-1a0b09896558

We don’t need people running around buying ads. While having booths at conferences is beneficial for a community-driven project, I'm skeptical about the value of billboards or sponsoring athletes as ways to promote Nostr. It’s fun, sure, but it mostly reaches people who are already aware of it.

What we really need is a focused initiative to grow Nostr—distinct from the fantastic teams already building Nostr itself. In a typical company, this would be the Growth Team. They’d focus on how people discover and learn about Nostr, the path they take to join, how they choose their app, what their experience is when signing up, whether they find engaging content, and how to ensure they stick around and invite others. This is not to dismiss the great work OpenSats and HRF are doing, but a growth team is something distinct.

Each app can handle some of this, and that's working to an extent. But Nostr is more than just a collection of apps using shared code. It’s a network that becomes more valuable with every new app built on Nostr. For example, when a user joins Primal, it enhances the experience for Amethyst users, but it also becomes much more interesting for someone using YakiHonne or Zap.streams.

So, we need people focused on cultivating the Nostr ecosystem. This isn’t marketing in the traditional sense, like buying ads, but more of a Nostr Community Growth Team. We need people who can work with creators and community founders to help them get started on Nostr. There’s a lot to grasp, and some hand-holding will be necessary.

We also need better internal Nostr news—something like nostr:npub19mduaf5569jx9xz555jcx3v06mvktvtpu0zgk47n4lcpjsz43zzqhj6vzk but aimed at two different audiences. First, for users, fans, and developers on Nostr: how do you keep track of all the projects and what's happening? There’s so much going on that it’s hard to follow. The second is external: we’re doing tons of incredible stuff, and we should be building excitement about Nostr by showcasing these amazing projects and content to the wider world.

The team at nostr:npub1w9wuqc3s6lr25c4sgj52werj3tngvt43qrccqrher4wvn7tjm32s2ck403 does cover Nostr, which is awesome, but their focus is on multiple social media protocols. Journalists write when they feel there's news to break, and we haven’t been doing a great job feeding stories to them. We can improve on this. One initiative coming out of Nostriga is better coordination on getting Nostr folks on podcasts, especially beyond the Bitcoin bubble where most people have heard of Nostr.

At Nostriga, I talked to a lot of people about how Nostr keeps being framed as an alt-right protocol in the media. That’s simply not true, but we need to work on changing that narrative. Nostr is for everybody, how Nostr is framed does matter. People don’t join a social app because of its functionality, they join because of the other people who are already on the app. Projects like Trustroots.io, Causes.com, and Protest.net will help showcase a different side of Nostr and build new communities beyond our Bitcoin-focused core.

Nostr has already grown in new languages and communities, thanks to creators sharing about it on centralized platforms. We saw this with the Thai community—it’s fantastic. Let’s develop a program to support these creators. We’ve been discussing with nostr:npub13qrrw2h4z52m7jh0spefrwtysl4psfkfv6j4j672se5hkhvtyw7qu0almy how she wants a space to onboard her fans into a community together. There’s a lot of promise in Ditto, which I’m excited about—I’ve set up an instance at social.protest.net. What if we helped each of these creators build their own communities on Nostr? From that initial onboarding, their community would be able to connect across all Nostr apps.

This isn’t exactly traditional marketing—it’s more like cultivating and nurturing a healthy Nostr ecosystem.

If we make it easy for communities to create their own spaces on Nostr, we can grow organically in countless directions. Every new user will feel ownership and be inspired to bring more people along. To achieve that growth, we need to lay the groundwork. We’ve got the apps, but we need to work with the people. After all, we’re building social software, and both the technology and the people are equally important.

Grass grows on its own—first slowly, then everywhere

The 6-month HODL Wave has surged to 77.64%—higher than the holding behavior seen at the 2015, 2018, and 2020 bear market bottoms

Kevin Day is a retired U.S. Navy Senior Chief Operations Specialist who specialized in radar systems. He is a TOPGUN air intercept controller with more than 20 years experience in strike group air defense including war-time operations. In November of 2004, off the coast of San Diego, Kevin was a radar operator on the USS Princeton, part of the USS Nimitz Carrier Strike Group.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zJi2ZRzojXs

Replying to Avatar jimmysong

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.

Dramatic Demand: Congress Called to Action by Pentagon Insider on UAP 🛸

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UdIhhYkMG2Y