I have a question: weren't you responsible for all the twitter censorship in 2020-2021?

I'm having trouble understanding your change of heart. Have you ever addressed this on stage?

No judgement, just concerned and genuinely curious. Would love an explanation.

Just 18 months ago zaps were new and weren’t widely supported in clients and wallets yet. Incredible how quickly nostr has progressed in the time since then.

On Twitter/X, you need a massive following and significant reach to monetize your content, and even then, the data isn't truly yours—it's all on Twitter's side.

On the other hand, Nostr offers true ownership of your data, allowing you to receive zaps regardless of your follower count.

It's the embodiment of a truly free social network where incentives are genuinely aligned!

Berkshire Hathaway just hit $1 TRILLION in market cap, and this is screenshot of their website.

The company has bullet points with links attached to them on a single page website.

The best part?

A disclaimer at the bottom of their website says "If you have any comments about our WEB page, you can write us at the address shown above."

It also says "However, due to the limited number of personnel in our corporate office, we are unable to provide a direct response."

- Kobeissi Letter

I have 1,200 followers on X/Twitter.

I have 5 followers on Nostr.

I have more net engagements and meaningful engagements on Nostr.

Quality > Quantity

It amuses me to no end to see Bitcoiners acting like Buttcoiners with regard to nostr.

I do wonder how much of this can be attributed to maximalist culture making people more close minded and pessimistic.

I'm not interested in all the ways nostr can fail.

I'm interested in all the ways it can succeed.

The studio is ready, Danny's flights are booked, and next week we’ll begin recording episodes for our new podcast.

I wanted to share the reasons behind this shift as many have been asking. Three primary factors influenced this decision:

1. I hate making remote shows—I never want to do them again. These interviews need the intimacy of being in person.

2. Traveling constantly has been detrimental to my health and my family.

3. My commitments here with the football club and local community are growing.

So, the solution was clear: build a studio in the UK and produce the show locally.

We’ve secured a fantastic space in Soho, London, and we’re ready to go but given the limited number of Bitcoin guests available in the UK or those willing to fly in, it’s time to retire What Bitcoin Did.

Our new podcast will be similar in feel but will cover a broader range of topics. While some episodes will focus on Bitcoin (though less frequently), most will explore other interesting topics or people.

Having made nearly 900 episodes covering a wide range of #bitcoin topics and guests, we’re now aiming higher. By diversifying our content and guests, we hope to introduce more people to the concept of sound money through podcast osmosis. If we get this right, it will be a bigger show, if we get it wrong, well we tried.

For a long time I have felt there is a need to get out of the #bitcoin corner of the party. Real Bedford FC was a way of integrating sound money into a traditional business model. CheatCode purposely did not include Bitcoin in the title, so changing the show feels like a natural next step.

Sometimes when stuck in the #bitcoin landscape you can lose site of how other people in the world think, lose empathy for the complexities of the world. I have felt this. I'd come home from spending two weeks with Bitcoiners and be with friends and family locally and notice a distinct difference in how we see the world. As everything feels like it is going to shit, I feel like there is a bigger job to do now.

The Bitcoin podcast landscape is well served, from Marty and Odell to Natalie and Preston, from The Blue Collar guys to Stefan Livera and anyone I haven't mentioned. There’s no shortage of high-quality Bitcoin podcasts.

However, there seems to be some fatigue in the space, with similar guests and topics being revisited. With our new show we want to bring fresh perspectives and ideas, aligning with sound money where relevant—think of the shows we’ve had with the likes of Eric Weinstein and Michael Malice.

On a personal note, I’m need the challenge, test myself wider, get fit and find a good woman. I can't do this travelling all the time.

When I started the podcast my life was a shit show - divorced, coming off drugs, heading towards bankruptcy. I've had an incredible 7 years, travelled the world, made amazing friends and got to live my dream by buying my local football club.

To everyone who has helped us get this far - the guests, the listeners, the sponsors, we could not have done this without you. I am forever in your debt.

I hope you’ll check out the new show and enjoy it, though it may not be for some of you. Regardless, Danny and I will work hard to deliver the best show possible, like we always have.

Roll on The McCormack Show!

I appreciate your perspective.

And Tor is indeed the adjacent network that I think about critically and economically here as a first glance when I put my critical hat on for Nostr. Which is why, in multiple of my recent posts, I purposely brought to attention critical Nostr relay economics from Peter Todd and then quote-posted Odell about how questioning the economics is rational behavior.

I do think that Nostr has stronger ethical incentive mechanisms than Tor, as a starting point. Open socials and open data combined, is a stronger selling point than open data alone. I think the ecosystem needs to improve key management and some details, but assuming we hit product market fit and decent UX for big scaling, I think there's a lot of broad support here. Or if we fail, from whatever emerges better from our ashes could do decently.

Imo, unlike Tor, the biggest relays will be run by businesses as a loss-leader for their other business activities. In other words, data availability is a cost of doing business. It's more economic, given the broader audience.

Power-users of a given social app would indeed pay $10/month or $100/month or in some cases way more as a sizable business. Advertisements aside, they do so in order to reach an audience with minimal frictions of impersonators or data availability. This covers many free users.

I admittedly partly kept my post incomplete for a humor punchline, and commented elsewhere on my full thoughts. I don't just think "psychopath hobbyists" will run the relays. They are the relay runners of last resort. To the extent that Nostr grows users in any significant way (still a big "if"), I think businesses in multiple jurisdictions will run the big relays, and then there will be many smaller hobbyist ones to fill the gaps, as far as I can see currently based on how early this tech is.

If Nostr has trouble with relay economics and there is no better option on the market, I'd be willing to donate five figures per year in support assuming my own income-generating businesses are running well enough. And there are others that might be willing to 10x or 100x that kind of number. That number only increases as freedom is impaired by more jurisdictions.

When I was in my early twenties, not rich, overworked, and put like a thousand hours of voluntary work into that forum in my post that you referenced, I was earning like $40-$50/hr. That was like $40-$50k cumulative labor hours that I provided for free to a forum I liked in my early twenties. Like a psychopath. I earn multiples of that now, and am still a psychopath. Any ecosystem that gets a few whales on its team, and a few people that are willing to work for free part-time or work for scraps part-time, can keep a network running.

And as a partner in a venture capital firm that puts seven or eight figures into a company depending on its stage, including various freedom-tech if it's economical, I'd say we're indeed looking at Nostr for any economic angle should it materialize to our criteria, and all of us as partners support it conceptually.

Bitcoin itself is a combo of 1) voluntary donations to Core devs and its associations and 2) companies building on Bitcoin for expectations of economic gain. I expect Nostr to be similar. It relies on economics for big scaling, but donations for the cypherpunk margins, for which there are legion.

And these things tend to be responsive to input. If a network is running fine and everyone is engaging happily and without big pushback, people contribute less. If the network starts to be impaired by internal or external forces and there is no better solution available, people wake up and contribute more, and influencers wake up and convince people to contribute more.

Good morning all and #Nostr

Hope you all have a great morning and day.

#WednesdayMorning #Nostr

Gm #flowerchain

#plebchain #nostr #bitcoin #zap #photography

I started fasting in 2013, my family said I was crazy.

I started carnivore in 2017, my family said I was crazy.

Today, they are doing both.

It's been a lonely road, but it paid off and I'm grateful I was patient.

The same will happen with #Bitcoin

Truth wins with time 🧡

I'll be damned, we finally have people coming over to Nostr en masse.

#Bitcoin will succeed because governments will continue to debase their currencies.

#Nostr will succeed because governments and companies will continue to censor free speech and gate-keep content and digital identities.