If you’re on Damus you can edit your profile and update the image section with a link to your image. Currently no image hosting directly

Should paid relays mirror free relays by default (without the spam)? If so, I’ll go ahead and build this into Nostream so all paid relays can offer this as well.

real bitcoiners' favorite pastime is thinking of ways of killing bitcoin

People make comments that are far too flippant. I would gladly turn on a mode where I have to pay 100 sats per note and everyone else does to (perhaps it could be a toggle and continuously variable on a per note basis). In the traditional, tribal world, there is a true opportunity cost to one's words since you have a limited time with a limited number of people to share your thoughts. The internet removed that scarcity, so people shout aimlessly and arrogantly.

When one's thoughts are costly and hodl'd it is easier to hear those who are sincere. Spam is not a binary problem, it is an analog problem. "Well said" or "you're amazing" as a note response to a "celebrity" is actually a form of spam.

Accosting Michael Saylor IRL to say "thank you so much for what you do for bitcoin" is spam. You will not learn or humble yourself, but costliness will shut you up so those who have something to communicate about can do so efficiently.

The only badge I want is the early adopter # on Nostr (or Damus) because I think I am.

Nostr-pilling may progress far more swiftly than orangepilling primarily because "buying in" does not require *buying* in.

Well I'm actually more interested in a marketplace for certain types of *labor* of the variety where the tasks are highly commoditized, repeatable, legible, predictable, and most importantly, discretizable -- if you have a series of labor transactions where you need each thing to work such as paying a developer to build an app, there is risk at the size of the entire project, but for a delivery of a physical item, risk is bounded, acceptable, and low enough that it can more easily be overcome through costliness of breech of contract.

Why not http? Nostr is better for real time, dynamic interactions that combine encrypted DMs, the critical relational aspect that allows trust, easy payment integration, and mutability resistant and Sybil resistant transaction history. Also eliminates single point of failure.

Why on nostr, and not http?

There are many things you'll learn along the way when building an online marketplace, and starting with nostr means your product pages will be immutable. That could be a nice-to-have for tracking previous prices, but online marketing employs more psychological tactics than you can imagine, in a cutthroat landscape where second place is always just the first loser. Over-informing your customers is counter-intuitively bad for business.

With e-commerce, you're not trying to solve problems of censorship; you're trying to make a sale, and nothing else matters.

A delivery app for anything is probably a good marketplace app for nostr. Rather than selecting different items, the requests are placed in text format: e.g. [2 lbs ribeyes, 1 lb butter, 1 gallon raw milk, and a Makita impact driver]. Zero collaboration with stores, no browsing for cleaner UI, just know what you want. The note includes geolocation, order parameters, and allows runners to filter for their area. Different bid/ask approaches are possible.

When a contract is agreed upon, the buyer zaps the runner the fee amount (say $10). The runner then purchases the items and physically delivers the items. An image of the receipt could then be posted to Nostr on a thread for the contract. Then upon physical hand-off, the buyer zaps the receipt note with the stated amount (and can include a tip).

In the event the buyer breaches the contract, the runner retains possession of the goods, and may even be able to return the goods, while also keeping the fee that was paid up front. In the event the runner fails to deliver the goods, their reputation will prevent them from continuing in this line of work with that ID, and bootstrapping a new one will require taking a number of much lower profit orders.

Rather than relying on a 3rd party to decide platform or deplatform in a binary way, everyone can chose who to interact with, and it can be done in a ranked way. For instance, you might choose to bid more for people with higher ratings, which then incentivizes people do things continuously better rather than merely acceptably. The images of receipts and some heuristics around those may suffice to have very high Sybil resistance.

The client could have a tool for filtering notes such that it is easy to verify a history of transactions, and you could even have parameters for degrees of trust in a single click. The client would also have a price conversion showing the dollar amount matching the sats sent at that time, and you could even have it hooked up to an image recognition AI service that extracts the total on the receipt to auto-generate an LN invoice.

Since the threshold of trust is lower than the transaction size, and only needs to exceed the value of the fee, it seems relatively easier to bootstrap, and perhaps could be bootstrapped fairly easily with a vouching system that does not need to be overly complex since after a few weeks of history, it no longer needs the vouching of others to remain trustworthy. I think this might fulfill the concept of a fully transferable relational contracting capability.

This allows delivery of restaurant or grocery food or any other IRL item. It also is structured in such a way that it allows the purchase of bitcoin by runners at a negative rate since they can use a credit card when buying. One challenge however is that runners may need to quickly turn their bitcoin back into dollars since the sort of people doing deliveries might not have enough liquidity to cover a day's worth of shopping.

Am I thinking about this correctly, or do I have something off? Is there a good way to monetize this with any amount of defensibility? Maybe a highly reliable client that charges a very small rake on fees? Perhaps partnering with LSPs? Of course, does have some privacy challenges, though you would use a separate keypair from your primary ID as a starting point.

My general view is there is a sweet spot of latency for a good first marketplace product: e-commerce, craigslist, UpWork, or Airbnb and you don't actually need Nostr quite as much; ride-share, and it's hard to have good UX without critical mass and more precision around mapping and dispatching probably harder; it also seems easier to bootstrap than plumbing, painting, electrical, auto repair, or the like, but that would likely be a good follow on.

The onboarding process is painful. Pub keys are awful UIDs; NIP-05 verification is a step forward, but discovering people to follow needs work, otherwise this will turn into GnuPG.

Settling in to nostr, it feels a lot like HAM radio, but for bitcoin bros.

When explaining nostr to friends IRL, it helps to have 4 people: two clients, two relays.