@ 3bf0c63f:aefa459d

Pequenos problemas que o Estado cria para a sociedade e que não são sempre lembrados

- **vale-transporte**: transferir o custo com o transporte do funcionário para um terceiro o estimula a morar longe de onde trabalha, já que morar perto é normalmente mais caro e a economia com transporte é inexistente.
- **atestado médico**: o direito a faltar o trabalho com atestado médico cria a exigência desse atestado para todas as situações, substituindo o livre acordo entre patrão e empregado e sobrecarregando os médicos e postos de saúde com visitas desnecessárias de assalariados resfriados.
- **prisões**: com dinheiro mal-administrado, burocracia e péssima alocação de recursos -- problemas que empresas privadas em competição (ou mesmo sem qualquer competição) saberiam resolver muito melhor -- o Estado fica sem presídios, com os poucos existentes entupidos, muito acima de sua alocação máxima, e com isto, segundo a bizarra corrente de responsabilidades que culpa o juiz que condenou o criminoso por sua morte na cadeia, juízes deixam de condenar à prisão os bandidos, soltando-os na rua.
- **justiça**: entrar com processos é grátis e isto faz proliferar a atividade dos advogados que se dedicam a criar problemas judiciais onde não seria necessário e a entupir os tribunais, impedindo-os de fazer o que mais deveriam fazer.
- **justiça**: como a justiça só obedece às leis e ignora acordos pessoais, escritos ou não, as pessoas não fazem acordos, recorrem sempre à justiça estatal, e entopem-na de assuntos que seriam muito melhor resolvidos entre vizinhos.
- **leis civis**: as leis criadas pelos parlamentares ignoram os costumes da sociedade e são um incentivo a que as pessoas não respeitem nem criem normas sociais -- que seriam maneiras mais rápidas, baratas e satisfatórias de resolver problemas.
- **leis de trãnsito**: quanto mais leis de trânsito, mais serviço de fiscalização são delegados aos policiais, que deixam de combater crimes por isto (afinal de contas, eles não querem de fato arriscar suas vidas combatendo o crime, a fiscalização é uma excelente desculpa para se esquivarem a esta responsabilidade).
- **financiamento educacional**: é uma espécie de subsídio às faculdades privadas que faz com que se criem cursos e mais cursos que são cada vez menos recheados de algum conhecimento ou técnica útil e cada vez mais inúteis.
- **leis de tombamento**: são um incentivo a que o dono de qualquer área ou construção "histórica" destrua todo e qualquer vestígio de história que houver nele antes que as autoridades descubram, o que poderia não acontecer se ele pudesse, por exemplo, usar, mostrar e se beneficiar da história daquele local sem correr o risco de perder, de fato, a sua propriedade.
- **zoneamento urbano**: torna as cidades mais espalhadas, criando uma necessidade gigantesca de carros, ônibus e outros meios de transporte para as pessoas se locomoverem das zonas de moradia para as zonas de trabalho.
- **zoneamento urbano**: faz com que as pessoas percam horas no trânsito todos os dias, o que é, além de um desperdício, um atentado contra a sua saúde, que estaria muito melhor servida numa caminhada diária entre a casa e o trabalho.
- **zoneamento urbano**: torna ruas e as casas menos seguras criando zonas enormes, tanto de residências quanto de indústrias, onde não há movimento de gente alguma.
- **escola obrigatória + currículo escolar nacional**: emburrece todas as crianças.
- **leis contra trabalho infantil**: tira das crianças a oportunidade de aprender ofícios úteis e levar um dinheiro para ajudar a família.
- **licitações**: como não existem os critérios do mercado para decidir qual é o melhor prestador de serviço, criam-se comissões de pessoas que vão decidir coisas. isto incentiva os prestadores de serviço que estão concorrendo na licitação a tentar comprar os membros dessas comissões. isto, fora a corrupção, gera problemas reais: __(i)__ a escolha dos serviços acaba sendo a pior possível, já que a empresa prestadora que vence está claramente mais dedicada a comprar comissões do que a fazer um bom trabalho (este problema afeta tantas áreas, desde a construção de estradas até a qualidade da merenda escolar, que é impossível listar aqui); __(ii)__ o processo corruptor acaba, no longo prazo, eliminando as empresas que prestavam e deixando para competir apenas as corruptas, e a qualidade tende a piorar progressivamente.
- **cartéis**: o Estado em geral cria e depois fica refém de vários grupos de interesse. o caso dos taxistas contra o Uber é o que está na moda hoje (e o que mostra como os Estados se comportam da mesma forma no mundo todo).
- **multas**: quando algum indivíduo ou empresa comete uma fraude financeira, ou causa algum dano material involuntário, as vítimas do caso são as pessoas que sofreram o dano ou perderam dinheiro, mas o Estado tem sempre leis que prevêem multas para os responsáveis. A justiça estatal é sempre muito rígida e rápida na aplicação dessas multas, mas relapsa e vaga no que diz respeito à indenização das vítimas. O que em geral acontece é que o Estado aplica uma enorme multa ao responsável pelo mal, retirando deste os recursos que dispunha para indenizar as vítimas, e se retira do caso, deixando estas desamparadas.
- **desapropriação**: o Estado pode pegar qualquer propriedade de qualquer pessoa mediante uma indenização que é necessariamente inferior ao valor da propriedade para o seu presente dono (caso contrário ele a teria vendido voluntariamente).
- **seguro-desemprego**: se há, por exemplo, um prazo mínimo de 1 ano para o sujeito ter direito a receber seguro-desemprego, isto o incentiva a planejar ficar apenas 1 ano em cada emprego (ano este que será sucedido por um período de desemprego remunerado), matando todas as possibilidades de aprendizado ou aquisição de experiência naquela empresa específica ou ascensão hierárquica.
- **previdência**: a previdência social tem todos os defeitos de cálculo do mundo, e não importa muito ela ser uma forma horrível de poupar dinheiro, porque ela tem garantias bizarras de longevidade fornecidas pelo Estado, além de ser compulsória. Isso serve para criar no imaginário geral a idéia da __aposentadoria__, uma época mágica em que todos os dias serão finais de semana. A idéia da aposentadoria influencia o sujeito a não se preocupar em ter um emprego que faça sentido, mas sim em ter um trabalho qualquer, que o permita se aposentar.
- **regulamentação impossível**: milhares de coisas são proibidas, há regulamentações sobre os aspectos mais mínimos de cada empreendimento ou construção ou espaço. se todas essas regulamentações fossem exigidas não haveria condições de produção e todos morreriam. portanto, elas não são exigidas. porém, o Estado, ou um agente individual imbuído do poder estatal pode, se desejar, exigi-las todas de um cidadão inimigo seu. qualquer pessoa pode viver a vida inteira sem cumprir nem 10% das regulamentações estatais, mas viverá também todo esse tempo com medo de se tornar um alvo de sua exigência, num estado de terror psicológico.
- **perversão de critérios**: para muitas coisas sobre as quais a sociedade normalmente chegaria a um valor ou comportamento "razoável" espontaneamente, o Estado dita regras. estas regras muitas vezes não são obrigatórias, são mais "sugestões" ou limites, como o salário mínimo, ou as 44 horas semanais de trabalho. a sociedade, porém, passa a usar esses valores como se fossem o normal. são raras, por exemplo, as ofertas de emprego que fogem à regra das 44h semanais.
- **inflação**: subir os preços é difícil e constrangedor para as empresas, pedir aumento de salário é difícil e constrangedor para o funcionário. a inflação força as pessoas a fazer isso, mas o aumento não é automático, como alguns economistas podem pensar (enquanto alguns outros ficam muito satisfeitos de que esse processo seja demorado e difícil).
- **inflação**: a inflação destrói a capacidade das pessoas de julgar preços entre concorrentes usando a própria memória.
- **inflação**: a inflação destrói os cálculos de lucro/prejuízo das empresas e prejudica enormemente as decisões empresariais que seriam baseadas neles.
- **inflação**: a inflação redistribui a riqueza dos mais pobres e mais afastados do sistema financeiro para os mais ricos, os bancos e as megaempresas.
- **inflação**: a inflação estimula o endividamento e o consumismo.
- **lixo:** ao prover coleta e armazenamento de lixo "grátis para todos" o Estado incentiva a criação de lixo. se tivessem que pagar para que recolhessem o seu lixo, as pessoas (e conseqüentemente as empresas) se empenhariam mais em produzir coisas usando menos plástico, menos embalagens, menos sacolas.
- **leis contra crimes financeiros:** ao criar legislação para dificultar acesso ao sistema financeiro por parte de criminosos a dificuldade e os custos para acesso a esse mesmo sistema pelas pessoas de bem cresce absurdamente, levando a um percentual enorme de gente incapaz de usá-lo, para detrimento de todos -- e no final das contas os grandes criminosos ainda conseguem burlar tudo.

@ 3bf0c63f:aefa459d

Drivechain

Understanding Drivechain requires a shift from the paradigm most bitcoiners are used to. It is not about "trustlessness" or "mathematical certainty", but game theory and incentives. (Well, Bitcoin in general is also that, but people prefer to ignore it and focus on some illusion of trustlessness provided by mathematics.)

Here we will describe the basic mechanism (simple) and incentives (complex) of "hashrate escrow" and how it enables a 2-way peg between the mainchain (Bitcoin) and various sidechains.

The full concept of "Drivechain" also involves blind merged mining (i.e., the sidechains mine themselves by publishing their block hashes to the mainchain without the miners having to run the sidechain software), but this is much easier to understand and can be accomplished either by the BIP-301 mechanism or by the Spacechains mechanism.

How does hashrate escrow work from the point of view of Bitcoin?

A new address type is created. Anything that goes in that is locked and can only be spent if all miners agree on the Withdrawal Transaction (WT^) that will spend it for 6 months. There is one of these special addresses for each sidechain.

To gather miners' agreement bitcoind keeps track of the "score" of all transactions that could possibly spend from that address. On every block mined, for each sidechain, the miner can use a portion of their coinbase to either increase the score of one WT^ by 1 while decreasing the score of all others by 1; or they can decrease the score of all WT^s by 1; or they can do nothing.

Once a transaction has gotten a score high enough, it is published and funds are effectively transferred from the sidechain to the withdrawing users.

If a timeout of 6 months passes and the score doesn't meet the threshold, that WT^ is discarded.

What does the above procedure mean?

It means that people can transfer coins from the mainchain to a sidechain by depositing to the special address. Then they can withdraw from the sidechain by making a special withdraw transaction in the sidechain.

The special transaction somehow freezes funds in the sidechain while a transaction that aggregates all withdrawals into a single mainchain WT^, which is then submitted to the mainchain miners so they can start voting on it and finally after some months it is published.

Now the crucial part: the validity of the WT^ is not verified by the Bitcoin mainchain rules, i.e., if Bob has requested a withdraw from the sidechain to his mainchain address, but someone publishes a wrong WT^ that instead takes Bob's funds and sends them to Alice's main address there is no way the mainchain will know that. What determines the "validity" of the WT^ is the miner vote score and only that. It is the job of miners to vote correctly -- and for that they may want to run the sidechain node in SPV mode so they can attest for the existence of a reference to the WT^ transaction in the sidechain blockchain (which then ensures it is ok) or do these checks by some other means.

What? 6 months to get my money back?

Yes. But no, in practice anyone who wants their money back will be able to use an atomic swap, submarine swap or other similar service to transfer funds from the sidechain to the mainchain and vice-versa. The long delayed withdraw costs would be incurred by few liquidity providers that would gain some small profit from it.

Why bother with this at all?

Drivechains solve many different problems:

It enables experimentation and new use cases for Bitcoin

Issued assets, fully private transactions, stateful blockchain contracts, turing-completeness, decentralized games, some "DeFi" aspects, prediction markets, futarchy, decentralized and yet meaningful human-readable names, big blocks with a ton of normal transactions on them, a chain optimized only for Lighting-style networks to be built on top of it.

These are some ideas that may have merit to them, but were never actually tried because they couldn't be tried with real Bitcoin or inferfacing with real bitcoins. They were either relegated to the shitcoin territory or to custodial solutions like Liquid or RSK that may have failed to gain network effect because of that.

It solves conflicts and infighting

Some people want fully private transactions in a UTXO model, others want "accounts" they can tie to their name and build reputation on top; some people want simple multisig solutions, others want complex code that reads a ton of variables; some people want to put all the transactions on a global chain in batches every 10 minutes, others want off-chain instant transactions backed by funds previously locked in channels; some want to spend, others want to just hold; some want to use blockchain technology to solve all the problems in the world, others just want to solve money.

With Drivechain-based sidechains all these groups can be happy simultaneously and don't fight. Meanwhile they will all be using the same money and contributing to each other's ecosystem even unwillingly, it's also easy and free for them to change their group affiliation later, which reduces cognitive dissonance.

It solves "scaling"

Multiple chains like the ones described above would certainly do a lot to accomodate many more transactions that the current Bitcoin chain can. One could have special Lightning Network chains, but even just big block chains or big-block-mimblewimble chains or whatnot could probably do a good job. Or even something less cool like 200 independent chains just like Bitcoin is today, no extra features (and you can call it "sharding"), just that would already multiply the current total capacity by 200.

Use your imagination.

It solves the blockchain security budget issue

The calculation is simple: you imagine what security budget is reasonable for each block in a world without block subsidy and divide that for the amount of bytes you can fit in a single block: that is the price to be paid in satoshis per byte. In reasonable estimative, the price necessary for every Bitcoin transaction goes to very large amounts, such that not only any day-to-day transaction has insanely prohibitive costs, but also Lightning channel opens and closes are impracticable.

So without a solution like Drivechain you'll be left with only one alternative: pushing Bitcoin usage to trusted services like Liquid and RSK or custodial Lightning wallets. With Drivechain, though, there could be thousands of transactions happening in sidechains and being all aggregated into a sidechain block that would then pay a very large fee to be published (via blind merged mining) to the mainchain. Bitcoin security guaranteed.

It keeps Bitcoin decentralized

Once we have sidechains to accomodate the normal transactions, the mainchain functionality can be reduced to be only a "hub" for the sidechains' comings and goings, and then the maximum block size for the mainchain can be reduced to, say, 100kb, which would make running a full node very very easy.

Can miners steal?

Yes. If a group of coordinated miners are able to secure the majority of the hashpower and keep their coordination for 6 months, they can publish a WT^ that takes the money from the sidechains and pays to themselves.

Will miners steal?

No, because the incentives are such that they won't.

Although it may look at first that stealing is an obvious strategy for miners as it is free money, there are many costs involved:

1. The cost of ceasing blind-merged mining returns -- as stealing will kill a sidechain, all the fees from it that miners would be expected to earn for the next years are gone;
2. The cost of Bitcoin price going down: If a steal is successful that will mean Drivechains are not safe, therefore Bitcoin is less useful, and miner credibility will also be hurt, which are likely to cause the Bitcoin price to go down, which in turn may kill the miners' businesses and savings;
3. The cost of coordination -- assuming miners are just normal businesses, they just want to do their work and get paid, but stealing from a Drivechain will require coordination with other miners to conduct an immoral act in a way that has many pitfalls and is likely to be broken over the months;
4. The cost of miners leaving your mining pool: when we talked about "miners" above we were actually talking about mining pools operators, so they must also consider the risk of miners migrating from their mining pool to others as they begin the process of stealing;
5. The cost of community goodwill -- when participating in a steal operation, a miner will suffer a ton of backlash from the community. Even if the attempt fails at the end, the fact that it was attempted will contribute to growing concerns over exaggerated miners power over the Bitcoin ecosystem, which may end up causing the community to agree on a hard-fork to change the mining algorithm in the future, or to do something to increase participation of more entities in the mining process (such as development or cheapment of new ASICs), which have a chance of decreasing the profits of current miners.

Another point to take in consideration is that one may be inclined to think a newly-created sidechain or a sidechain with relatively low usage may be more easily stolen from, since the blind merged mining returns from it (point 1 above) are going to be small -- but the fact is also that a sidechain with small usage will also have less money to be stolen from, and since the other costs besides 1 are less elastic at the end it will not be worth stealing from these too.

All of the above consideration are valid only if miners are stealing from good sidechains. If there is a sidechain that is doing things wrong, scamming people, not being used at all, or is full of bugs, for example, that will be perceived as a bad sidechain, and then miners can and will safely steal from it and kill it, which will be perceived as a good thing by everybody.

What do we do if miners steal?

Paul Sztorc has suggested in the past that a user-activated soft-fork could prevent miners from stealing, i.e., most Bitcoin users and nodes issue a rule similar to this one to invalidate the inclusion of a faulty WT^ and thus cause any miner that includes it in a block to be relegated to their own Bitcoin fork that other nodes won't accept.

This suggestion has made people think Drivechain is a sidechain solution backed by user-actived soft-forks for safety, which is very far from the truth. Drivechains must not and will not rely on this kind of soft-fork, although they are possible, as the coordination costs are too high and no one should ever expect these things to happen.

If even with all the incentives against them (see above) miners do still steal from a good sidechain that will mean the failure of the Drivechain experiment. It will very likely also mean the failure of the Bitcoin experiment too, as it will be proven that miners can coordinate to act maliciously over a prolonged period of time regardless of economic and social incentives, meaning they are probably in it just for attacking Bitcoin, backed by nation-states or something else, and therefore no Bitcoin transaction in the mainchain is to be expected to be safe ever again.

Why use this and not a full-blown trustless and open sidechain technology?

Because it is impossible.

If you ever heard someone saying "just use a sidechain", "do this in a sidechain" or anything like that, be aware that these people are either talking about "federated" sidechains (i.e., funds are kept in custody by a group of entities) or they are talking about Drivechain, or they are disillusioned and think it is possible to do sidechains in any other manner.

No, I mean a trustless 2-way peg with correctness of the withdrawals verified by the Bitcoin protocol!

That is not possible unless Bitcoin verifies all transactions that happen in all the sidechains, which would be akin to drastically increasing the blocksize and expanding the Bitcoin rules in tons of ways, i.e., a terrible idea that no one wants.

What about the Blockstream sidechains whitepaper?

Yes, that was a way to do it. The Drivechain hashrate escrow is a conceptually simpler way to achieve the same thing with improved incentives, less junk in the chain, more safety.

Isn't the hashrate escrow a very complex soft-fork?

Yes, but it is much simpler than SegWit. And, unlike SegWit, it doesn't force anything on users, i.e., it isn't a mandatory blocksize increase.

Why should we expect miners to care enough to participate in the voting mechanism?

Because it's in their own self-interest to do it, and it costs very little. Today over half of the miners mine RSK. It's not blind merged mining, it's a very convoluted process that requires them to run a RSK full node. For the Drivechain sidechains, an SPV node would be enough, or maybe just getting data from a block explorer API, so much much simpler.

What if I still don't like Drivechain even after reading this?

That is the entire point! You don't have to like it or use it as long as you're fine with other people using it. The hashrate escrow special addresses will not impact you at all, validation cost is minimal, and you get the benefit of people who want to use Drivechain migrating to their own sidechains and freeing up space for you in the mainchain. See also the point above about infighting.

See also

• Podcast episode with Ruben Somsen and Aaron van Wirdum explaining Drivechain
• Alternatives to Drivechain
• Drivechain comparison with Ethereum

@ 3bf0c63f:aefa459d

Personagens de jogos e símbolos

A sensação de "ser" um personagem em um jogo ou uma brincadeira talvez seja o mais próximo que eu tenha conseguido chegar do entendimento de um símbolo religioso.

A hóstia consagrada é, segundo a religião, o corpo de Cristo, mas nossa mente moderna só consegue concebê-la como sendo uma representação do corpo de Cristo. Da mesma forma outras culturas e outras religiões têm símbolos parecidos, inclusive nos quais o próprio participante do ritual faz o papel de um deus ou de qualquer coisa parecida.

"Faz o papel" é de novo a interpretação da mente moderna. O sujeito ali é a coisa, mas ele ao mesmo tempo que é também sabe que não é, que continua sendo ele mesmo.

Nos jogos de videogame e brincadeiras infantis em que se encarna um personagem o jogador é o personagem. não se diz, entre os jogadores, que alguém está "encenando", mas que ele é e pronto. nem há outra denominação ou outro verbo. No máximo "encarnando", mas já aí já é vocabulário jornalístico feito para facilitar a compreensão de quem está de fora do jogo.

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Bluesky is a scam

Bluesky advertises itself as an open network, they say people won't lose followers or their identity, they advertise themselves as a protocol ("atproto") and because of that they are tricking a lot of people into using them. These three claims are false.

protocolness

Bluesky is a company. "atproto" is the protocol. Supposedly they are two different things, right? Bluesky just releases software that implements the protocol, but others can also do that, it's open!

And yet, the protocol has an official webpage with a waitlist and a private beta? Why is the protocol advertised as a company product? Because it is. The "protocol" is just a description of whatever the Bluesky app and servers do, it can and does change anytime the Bluesky developers decide they want to change it, and it will keep changing for as long as Bluesky apps and servers control the biggest part of the network.

Oh, so there is the possibility of other players stepping in and then it becomes an actual interoperable open protocol? Yes, but what is the likelihood of that happening? It is very low. No serious competitor is likely to step in and build serious apps using a protocol that is directly controlled by Bluesky. All we will ever see are small "community" apps made by users and small satellite small businesses -- not unlike the people and companies that write plugins, addons and alternative clients for popular third-party centralized platforms.

And last, even if it happens that someone makes an app so good that it displaces the canonical official Bluesky app, then that company may overtake the protocol itself -- not because they're evil, but because there is no way it cannot be like this.

identity

According to their own documentation, the Bluesky people were looking for an identity system that provided global ids, key rotation and human-readable names.

They must have realized that such properties are not possible in an open and decentralized system, but instead of accepting a tradeoff they decided they wanted all their desired features and threw away the "decentralized" part, quite literally and explicitly (although they make sure to hide that piece in the middle of a bunch of code and text that very few will read).

The "DID Placeholder" method they decided to use for their global identities is nothing more than a normal old boring trusted server controlled by Bluesky that keeps track of who is who and can, at all times, decide to ban a person and deprive them from their identity (they dismissively call a "denial of service attack").

They decided to adopt this method as a placeholder until someone else doesn't invent the impossible alternative that would provide all their desired properties in a decentralized manner -- which is nothing more than a very good excuse: "yes, it's not great now, but it will improve!".

openness

Months after launching their product with an aura of decentralization and openness and getting a bunch of people inside that believed, falsely, they were joining an actually open network, Bluesky has decided to publish a part of their idea of how other people will be able to join their open network.

When I first saw their app and how they were very prominently things like follower counts, like counts and other things that are typical of centralized networks and can't be reliable or exact on truly open networks (like Nostr), I asked myself how were they going to do that once they became and open "federated" network as they were expected to be.

Turns out their decentralization plan is to just allow you, as a writer, to host your own posts on "personal data stores", but not really have any control over the distribution of the posts. All posts go through the Bluesky central server, called BGS, and they decide what to do with it. And you, as a reader, doesn't have any control of what you're reading from either, all you can do is connect to the BGS and ask for posts. If the BGS decides to ban, shadow ban, reorder, miscount, hide, deprioritize, trick or maybe even to serve ads, then you are out of luck.

Oh, but anyone can run their own BGS!, they will say. Even in their own blog post announcing the architecture they assert that "it’s a fairly resource-demanding service" and "there may be a few large full-network providers". But I fail to see why even more than one network provider will exist, if Bluesky is already doing that job, and considering the fact there are very little incentives for anyone to switch providers -- because the app does not seem to be at all made to talk to multiple providers, one would have to stop using the reliable, fast and beefy official BGS and start using some half-baked alternative and risk losing access to things.

When asked about the possibility of switching, one of Bluesky overlords said: "it would look something like this: bluesky has gone evil. there's a new alternative called freesky that people are rushing to. I'm switching to freesky".

The quote is very naïve and sounds like something that could be said about Twitter itself: "if Twitter is evil you can just run your own social network". Both are fallacies because they ignore the network-effect and the fact that people will never fully agree that something is "evil". In fact these two are the fundamental reasons why -- for social networks specifically (and not for other things like commerce) -- we need truly open protocols with no owners and no committees.

@ 3bf0c63f:aefa459d

A Causa

o Princípios de Economia Política de Menger é o único livro que enfatiza a CAUSA o tempo todo. os cientistas todos parecem não saber, ou se esquecer sempre, que as coisas têm causa, e que o conhecimento verdadeiro é o conhecimento da causa das coisas.

a causa é uma categoria metafísica muito superior a qualquer correlação ou resultado de teste de hipótese, ela não pode ser descoberta por nenhum artifício econométrico ou reduzida à simples antecedência temporal estatística. a causa dos fenômenos não pode ser provada cientificamente, mas pode ser conhecida.

o livro de Menger conta para o leitor as causas de vários fenômenos econômicos e as interliga de forma que o mundo caótico da economia parece adquirir uma ordem no momento em que você lê. é uma sensação mágica e indescritível.

quando eu te o recomendei, queria é te imbuir com o espírito da busca pela causa das coisas. depois de ler aquilo, você está apto a perceber continuidade causal nos fenômenos mais complexos da economia atual, enxergar as causas entre toda a ação governamental e as suas várias consequências na vida humana. eu faço isso todos os dias e é a melhor sensação do mundo quando o caos das notícias do caderno de Economia do jornal -- que para o próprio jornalista que as escreveu não têm nenhum sentido (tanto é que ele escreve tudo errado) -- se incluem num sistema ordenado de causas e consequências.

provavelmente eu sempre erro em alguns ou vários pontos, mas ainda assim é maravilhoso. ou então é mais maravilhoso ainda quando eu descubro o erro e reinsiro o acerto naquela racionalização bela da ordem do mundo econômico que é a ordem de Deus.

em scrap para T.P.

@ 3bf0c63f:aefa459d

Parallel Chains

We want merged-mined blockchains. We want them because it is possible to do things in them that aren't doable in the normal Bitcoin blockchain because it is rightfully too expensive, but there are other things beside the world money that could benefit from a "distributed ledger" -- just like people believed in 2013 --, like issued assets and domain names (just the most obvious examples).

On the other hand we can't have -- like people believed in 2013 -- a copy of Bitcoin for every little idea with its own native token that is mined by proof-of-work and must get off the ground from being completely valueless into having some value by way of a miracle that operated only once with Bitcoin.

It's also not a good idea to have blockchains with custom merged-mining protocol (like Namecoin and Rootstock) that require Bitcoin miners to run their software and be an active participant and miner for that other network besides Bitcoin, because it's too cumbersome for everybody.

Luckily Ruben Somsen invented this protocol for blind merged-mining that solves the issue above. Although it doesn't solve the fact that each parallel chain still needs some form of "native" token to pay miners -- or it must use another method that doesn't use a native token, such as trusted payments outside the chain.

How does it work

With the SIGHASH_NOINPUT/SIGHASH_ANYPREVOUT soft-fork[^eltoo] it becomes possible to create presigned transactions that aren't related to any previous UTXO.

Then you create a long sequence of transactions (sufficient to last for many many years), each with an nLockTime of 1 and each spending the next (you create them from the last to the first). Since their scriptSig (the unlocking script) will use SIGHASH_ANYPREVOUT you can obtain a transaction id/hash that doesn't include the previous TXO, you can, for example, in a sequence of transactions A0-->B (B spends output 0 from A), include the signature for "spending A0 on B" inside the scriptPubKey (the locking script) of "A0".

With the contraption described above it is possible to make that long string of transactions everybody will know (and know how to generate) but each transaction can only be spent by the next previously decided transaction, no matter what anyone does, and there always must be at least one block of difference between them.

Then you combine it with RBF, SIGHASH_SINGLE and SIGHASH_ANYONECANPAY so parallel chain miners can add inputs and outputs to be able to compete on fees by including their own outputs and getting change back while at the same time writing a hash of the parallel block in the change output and you get everything working perfectly: everybody trying to spend the same output from the long string, each with a different parallel block hash, only the highest bidder will get the transaction included on the Bitcoin chain and thus only one parallel block will be mined.

See also

• Drivechain

[^eltoo]: The same thing used in Eltoo.

@ 3bf0c63f:aefa459d

Veterano não é dono de bixete

"VETERANO NÃO É DONO DE BIXETE". A frase em letras garrafais chama a atenção dos transeuntes neófitos. Paira sobre um cartaz amarelo que lista várias reclamações contra os "trotes machistas", que, na opinião do responsável pelo cartaz, "não é brincadeira, é opressão".

Eis aí um bizarro exemplo de como são as coisas: primeiro todos os universitários aprovam a idéia do trote, apoiam sua realização e até mesmo desejam sofrer o trote -- com a condição de o poderem aplicar eles mesmos depois --, louvam as maravilhas do mundo universitário, onde a suprema sabedoria se esconde atrás de rituais iniciáticos fora do alcance da imaginação do homem comum e rude, do pobre e do filhinho-de-papai das faculdades privadas; em suma: fomentam os mais baixos, os mais animalescos instintos, a crueldade primordial, destroem em si mesmos e nos colegas quaisquer valores civilizatórios que tivessem sobrado ali, ficando todos indistingüíveis de macacos agressivos e tarados.

Depois vêm aí com um cartaz protestar contra os assédios -- que sem dúvida acontecem em larguíssima escala -- sofridos pelas calouras de 17 anos e que, sendo também novatas no mundo universitário, ainda conservam um pouco de discernimento e pudor.

A incompreensão do fenômeno, porém, é tão grande, que os trotes não são identificados como um problema mental, uma doença que deve ser tratada e eliminada, mas como um sintoma da opressão machista dos homens às mulheres, um produto desta civilização paternalista que, desde que Deus é chamado "o Pai" e não "a Mãe", corrompe a benéfica, pura e angélica natureza do homem primitivo e o torna esta tão torpe criatura.

Na opinião dos autores desse cartaz é preciso, pois, continuar a destruir o que resta da cultura ocidental, e então esperar que haja trotes menos opressores.

@ 3bf0c63f:aefa459d

Rede Relâmpago

Ao se referir à Lightning Network do O que é Bitcoin?, nós, brasileiros e portugueses, devemos usar o termo "Relâmpago" ou "Rede Relâmpago". "Relâmpago" é uma palavra bonita e apropriada, e fácil de pronunciar por todos os nossos compatriotas. Chega de anglicismos desnecessários.

Exemplo de uma conversa hipotética no Brasil usando esta nomenclatura:

– Posso pagar com Relâmpago?

– Opa, claro! Vou gerar um boleto aqui pra você.

Repare que é bem mais natural e fácil do que a outra alternativa:

– Posso pagar com láitenim?

– Leite ninho?

@ 3bf0c63f:aefa459d

Timeu

Os quatro elementos, a esfera como a forma mais perfeita, os cinco sentidos, a dor como perturbação e o prazer como retorno, o demiurgo que cria da melhor maneira possível com a matéria que tem, o conceito de duro e mole, todas essas coisas que ensinam nas escolas e nos desenhos animados ou sei lá como entram na nossa consciência como se fossem uma verdade, mas sempre uma verdade provisória, infantil -- como os nomes infantis dos dedos (mata-piolho, fura-bolo etc.) --, que mesmo as crianças sabem que não é verdade mesmo.

Parece que todas essas coisas estão nesse livro. Talvez até mesmo a classificação dos cinco dedos como mata-piolho e tal, mas talvez eu tenha dormido nessa parte.

Me pergunto se essas coisas não eram ensinadas tradicionalmente na idade média como sendo verdade absoluta (pois afinal estava lá o Platão dizendo, em sua única obra) e persistiram até hoje numa tradição que se mantém aos trancos e barrancos, contra tudo e contra todos, sem ninguém saber como, um conhecimento em que ninguém acredita mas acha bonito mesmo assim, harmonioso, e vem despida de suas origens e fontes primárias e de todo o seu contexto perturbar o entendimento do mundo pelas crianças.

@ 3bf0c63f:aefa459d

neuron.vim

I started using this neuron thing to create an update this same zettelkasten, but the existing vim plugin had too many problems, so I forked it and ended up changing almost everything.

Since the upstream repository was somewhat abandoned, most users and people who were trying to contribute upstream migrate to my fork too.

• https://github.com/fiatjaf/neuron.vim

@ 3bf0c63f:aefa459d

Blockchains are not decentralized data storage

People are used to saying and thinking that blockchains provide immutable data storage. Then many times they add a caveat that says blockchains are very expensive, so we can't really store too much data on them, but we can still store some data if we really want and are ok with paying for it.

But the fact is that blockchains cannot ever be used to store anything. The purpose of blockchains is to keep track of some state that everybody must agree upon at all times, and arbitrary data that anyone may have wanted to backup there is not relevant to anyone else[^relevant] and thus there are no incentives for anyone else to keep track of that. In other words: if you backup your personal pictures as OP_RETURN outputs on Bitcoin, people may delete that and your backup will be void[^op-return-invalid-outputs].

Another thing blockchains supposedly do is to "broadcast" something. For example, nodes may delete the OP_RETURN outputs, but at least they have to verify these first, and spread they over the network, so you can broadcast your data and be sure everybody will get it. About this we can say two things: 1, if this happens, it's not a property of blockchains, but of the Bitcoin transaction sharing network that operates outside of the blockchain. 2, if you try to use that network for purposes that are irrelevant for the functioning of the Bitcoin protocol there is no incentive for other nodes to cooperate and they may ignore you.

The above points may sound weird and you may be prompted to answer: but you can do all that today and there is no actual mechanism to stop anyone from broadcasting irrelevant crap!, and that is true. My point here is only that if you're thinking about blockchains as being this data-broadcast-storage mechanism you're thinking about them wrong, that is not an essential part of any blockchain. In other words: the incentives are not aligned for blockchains to be used like that (unless you come up with a scheme that makes data from everyone else to be relevant to everybody), in the long term such things are not expected to work and insisting on doing them will result in either your application or protocol that stores data on the blockchain to crash or in the death of the given blockchain (I hope Bitcoin haters don't read this).

(This is a counterpoint to myself on idea: Rumple, which was a protocol idea that relied on a blockchain storing irrelevant data.)

[^relevant]: For example, all Bitcoin transactions are relevant to all Bitcoin users because as a user the total supply and the ausence of double-spends are relevant, and also the fact that any of these transactions may end up being ancestors of transactions that you might receive in the future. [^op-return-invalid-outputs]: Of course you can still backup your pictures as invalid P2PKH outputs or something like that, then it will be harder for people to spot your data as irrelevant, but this is not a feature, it's a bug of Bitcoin that enables someone to spam other nodes in a way they can't detect it. If people started doing this a lot it would break Bitcoin.

@ 3bf0c63f:aefa459d

Programming quibbles

• About CouchDB
• my personal approach on using let, const and var in javascript
• A crappy course on torrents
• Multi-service Graph Reputation protocol
• The monolithic approach to CouchDB views
• My stupid introduction to Haskell
• The unit test bubble
• There's a problem with using Git concepts for everything
• On the state of programs and browsers
• Rust's .into() is a strictly bad thing

@ 3bf0c63f:aefa459d

On "zk-rollups" applied to Bitcoin

ZK rollups make no sense in bitcoin because there is no "cheap calldata". all data is already ~~cheap~~ expensive calldata.

There could be an onchain zk verification that allows succinct signatures maybe, but never a rollup.

What happens is: you can have one UTXO that contains multiple balances on it and in each transaction you can recreate that UTXOs but alter its state using a zk to compress all internal transactions that took place.

The blockchain must be aware of all these new things, so it is in no way "L2".

And you must have an entity responsible for that UTXO and for conjuring the state changes and zk proofs.

But on bitcoin you also must keep the data necessary to rebuild the proofs somewhere else, I'm not sure how can the third party responsible for that UTXO ensure that happens.

I think such a construct is similar to a credit card corporation: one central party upon which everybody depends, zero interoperability with external entities, every vendor must have an account on each credit card company to be able to charge customers, therefore it is not clear that such a thing is more desirable than solutions that are truly open and interoperable like Lightning, which may have its defects but at least fosters a much better environment, bringing together different conflicting parties, custodians, anyone.

@ 3bf0c63f:aefa459d

Trello Attachment Editor

A static JS app that allowed you to authorize with your Trello account, fetch the board structure, find attachments, edit them in the browser then replace them in the cards.

Quite a nice thing. I believe it was done to help with Websites For Trello attached scripts and CSS files.

• https://github.com/fiatjaf/trello-attachments
• https://fiatjaf.github.io/trello-attachments/#/login

See also

• Temperos

@ 3bf0c63f:aefa459d

A flexibilidade da doutrina socialista

Os fatos da revolução russa mostram que Lênin e seus amigos bolcheviques não eram só psicopatas assassinos: eles realmente acreditavam que estavam fazendo o certo.

Talvez depois de um tempo o foco deles tenha mudado mais para o lado de se preocuparem menos com a vida e o bem-estar dos outros do que com eles mesmos, mas não houve uma mudança fundamental.

Ao mesmo tempo, a doutrina socialista na qual eles acreditavam era enormemente flexível, assim como a dos esquerdistas de hoje. É a mesma doutrina: uma coleção de slogans que pode ser adaptada para apoiar ou ir contra qualquer outra tese ou ação.

Me parece que a justificativa que eles encontraram para fazer tantas coisas claramente ruins vem dessas mesma flexibilidade. Os atos cruéis estavam todos justificados pela mesma coleção de slogans socialistas de sempre, apenas adaptados às circunstâncias.

Será que uma doutrina mais sólida se prestaria a essas atrocidades? Se concluirmos que a flexibilidade vem da mente e não da doutrina em si, sim, mas não acho que venha daí, porque é sempre o socialismo que é flexível, nunca nenhuma outra doutrina. Ou, na verdade, o socialismo é tão flexível que ele envolve e integra qualquer outra doutrina que seja minimamente compatível.

Talvez a flexibilidade esteja mesmo na mente, mas existe alguma relação entre a mente que desconhece a coerência e a lógica e a mente que se deixa atrair pelos slogans socialistas.

@ 3bf0c63f:aefa459d

Splitpages

The simplest possible service: it splitted PDF pages in half.

Created specially to solve the problem of those scanned books that come with two pages side-by-side as if they were a single page and are much harder to read on Kindle because of that.

It required me to learn about Heroku Buildpacks though, and fork or contribute to a Heroku Buildpack that embedded a mupdf binary.

• https://github.com/fiatjaf/splitpages
• https://splitpages.herokuapp.com/

@ 3bf0c63f:aefa459d

tempreites

My first library to get stars on GitHub, was a very stupid templating library that used just HTML and HTML attributes ("DSL-free"). I was inspired by http://microjs.com/ at the time and ended up not using the library. Probably no one ever did.

• https://github.com/fiatjaf/tempreites

@ 3bf0c63f:aefa459d

microanalytics

A replacement for Google Analytics that run inside a CouchDB, when CouchDB still was a potential platform for hosting of simple apps and easily distribution of apps with data.

It also had a CLI app for browsing the data with nice CLI charts.

• https://github.com/fiatjaf/microanalytics
• https://github.com/fiatjaf/microanalytics-cli

See also

• About CouchDB
• trackingco.de

@ 3bf0c63f:aefa459d

litepub

A Go library that abstracts all the burdensome ActivityPub things and provides just the right amount of helpers necessary to integrate an existing website into the "fediverse" (what an odious name). Made for the gravity integration.

• https://godoc.org/github.com/fiatjaf/litepub

See also

-

@ 3bf0c63f:aefa459d

IPFS problems: Community

I was an avid IPFS user until yesterday. Many many times I asked simple questions for which I couldn't find an answer on the internet in the #ipfs IRC channel on Freenode. Most of the times I didn't get an answer, and even when I got it was rarely by someone who knew IPFS deeply. I've had issues go unanswered on js-ipfs repositories for year – one of these was raising awareness of a problem that then got fixed some months later by a complete rewrite, I closed my own issue after realizing that by myself some couple of months later, I don't think the people responsible for the rewrite were ever acknowledge that he had fixed my issue.

Some days ago I asked some questions about how the IPFS protocol worked internally, sincerely trying to understand the inefficiencies in finding and fetching content over IPFS. I pointed it would be a good idea to have a drawing showing that so people would understand the difficulties (which I didn't) and wouldn't be pissed off by the slowness. I was told to read the whitepaper. I had already the whitepaper, but read again the relevant parts. The whitepaper doesn't explain anything about the DHT and how IPFS finds content. I said that in the room, was told to read again.

Before anyone misread this section, I want to say I understand it's a pain to keep answering people on IRC if you're busy developing stuff of interplanetary importance, and that I'm not paying anyone nor I have the right to be answered. On the other hand, if you're developing a super-important protocol, financed by many millions of dollars and a lot of people are hitting their heads against your software and there's no one to help them; you're always busy but never delivers anything that brings joy to your users, something is very wrong. I sincerely don't know what IPFS developers are working on, I wouldn't doubt they're working on important things if they said that, but what I see – and what many other users see (take a look at the IPFS Discourse forum) is bugs, bugs all over the place, confusing UX, and almost no help.

@ 3bf0c63f:aefa459d

questo.email

This was a thing done in a brief period I liked the idea of "indiewebcamp", a stupid movement of people saying everybody should have their site and post their lives in it.

From the GitHub postmortem:

questo.email was a service that integrated email addresses into the indieweb ecosystem by providing email-to-note and email-to-webmention triggers, which could be used for people to comment through webmention using their email addresses, and be replied, and also for people to send messages from their sites directly to the email addresses of people they knew; Questo also worked as an IndieAuth provider that used people's email addresses and Mozilla Persona.

It was live from December 2014 through December 2015.

Here's how the home page looked:

• https://github.com/fiatjaf/questo.email

See also

• jekmentions, another thing related to "indieweb"

@ 3bf0c63f:aefa459d

Castas hindus em nova chave

Shudras buscam o máximo bem para os seus próprios corpos; vaishyas o máximo bem para a sua própria vida terrena e a da sua família; kshatriyas o máximo bem para a sociedade e este mundo terreno; brâmanes buscam o máximo bem.

@ 3bf0c63f:aefa459d

Bolo

It seems that from 1987 to around 2000 there was a big community of people who played this game called "Bolo". It was a game in which people controlled a tank and killed others while trying to capture bases in team matches. Always 2 teams, from 2 to 16 total players, games could last from 10 minutes to 12 hours. I'm still trying to understand all this.

The game looks silly from some videos you can find today, but apparently it was very deep in strategy because people developed strategy guides and wrote extensively about it and Netscape even supported bolo: URLs out of the box.

The two most important elements on the map are pillboxes and bases. Pillboxes are originally neutral, meaning that they shoot at every tank that happens to get in its range. They shoot fast and with deadly accuracy. You can shoot the pillbox with your tank, and you can see how damaged it is by looking at it. Once the pillbox is subdued, you may run over it, which will pick it up. You may place the pillbox where you want to put it (where it is clear), if you've enough trees to build it back up. Trees are harvested by sending your man outside your tank to forest the trees. Your man (also called a builder) can also lay mines, build roads, and build walls. Once you have placed a pillbox, it will not shoot at you, but only your enemies. Therefore, pillboxes are often used to protect your bases.

That quote was taken from this "augmented FAQ" written by some user. Apparently there were many FAQs for this game. A FAQ is after all just a simple, clear and direct to the point way of writing about anything, previously known as summa[^summa-k], it doesn't have to be related to any actually frequently asked question.

More unexpected Bolo writings include an etiquette guide, an anthropology study and some wonderings on the reverse pill war tactic.

[^summa-k]: It's not the same thing, but I couldn't help but notice the similarity.

@ 3bf0c63f:aefa459d

Thoughts on Nostr key management

On Why I don't like NIP-26 as a solution for key management I talked about multiple techniques that could be used to tackle the problem of key management on Nostr.

Here are some ideas that work in tandem:

• NIP-41 (stateless key invalidation)
• NIP-46 (Nostr Connect)
• NIP-07 (signer browser extension)
• Connected hardware signing devices
• other things like musig or frostr keys used in conjunction with a semi-trusted server; or other kinds of trusted software, like a dedicated signer on a mobile device that can sign on behalf of other apps; or even a separate protocol that some people decide to use as the source of truth for their keys, and some clients might decide to use that automatically
• there are probably many other ideas

Some premises I have in my mind (that may be flawed) that base my thoughts on these matters (and cause me to not worry too much) are that

• For the vast majority of people, Nostr keys aren't a target as valuable as Bitcoin keys, so they will probably be ok even without any solution;
• Even when you lose everything, identity can be recovered -- slowly and painfully, but still --, unlike money;
• Nostr is not trying to replace all other forms of online communication (even though when I think about this I can't imagine one thing that wouldn't be nice to replace with Nostr) or of offline communication, so there will always be ways.
• For the vast majority of people, losing keys and starting fresh isn't a big deal. It is a big deal when you have followers and an online persona and your life depends on that, but how many people are like that? In the real world I see people deleting social media accounts all the time and creating new ones, people losing their phone numbers or other accounts associated with their phone numbers, and not caring very much -- they just find a way to notify friends and family and move on.

We can probably come up with some specs to ease the "manual" recovery process, like social attestation and explicit signaling -- i.e., Alice, Bob and Carol are friends; Alice loses her key; Bob sends a new Nostr event kind to the network saying what is Alice's new key; depending on how much Carol trusts Bob, she can automatically start following that and remove the old key -- or something like that.

---

One nice thing about some of these proposals, like NIP-41, or the social-recovery method, or the external-source-of-truth-method, is that they don't have to be implemented in any client, they can live in standalone single-purpose microapps that users open or visit only every now and then, and these can then automatically update their follow lists with the latest news from keys that have changed according to multiple methods.

@ 3bf0c63f:aefa459d

IPFS problems: Shitcoinery

IPFS was advertised to the Ethereum community since the beggining as a way to "store" data for their "dApps". I don't think this is harmful in any way, but for some reason it may have led IPFS developers to focus too much on Ethereum stuff. Once I watched a talk showing libp2p developers – despite being ignored by the Ethereum team (that ended up creating their own agnostic p2p library) – dedicating an enourmous amount of work on getting a libp2p app running in the browser talking to a normal Ethereum node.

The always somewhat-abandoned "Awesome IPFS" site is a big repository of "dApps", some of which don't even have their landing page up anymore, useless Ethereum smart contracts that for some reason use IPFS to store whatever the useless data their users produce.

Again, per se it isn't a problem that Ethereum people are using IPFS, but it is at least confusing, maybe misleading, that when you search for IPFS most of the use-cases are actually Ethereum useless-cases.

See also

• Bitcoin, the only non-shitcoin

@ 3bf0c63f:aefa459d

idea: Rumple

a payments network based on trust channels

This is the description of a Lightning-like network that will work only with credit or trust-based channels and exist alongside the normal Lightning Network. I imagine some people will think this is undesirable and at the same time very easy to do (such that if it doesn't exist yet it must be because no one cares), but in fact it is a very desirable thing -- which I hope I can establish below -- and at the same time a very non-trivial problem to solve, as the history of Ryan Fugger's Ripple project and posterior copies of it show.

Read these first to get the full context:

1. Ryan Fugger's Ripple
2. Ripple and the problem of the decentralized commit
3. The Lightning Network solves the problem of the decentralized commit
4. Parallel Chains

Explanation about the name

Since we're copying the fundamental Ripple idea from Ryan Fugger and since the name "Ripple" is now associated with a scam coin called XRP, and since Ryan Fugger has changed the name of his old website "Ripplepay" to "Rumplepay", we will follow his lead here. If "Ripplepay" was the name of a centralized prototype to the open peer-to-peer network "Ripple", now that the centralized version is called "Rumplepay" the peer-to-peer version must be called "Rumple".

Now the idea

Basically we copy the Lightning Network, but without HTLCs or channels being opened and closed with funds committed to them on multisig Bitcoin transactions published to the blockchain. Instead we use pure trust relationships like the original Ripple concept.

And we use the blockchain commit method, but instead of spending an absurd amount of money to use the actual Bitcoin blockchain instead we use a parallel chain.

How exactly -- a protocol proposal attempt

It could work like this:

The parallel chain, or "Rumple Chain"

1. We define a parallel chain with a genesis block;
2. Following blocks must contain a. the ID of the previous block; b. a list of up to 32768 entries of arbitrary 32-byte values; c. an ID constituted by sha256(the previous block ID + the merkle root of all the entries)
3. To be mined, each parallel block must be included in the Bitcoin chain according as explained above.

Now that we have a structure for a simple "blockchain" that is completely useless, just blocks over blocks of meaningless values, we proceed to the next step of assigning meaning to these values.

The off-chain payments network, or "Rumple Network"

1. We create a network of nodes that can talk to each other via TCP messages (all details are the same as the Lightning Network, except where mentioned otherwise);
2. These nodes can create trust channels to each other. These channels are backed by nothing except the willingness of one peer to pay the other what is owed.
3. When Alice creates a trust channel with Bob (Alice trusts Bob), contrary to what happens in the Lightning Network, it's A that can immediately receive payments through that channel, and everything A receives will be an IOU from Bob to Alice. So Alice should never open a channel to Bob unless Alice trusts Bob. But also Alice can choose the amount of trust it has in Bob, she can, for example, open a very small channel with Bob, which means she will only lose a few satoshis if Bob decides to exit scam her. (in the original Ripple examples these channels were always depicted as friend relationships, and they can continue being that, but it's expected -- given the experience of the Lightning Network -- that the bulk of the channels will exist between users and wallet provider nodes that will act as hubs).
4. As Alice receive a payment through her channel with Bob, she becomes a creditor and Bob a debtor, i.e., the balance of the channel moves a little to her side. Now she can use these funds to make payments over that channel (or make a payment that combines funds from multiple channels using MPP).
5. If at any time Alice decides to close her channel with Bob, she can send all the funds she has standing there to somewhere else (for example, another channel she has with someone else, another wallet somewhere else, a shop that is selling some good or service, or a service that will aggregate all funds from all her channels and send a transaction to the Bitcoin chain on her behalf).
6. If at any time Bob leaves the network Alice is entitled by Bob's cryptographic signatures to knock on his door and demand payment, or go to a judge and ask him to force Bob to pay, or share the signatures and commitments online and hurt Bob's reputation with the rest of the network (but yes, none of these things is good enough and if Bob is a very dishonest person none of these things is likely to save Alice's funds).

The payment flow

1. Suppose there exists a route Alice->Bob->Carol and Alice wants to send a payment to Carol.
2. First Alice reads an invoice she received from Carol. The invoice (which can be pretty similar or maybe even the same as BOLT11) contains a payment hash h and information about how to reach Carol's node, optionally an amount. Let's say it's 100 satoshis.
3. Using the routing information she gathered, Alice builds an onion and sends it to Bob, at the same time she offers to Bob a "conditional IOU". That stands for a signed commitment that Alice will owe Bob an 100 satoshis if in the next 50 blocks of the Rumple Chain there appears a block containing the preimage p such that sha256(p) == h.
4. Bob peels the onion and discovers that he must forward that payment to Carol, so he forwards the peeled onion and offers a conditional IOU to Carol with the same h. Bob doesn't know Carol is the final recipient of the payment, it could potentially go on and on.
5. When Carol gets the conditional IOU from Bob, she makes a list of all the nodes who have announced themselves as miners (which is not something I have mentioned before, but nodes that are acting as miners will must announce themselves somehow) and are online and bidding for the next Rumple block. Each of these miners will have previously published a random 32-byte value v they they intend to include in their next block.
6. Carol sends payments through routes to all (or a big number) of these miners, but this time the conditional IOU contains two conditions (values that must appear in a block for the IOU to be valid): p such that sha256(p) == h (the same that featured in the invoice) and v (which must be unique and constant for each miner, something that is easily verifiable by Carol beforehand). Also, instead of these conditions being valid for the next 50 blocks they are valid only for the single next block.
7. Now Carol broadcasts p to the mempool and hopes one of the miners to which she sent conditional payments sees it and, allured by the possibility of cashing in Carol's payment, includes p in the next block. If that does not happen, Carol can try again in the next block.

Why bother with this at all?

1. The biggest advantage of Lightning is its openness

   It has been said multiple times that if trust is involved then we don't need Lightning, we can use Coinbase, or worse, Paypal. This is very wrong. Lightning is good specially because it serves as a bridge between Coinbase, Paypal, other custodial provider and someone running their own node. All these can transact freely across the network and pay each other without worrying about who is in which provider or setup.

   Rumple inherits that openness. In a Rumple Network anyone is free to open new trust channels and immediately route payments to anyone else.

   Also, since Rumple payments are also based on the reveal of a preimage it can do swaps with Lightning inside a payment route from day one (by which I mean one can pay from Rumple to Lightning and vice-versa).

2. Rumple fixes Lightning's fragility

   Lightning is too fragile.

   It's known that Lightning is vulnerable to multiple attacks -- like the flood-and-loot attack, for example, although not an attack that's easy to execute, it's still dangerous even if failed. Given the existence of these attacks, it's important to not ever open channels with random anonymous people. Some degree of trust must exist between peers.

   But one does not even have to consider attacks. The creation of HTLCs is a liability that every node has to do multiple times during its life. Every initiated, received or forwarded payment require adding one HTLC then removing it from the commitment transaction.

   Another issue that makes trust needed between peers is the fact that channels can be closed unilaterally. Although this is a feature, it is also a bug when considering high-fee environments. Imagine you pay $2 in fees to open a channel, your peer may close that unilaterally in the next second and then you have to pay another $15 to close the channel. The opener pays (this is also a feature that can double as a bug by itself). Even if it's not you opening the channel, a peer can open a channel with you, make a payment, then clone the channel, and now you're left with, say, an output of 800 satoshis, which is equal to zero if network fees are high.

   So you should only open channels with people you know and know aren't going to actively try to hack you and people who are not going to close channels and impose unnecessary costs on you. But even considering a fully trusted Lightning Network, even if -- to be extreme -- you only opened channels with yourself, these channels would still be fragile. If some HTLC gets stuck for any reason (peer offline or some weird small incompatibility between node softwares) and you're forced to close the channel because of that, there are the extra costs of sweeping these UTXO outputs plus the total costs of closing and reopening a channel that shouldn't have been closed in the first place. Even if HTLCs don't get stuck, a fee renegotiation event during a mempool spike may cause channels to force-close, become valueless or settle for very high closing fee.

   Some of these issues are mitigated by Eltoo, others by only having channels with people you trust. Others referenced above, plus the the griefing attack and in general the ability of anyone to spam the network for free with payments that can be pending forever or a lot of payments fail repeatedly makes it very fragile.

   Rumple solves most of these problems by not having to touch the blockchain at all. Fee negotiation makes no sense. Opening and closing channels is free. Flood-and-loot is a non-issue. The griefing attack can be still attempted as funds in trust channels must be reserved like on Lightning, but since there should be no theoretical limit to the number of prepared payments a channel can have, the griefing must rely on actual amounts being committed, which prevents large attacks from being performed easily.

3. Rumple fixes Lightning's unsolvable reputation issues

   In the Lightning Conference 2019, Rusty Russell promised there would be pre-payments on Lightning someday, since everybody was aware of potential spam issues and pre-payments would be the way to solve that. Fast-forward to November 2020 and these pre-payments have become an apparently unsolvable problem[^thread-402]: no one knows how to implement them reliably without destroying privacy completely or introducing worse problems.

   Replacing these payments with tables of reputation between peers is also an unsolved problem[^reputation-lightning], for the same reasons explained in the thread above.

4. Rumple solves the hot wallet problem

   Since you don't have to use Bitcoin keys or sign transactions with a Rumple node, only your channel trust is at risk at any time.

5. Rumple ends custodianship

   Since no one is storing other people's funds, a big hub or wallet provider can be used in multiple payment routes, but it cannot be immediately classified as a "custodian". At best, it will be a big debtor.

6. Rumple is fun

   Opening channels with strangers is boring. Opening channels with friends and people you trust even a little makes that relationship grow stronger and the trust be reinforced. (But of course, like it happens in the Lightning Network today, if Rumple is successful the bulk of trust will be from isolated users to big reliable hubs.)

Questions or potential issues

1. So many advantages, yes, but trusted? Custodial? That's easy and stupid!

   Well, an enormous part of the current Lightning Network (and also onchain Bitcoin wallets) already rests on trust, mainly trust between users and custodial wallet providers like ZEBEDEE, Alby, Wallet-of-Satoshi and others. Worse: on the current Lightning Network users not only trust, they also expose their entire transaction history to these providers[^hosted-channels].

   Besides that, as detailed in point 3 of the previous section, there are many unsolvable issues on the Lightning protocol that make each sovereign node dependent on some level of trust in its peers (and the network in general dependent on trusting that no one else will spam it to death).

   So, given the current state of the Lightning Network, to trust peers like Rumple requires is not a giant change -- but it is still a significant change: in Rumple you shouldn't open a large trust channel with someone just because it looks trustworthy, you must personally know that person and only put in what you're willing to lose. In known brands that have reputation to lose you can probably deposit more trust, same for long-term friends, and that's all. Still it is probably good enough, given the existence of MPP payments and the fact that the purpose of Rumple is to be a payments network for day-to-day purchases and not a way to buy real estate.

2. Why would anyone run a node in this parallel chain?

   I don't know. Ideally every server running a Rumple Network node will be running a Bitcoin node and a Rumple chain node. Besides using it to confirm and publish your own Rumple Network transactions it can be set to do BMM mining automatically and maybe earn some small fees comparable to running a Lightning routing node or a JoinMarket yield generator.

   Also it will probably be very lightweight, as pruning is completely free and no verification-since-the-genesis-block will take place.

3. What is the maturity of the debt that exists in the Rumple Network or its legal status?

   By default it is to be understood as being payable on demand for payments occurring inside the network (as credit can be used to forward or initiate payments by the creditor using that channel). But details of settlement outside the network or what happens if one of the peers disappears cannot be enforced or specified by the network.

   Perhaps some standard optional settlement methods (like a Bitcoin address) can be announced and negotiated upon channel creation inside the protocol, but nothing more than that.

[^thread-402]: Read at least the first 10 messages of the thread to see how naïve proposals like you and me could have thought about are brought up and then dismantled very carefully by the group of people most committed to getting Lightning to work properly. [^reputation-lightning]: See also the footnote at Ripple and the problem of the decentralized commit. [^hosted-channels]: Although that second part can be solved by hosted channels.

@ 3bf0c63f:aefa459d

Economics

Just a bunch of somewhat-related notes.

• notes on "Economic Action Beyond the Extent of the Market", Per Bylund
• Mises' interest rate theory
• Profits, not wages, as the originary factor
• Reisman on opportunity cost
• Money Supply Measurement
• Per Bylund's insight
• Maybe a new approach to the Austrian Business Cycle Theory, some disorganized thoughts
• An argument according to which fractional-reserve banking is merely theft and nothing else
• Conjecture and criticism
• Qual é o economista? (piadas)
• UBI calculations
• Donations on the internet

@ 3bf0c63f:aefa459d

Boardthreads

This was a very badly done service for turning a Trello list into a helpdesk UI.

Surprisingly, it had more paying users than Websites For Trello, which I was working on simultaneously and dedicating much more time to it.

The Neo4j database I used for this was a very poor choice, it was probably the cause of all the bugs.

-https://github.com/fiatjaf/boardthreads

@ 3bf0c63f:aefa459d

Webvatar

Like Gravatar, but using profile images from websites tagged with "microformats-2" tags, like people from the indiewebcamp movement liked. It falled back to favicon, gravatar and procedural avatar generators.

No one really used this, despite people saying they liked it. Since I was desperate to getting some of my programs appreciated by someone I even bought a domain. It was sad, but an enriching experience.

• https://github.com/fiatjaf/webvatar.com
• http://webvatar.com

See also

• jekmentions
• questo.email

@ 3bf0c63f:aefa459d

nix

Pra instalar o neuron fui forçado a baixar e instalar o nix. Não consegui me lembrar por que não estava usando até hoje aquele maravilhoso sistema de instalar pacotes desde a primeira vez que tentei, anos atrás.

Que sofrimento pra fazer funcionar com o fish, mas até que bem menos sofrimento que da outra vez. Tive que instalar um tal de fish-foreign-environment (usando o próprio nix!, já que a outra opção era o oh-my-fish ou qualquer outra porcaria dessas) e aí usá-lo para aplicar as definições de shell para bash direto no fish.

E aí lembrei também que o /nix/store fica cheio demais, o negócio instala tudo que existe neste mundo a partir do zero. É só para computadores muito ricos, mas vamos ver como vai ser. Estou gostando do neuron (veja, estou usando como diário), então vou ter que deixar o nix aí.

@ 3bf0c63f:aefa459d

The problem with ION

ION is a DID method based on a thing called "Sidetree".

I can't say for sure what is the problem with ION, because I don't understand the design, even though I have read all I could and asked everybody I knew. All available information only touches on the high-level aspects of it (and of course its amazing wonders) and no one has ever bothered to explain the details. I've also asked the main designer of the protocol, Daniel Buchner, but he may have thought I was trolling him on Twitter and refused to answer, instead pointing me to an incomplete spec on the Decentralized Identity Foundation website that I had already read before. I even tried to join the DIF as a member so I could join their closed community calls and hear what they say, maybe eventually ask a question, so I could understand it, but my entrance was ignored, then after many months and a nudge from another member I was told I had to do a KYC process to be admitted, which I refused.

One thing I know is:

• ION is supposed to provide a way to rotate keys seamlessly and automatically without losing the main identity (and the ION proponents also claim there are no "master" keys because these can also be rotated).
• ION is also not a blockchain, i.e. it doesn't have a deterministic consensus mechanism and it is decentralized, i.e. anyone can publish data to it, doesn't have to be a single central server, there may be holes in the available data and the protocol doesn't treat that as a problem.
• From all we know about years of attempts to scale Bitcoins and develop offchain protocols it is clear that you can't solve the double-spend problem without a central authority or a kind of blockchain (i.e. a decentralized system with deterministic consensus).
• Rotating keys also suffer from the double-spend problem: whenever you rotate a key it is as if it was "spent", you aren't supposed to be able to use it again.

The logic conclusion of the 4 assumptions above is that ION is flawed: it can't provide the key rotation it says it can if it is not a blockchain.

See also

• Excerpt of discussion about DIDs and ION

@ 3bf0c63f:aefa459d

A biblioteca infinita

Agora esqueci o nome do conto de Jorge Luis Borges em que a tal biblioteca é descrita, ou seus detalhes específicos. Eu tinha lido o conto e nunca havia percebido que ele matava a questão da aleatoriedade ser capaz de produzir coisas valiosas. Precisei mesmo da Wikipédia me dizer isso.

Alguns anos atrás levantei essa questão para um grupo de amigos sem saber que era uma questão tão batida e baixa. No meu exemplo era um cachorro andando sobre letras desenhadas e não um macaco numa máquina de escrever. A minha conclusão da discussão foi que não importa o que o cachorro escrevesse, sem uma inteligência capaz de compreender aquilo nada passaria de letras aleatórias.

Borges resolve tudo imaginando uma biblioteca que contém tudo o que o cachorro havia escrito durante todo o infinito em que fez o experimento, e portanto contém todo o conhecimento sobre tudo e todas as obras literárias possíveis -- mas entre cada página ou frase muito boa ou pelo menos legívei há toneladas de livros completamente aleatórios e uma pessoa pode passar a vida dentro dessa biblioteca que contém tanto conhecimento importante e mesmo assim não aprender nada porque nunca vai achar os livros certos.

Everything would be in its blind volumes. Everything: the detailed history of the future, Aeschylus' The Egyptians, the exact number of times that the waters of the Ganges have reflected the flight of a falcon, the secret and true nature of Rome, the encyclopedia Novalis would have constructed, my dreams and half-dreams at dawn on August 14, 1934, the proof of Pierre Fermat's theorem, the unwritten chapters of Edwin Drood, those same chapters translated into the language spoken by the Garamantes, the paradoxes Berkeley invented concerning Time but didn't publish, Urizen's books of iron, the premature epiphanies of Stephen Dedalus, which would be meaningless before a cycle of a thousand years, the Gnostic Gospel of Basilides, the song the sirens sang, the complete catalog of the Library, the proof of the inaccuracy of that catalog. Everything: but for every sensible line or accurate fact there would be millions of meaningless cacophonies, verbal farragoes, and babblings. Everything: but all the generations of mankind could pass before the dizzying shelves – shelves that obliterate the day and on which chaos lies – ever reward them with a tolerable page.

Tenho a impressão de que a publicação gigantesca de artigos, posts, livros e tudo o mais está transformando o mundo nessa biblioteca. Há tanta coisa pra ler que é difícil achar o que presta. As pessoas precisam parar de escrever.

@ 3bf0c63f:aefa459d

bolt12 problems

• clients can't programatically build new offers by changing a path or query params (services like zbd.gg or lnurl-pay.me won't work)
• impossible to use in a load-balanced custodian way -- since offers would have to be pregenerated and tied to a specific lightning node.
• the existence of fiat currency fields makes it so wallets have to fetch exchange rates from somewhere on the internet (or offer a bad user experience), using HTTP which hurts user privacy.
• the vendor field is misleading, can be phished very easily, not as safe as a domain name.
• onion messages are an improvement over fake HTLC-based payments as a way of transmitting data, for sure. but we must decide if they are (i) suitable for transmitting all kinds of data over the internet, a replacement for tor; or (ii) not something that will scale well or on which we can count on for the future. if there was proper incentivization for data transmission it could end up being (i), the holy grail of p2p communication over the internet, but that is a very hard problem to solve and not guaranteed to yield the desired scalability results. since not even hints of attempting to solve that are being made, it's safer to conclude it is (ii).

bolt12 limitations

• not flexible enough. there are some interesting fields defined in the spec, but who gets to add more fields later if necessary? very unclear.
• services can't return any actionable data to the users who paid for something. it's unclear how business can be conducted without an extra communication channel.

bolt12 illusions

• recurring payments is not really solved, it is just a spec that defines intervals. the actual implementation must still be done by each wallet and service. the recurring payment cannot be enforced, the wallet must still initiate the payment. even if the wallet is evil and is willing to initiate a payment without the user knowing it still needs to have funds, channels, be online, connected etc., so it's not as if the services could rely on the payments being delivered in time.
• people seem to think it will enable pushing payments to mobile wallets, which it does not and cannot.
• there is a confusion of contexts: it looks like offers are superior to lnurl-pay, for example, because they don't require domain names. domain names, though, are common and well-established among internet services and stores, because these services have websites, so this is not really an issue. it is an issue, though, for people that want to receive payments in their homes. for these, indeed, bolt12 offers a superior solution -- but at the same time bolt12 seems to be selling itself as a tool for merchants and service providers when it includes and highlights features as recurring payments and refunds.
• the privacy gains for the receiver that are promoted as being part of bolt12 in fact come from a separate proposal, blinded paths, which should work for all normal lightning payments and indeed are a very nice solution. they are (or at least were, and should be) independent from the bolt12 proposal. a separate proposal, which can be (and already is being) used right now, also improves privacy for the receiver very much anway, it's called trampoline routing.

@ 3bf0c63f:aefa459d

Qual é o economista? (piadas)

O economista americano rapper ficou triste quando sua banda brasileira favorita encerrou suas atividades por crer que a demanda por discos de rap seria cada vez pior. Resposta: Robert Lucas e as expectativas dos Racionais.

O economista inglês queria muito arrumar uma namorada. Resposta: John Maynard Keynes e a demanda afetiva.

Quando o filho do economista austríaco chegou em casa todo sujo ele sem nem pensar ordenou que o moleque fosse tomar banho. Resposta: Friedrich Hayek e a ordem espontânea.

O economista americano tinha muito orgulho de ter em sua casa um valiosíssimo quadro de um impressionista francês. Resposta: Milton Friedman e o Monet raríssimo.

O economista austríaco jurou aos seus filhos que todos eles se mudariam para Brasília. Resposta: Eugen von Böhm-Bawerk e o “eu juro” da capital.

O economista alemão organizou um evento meio sertanejo meio religioso e colocou como organizador uma executiva que tinha quebrado suas últimas 4 empresas por má administração. Resposta: Karl Marx e a expo-oração da que mais-falia.

@ 3bf0c63f:aefa459d

Batch for Trello

Another Trello helper.

This time it allowed people to perform batch actions on multiple cards, most notably delete a lot of cards at once.

I created it because I wanted to delete a ton of spam from Boardthreads.

• https://github.com/fiatjaf/batch-for-trello
• https://batch.cardsync.xyz/

@ 3bf0c63f:aefa459d

The Lightning Network solves the problem of the decentralized commit

Before reading this, see Ripple and the problem of the decentralized commit.

The Bitcoin Lightning Network can be thought as a system similar to Ripple: there are conditional IOUs (HTLCs) that are sent in "prepare"-like messages across a route, and a secret p that must travel from the final receiver backwards through the route until it reaches the initial sender and possession of that secret serves to prove the payment as well as to make the IOU hold true.

The difference is that if one of the parties don't send the "acknowledge" in time, the other has a trusted third-party with its own clock (that is the clock that is valid for everybody involved) to complain immediately at the timeout: the Bitcoin blockchain. If C has p and B isn't acknowleding it, C tells the Bitcoin blockchain and it will force the transfer of the amount from B to C.

Differences (or 1 upside and 3 downside)

1. The Lightning Network differs from a "pure" Ripple network in that when we send a "prepare" message on the Lightning Network, unlike on a pure Ripple network we're not just promising we will owe something -- instead we are putting the money on the table already for the other to get if we are not responsive.

2. The feature above removes the trust element from the equation. We can now have relationships with people we don't trust, as the Bitcoin blockchain will serve as an automated escrow for our conditional payments and no one will be harmed. Therefore it is much easier to build networks and route payments if you don't always require trust relationships.

3. However it introduces the cost of the capital. A ton of capital must be made available in channels and locked in HTLCs so payments can be routed. This leads to potential issues like the ones described in https://twitter.com/joostjgr/status/1308414364911841281.

4. Another issue that comes with the necessity of using the Bitcoin blockchain as an arbiter is that it may cost a lot in fees -- much more than the value of the payment that is being disputed -- to enforce it on the blockchain.[^closing-channels-for-nothing]

Solutions

Because the downsides listed above are so real and problematic -- and much more so when attacks from malicious peers are taken into account --, some have argued that the Lightning Network must rely on at least some trust between peers, which partly negate the benefit.

The introduction of purely trust-backend channels is the next step in the reasoning: if we are trusting already, why not make channels that don't touch the blockchain and don't require peers to commit large amounts of capital?

The reason is, again, the ambiguity that comes from the problem of the decentralized commit. Therefore hosted channels can be good when trust is required only from one side, like in the final hops of payments, but they cannot work in the middle of routes without eroding trust relationships between peers (however they can be useful if employed as channels between two nodes ran by the same person).

The next solution is a revamped pure Ripple network, one that solves the problem of the decentralized commit in a different way.

[^closing-channels-for-nothing]: That is even true when, for reasons of the payment being so small that it doesn't even deserve an actual HTLC that can be enforced on the chain (as per the protocol), even then the channel between the two nodes will be closed, only to make it very clear that there was a disagreement. Leaving it online would be harmful as one of the peers could repeat the attack again and again. This is a proof that ambiguity, in case of the pure Ripple network, is a very important issue.

@ 3bf0c63f:aefa459d

my personal approach on using let, const and var in javascript

Since these names can be used interchangeably almost everywhere and there are a lot of people asking and searching on the internet on how to use them (myself included until some weeks ago), I developed a personal approach that uses the declarations mostly as readability and code-sense sugar, for helping my mind, instead of expecting them to add physical value to the programs.

---

let is only for short-lived variables, defined at a single line and not changed after. Generally those variables which are there only to decrease the amount of typing. For example:

for (let key in something) {
  /* we could use `something[key]` for this entire block,
     but it would be too much letters and not good for the
     fingers or the eyes, so we use a radically temporary variable
  */
  let value = something[key]
  ...
}

const for all names known to be constant across the entire module. Not including locally constant values. The value in the example above, for example, is constant in its scope and could be declared with const, but since there are many iterations and for each one there's a value with same name, "value", that could trick the reader into thinking value is always the same. Modules and functions are the best example of const variables:

const PouchDB = require('pouchdb')
const instantiateDB = function () {}
const codes = {
  23: 'atc',
  43: 'qwx',
  77: 'oxi'
}

var for everything that may or not be variable. Names that may confuse people reading the code, even if they are constant locally, and are not suitable for let (i.e., they are not completed in a simple direct declaration) apply for being declared with var. For example:

var output = '\n'
lines.forEach(line => {
  output += '  '
  output += line.trim()
  output += '\n'
})
output += '\n---'

for (let parent in parents) {
  var definitions = {}
  definitions.name = getName(parent)
  definitions.config = {}
  definitions.parent = parent
}

@ 3bf0c63f:aefa459d

Eltoo

Read the paper, it's actually nice and small. You can read only everything up to section 4.2 and it will be enough. Done.

Ok, you don't want to. Or you tried but still want to read here.

Eltoo is a way of keeping payment channel state that works better than the original scheme used in Lightning. Since Lightning is a bunch of different protocols glued together, it can It replace just the part the previously dealed with keeping the payment channel.

Eltoo works like this: A and B want a payment channel, so they create a multisig transaction with deposits from both -- or from just one, doesn't matter. That transaction is only spendable if both cooperate. So if one of them is unresponsive or non-cooperative the other must have a way to get his funds back, so they also create an update transaction but don't publish it to the blockchain. That update transaction spends to a settlement transaction that then distributes the money back to A and B as their balances say.

If they are cooperative they can change the balances of the channel by just creating new update transactions and settlement transactions and number them like 1, 2, 3, 4 etc.

Solid arrows means a transaction is presigned to spend only that previous other transaction; dotted arrows mean it's a floating transaction that can spend any of the previous.

Why do they need and update and a settlement transaction?

Because if B publishes update2 (in which his balances were greater) A needs some time to publish update4 (the latest, which holds correct state of balances).

Each update transaction can be spent by any newer update transaction immediately or by its own specific settlement transaction only after some time -- or some blocks.

Hopefully you got that.

How do they close the channel?

If they're cooperative they can just agree to spend the funding transaction, that first multisig transaction I mentioned, to whatever destinations they want. If one party isn't cooperating the other can just publish the latest update transaction, wait a while, then publish its settlement transaction.

How is this better than the previous way of keeping channel states?

Eltoo is better because nodes only have to keep the last set of update and settlement transactions. Before they had to keep all intermediate state updates.

If it is so better why didn't they do it first?

Because they didn't have the idea. And also because they needed an update to the Bitcoin protocol that allowed the presigned update transactions to spend any of the previous update transactions. This protocol update is called SIGHASH_NOINPUT[^anyprevout], you've seen this name out there. By marking a transaction with SIGHASH_NOINPUT it enters a mystical state and becomes a floating transaction that can be bound to any other transaction as long as its unlocking script matches the locking script.

Why can't update2 bind itself to update4 and spend that?

Good question. It can. But then it can't anymore, because Eltoo uses OP_CHECKLOCKTIMEVERIFY to ensure that doesn't actually check not a locktime, but a sequence. It's all arcane stuff.

And then Eltoo update transactions are numbered and their lock/unlock scripts will only match if a transaction is being spent by another one that's greater than it.

Do Eltoo channels expire?

No.

What is that "on-chain protocol" they talk about in the paper?

That's just an example to guide you through how the off-chain protocol works. Read carefully or don't read it at all. The off-chain mechanics is different from the on-chain mechanics. Repeating: the on-chain protocol is useless in the real world, it's just a didactic tool.

[^anyprevout]: Later SIGHASH_NOINPUT was modified to fit better with Taproot and Schnorr signatures and renamed to SIGHASH_ANYPREVOUT.

@ 3bf0c63f:aefa459d

idea: Hosted-channels Lightning wallet that runs in the browser

Communicates over HTTP with a server that is actually connected to the Lightning Network, but generates preimages and onions locally, doing everything like the Hosted Channels protocol says. Just the communication method changes.

Could use this library: https://www.npmjs.com/package/bolt04

@ 3bf0c63f:aefa459d

Sistemas legais anárquicos

São poucos os exemplos de sistemas legais claramente anárquicos que nós temos, e são sempre de tempos muito remoto, da idade média ou por aí. Me vêm à cabeça agora o sistema islandês, o somaliano, o irlandês e as cortes dos mercadores da Europa continental.

Esses exemplos, embora sempre pareçam aos olhos de um libertário convicto a prova cabal de que a sociedade sem o Estado é capaz de fazer funcionar sistemas legais eficientes, complexos e muito melhores e mais baratos do que os estatais, a qualquer observador não entusiasmado vão parecer meio anacrônicos: são sempre coisas que envolvem família, clãs, chefes de família, comunidades pequenas -- fatores quase sempre ausentes na sociedade hoje --, o que dá espaço para que a pessoa pense (e eu confesso que isso também sempre me incomodou) que nada disso funcionaria hoje, são bonitos, mas sistemas que só funcionariam nos tempos de antigamente, o Estado com seu sistema judiciário é a evolução natural e necessária de tudo isso e assim por diante.

Vale lembrar, porém, que os exemplos que nós temos provavelmente não surgiram espontamente, eles mesmos foram o resultado de uma evolução lenta mas constante do sistema legal das suas respectivas comunidades. Se não tivessem sido interrompidos pela intervenção de algum Estado, esses sistemas teriam continuado evoluindo e hoje, quem sabe, seriam redes complexas altamente eficientes, que, por que não, juntariam tecnologias similares à internet com segurança de dados, algoritmos maravilhosos de reputação e voto, tudo decentralizado, feito por meio de protocolos concorrentes mas padronizados -- talvez, se tivessem tido um pouquinho mais de tempo, cada um desses sistemas legais anárquicos teria desenvolvido meios de evitar a conquista ou a concorrência desleal de um Estado, ou pelo menos do Estado como nós o conhecemos hoje.

@ 3bf0c63f:aefa459d

localchat

A server that creates instant chat rooms with Server-Sent Events and normal HTTP POST requests (instead of WebSockets which are an overkill most of the times).

It defaults to a room named as your public IP, so if two machines in the same LAN connect they'll be in the same chat automatically -- but then you can also join someone else's LAN if you need.

This is supposed to be useful.

• https://github.com/fiatjaf/localchat
• https://localchat.bigsun.xyz/

See also

• Filemap

@ 3bf0c63f:aefa459d

doulas.club

A full catalog of all Brazilian doulas with data carefully scrapped from many websites that contained partial catalogs and some data manually included. All this packaged as a Couchapp and served directly from Cloudant.

This was done because the idea of doulas was good, but I spotted an issue: pregnant womwn should know many doulas before choosing one that would match well, therefore a full catalog with a lot of information was necessary.

This was a huge amount of work mostly wasted.

Many doulas who knew about this didn't like it and sent angry and offensive emails telling me to remove them. This was information one should know before choosing a doula.

See also

• About CouchDB

@ 3bf0c63f:aefa459d

Just malinvestiment

Traditionally the Austrian Theory of Business Cycles has been explained and reworked in many ways, but the most widely accepted version (or the closest to the Mises or Hayek views) view is that banks (or the central bank) cause the general interest rate to decline by creation of new money and that prompts entrepreneurs to invest in projects of longer duration. This can be confusing because sometimes entrepreneurs embark in very short-time projects during one of these bubbles and still contribute to the overall cycle.

The solution is to think about the "longer term" problem is to think of the entire economy going long-term, not individual entrepreneurs. So if one entrepreneur makes an investiment in a thing that looks simple he may actually, knowingly or not, be inserting himself in a bigger machine that is actually involved in producing longer-term things. Incidentally this thinking also solves the biggest criticism of the Austrian Business Cycle Theory: that of the rational expectations people who say: "oh but can't the entrepreneurs know that the interest rate is artificially low and decide to not make long-term investiments?" ("and if they don't know they should lose money and be replaced like in a normal economy flow blablabla?"). Well, the answer is that they are not really relying on the interest rate, they are only looking for profit opportunities, and this is the key to another confusion that has always followed my thinkings about this topic.

If a guy opens a bar in an area of a town where many new buildings are being built during a "housing bubble" he may not know, but he is inserting himself right into the eye of that business cycle. He expects all these building projects to continue, and all the people involved in that to be getting paid more and be able to spend more at his bar and so on. That is a bet that may or may not end up paying.

Now what does that bar investiment has to do with the interest rate? Nothing. It is just a guy who saw a business opportunity in a place where hungry people with money had no bar to buy things in, so he opened a bar. Additionally the guy has made some calculations about all the ending, starting and future building projects in the area, and then the people that would live or work in that area afterwards (after all the buildings were being built with the expectation of being used) and so on, there is no interest rate calculations involved. And yet that may be a malinvestiment because some building projects will end up being canceled and the expected usage of the finished ones will turn out to be smaller than predicted.

This bubble may have been caused by a decline in interest rates that prompted some people to start buying houses that they wouldn't otherwise, but this is just a small detail. The bubble can only be kept going by a constant influx of new money into the economy, but the focus on the interest rate is wrong. If new money is printed and used by the government to buy ships then there will be a boom and a bubble in the ship market, and that involves all the parts of production process of ships and also bars that will be opened near areas of the town where ships are built and new people are being hired with higher salaries to do things that will eventually contribute to the production of ships that will then be sold to the government.

It's not interest rates or the length of the production process that matters, it's just printed money and malinvestiment.

@ 3bf0c63f:aefa459d

The monolithic approach to CouchDB views

Imagine you have an app that created one document for each day. The docs ids are easily "2015-02-05", "2015-02-06" and so on. Nothing could be more simple. Let's say each day you record "sales", "expenses" and "events", so this a document for a typical day for the retail management Couchapp for an orchid shop:

{ "_id": "2015-02-04", "sales": [{ "what": "A blue orchid", "price": 50000 }, { "what": "A red orchid", "price": 3500 }, { "what": "A yellow orchid", "price": 11500 }], "expenses": [{ "what": "A new bucket", "how much": 300 },{ "what": "The afternoon snack", "how much": "1200" }], "events": [ "Bob opened the store", "Lisa arrived", "Bob went home", "Lisa closed the store" ] }

Now when you want to know what happened in a specific day, you know where to look at.

But you don't want only that, you want profit reports, cash flows, day profitability, a complete log of the events et cetera. Then you create one view to turn this mess into something more useful:

``` function (doc) { var spldate = doc._id.split("-") var year = parseInt(spldate[0]) var month = parseInt(spldate[1]) var day = parseInt(spldate[2])

doc.sales.forEach(function (sale, i) { emit(["sale", sale.what], sale.price) emit(["cashflow", year, month, day, i], sale.price) }) doc.expenses.forEach(function (exp, i) { emit(["expense", exp.what], exp.price) emit(["cashflow", year, month, day, i], -exp.price) }) doc.events.forEach(function (ev, i) { emit(["log", year, month, day, i], ev) }) } ```

Then you add a reduce function with the value of _sum and you get a bunch of useful query endpoints. For example, you can request

/_design/orchids/_view/main?startkey=["cashflow", "2014", "12"]&endkey=["cashflow", "2014", "12", {}]

@ 3bf0c63f:aefa459d

O mito do objetivo

O insight deste cara segundo o qual buscar objetivos fixos, além de matar a criatividade, ainda não consegue atingir o tal objetivo -- que é uma coisa na qual eu sempre acreditei, embora sem muitas confirmações e (talvez por isso) sem dizê-lo abertamente --, combina com a idéia geral de que todas as estruturas sociais que valem alguma coisa surgem do jogo e brincadeira.

A seriedade, que é o oposto da brincadeira, é representada aqui pelo objetivo. Pessoas muito sérias com um planejamento e um objetivo final, tudo esquematizado.

---

Na verdade esse insight é bem manjado. Até eu mesmo já o tinha mencionado, citando Taleb em Processos Antifrágeis.

E finalmente há esta tirinha que eu achei aleatoriamente e que bem o representa:

@ 3bf0c63f:aefa459d

Profits, not wages, as the originary factor

Adam Smith says that there were first workers earning wages, but then came the capitalists and extracted profits from those wages.

But in fact if that primitive state ever existed there were no workers, but entrepreneursearning profit. And since they were not capitalists ("capitalist" defined as someone that buys with the intent of selling) they were earning an infinite rate of profit.

When capitalists came they were responsible for introducing costs (investment) reducing thus the rate of profit -- and the more capitalistic the society the smaller the rate of profits.

-- George Reisman in https://www.bobmurphyshow.com/139

@ f977c464:32fcbe00

Kendisini aynada ilk defa gördüğü o gün, diğerleri gibi olduğunu anlamıştı. Oysaki her insan biricik olmalıydı. Sözgelimi sinirlendiğinde bir kaşı diğerinden birkaç milimetre daha az çatılabilirdi veya sevindiğinde dudağı ona has bir açıyla dalgalanabilirdi. Hatta bunların hiçbiri mümkün değilse, en azından, gözlerinin içinde sadece onun sahip olabileceği bir ışık parlayabilirdi. Çok sıradan, öyle sıradan ki kimsenin fark etmediği o milyonlarca minik şeyden herhangi biri. Ne olursa.

Ama yansımasına bakarken bunların hiçbirini bulamadı ve diğer günlerden hiç de farklı başlamamış o gün, işe gitmek için vagonunun gelmesini beklediği alelade bir metro istasyonunda, içinde kaybolduğu illüzyon dağılmaya başladı.

İlk önce derisi döküldü. Tam olarak dökülmedi aslında, daha çok kıvılcımlara dönüşüp bedeninden fırlamış ve bir an sonra sönerek külleşmiş, havada dağılmıştı. Ardında da, kaybolmadan hemen önce, kısa süre için hayal meyal görülebilen, bir ruhun yok oluşuna ağıt yakan rengârenk peri cesetleri bırakmıştı. Beklenenin aksine, havaya toz kokusu yayıldı.

Dehşete düştü elbette. Dehşete düştüler. Panikle üstlerini yırtan 50 işçi. Her şeyin sebebiyse o vagon.

Saçları da döküldü. Her tel, yere varmadan önce, her santimde ikiye ayrıla ayrıla yok oldu.

Bütün yüzeylerin mat olduğu, hiçbir şeyin yansımadığı, suyun siyah aktığı ve kendine ancak kameralarla bakabildiğin bir dünyada, vagonun içine yerleştirilmiş bir aynadan ilk defa kendini görmek.

Gözlerinin akları buharlaşıp havada dağıldı, mercekleri boşalan yeri doldurmak için eriyip yayıldı. Gerçeği görmemek için yaratılmış, bu yüzden görmeye hazır olmayan ve hiç olmayacak gözler.

Her şeyin o anda sona erdiğini sanabilirdi insan. Derin bir karanlık ve ölüm. Görmenin görmek olduğu o anın bitişi.

---

Ben geldiğimde ölmüşlerdi.

Yani bozulmuşlardı demek istiyorum.

Belleklerini yeni taşıyıcılara takmam mümkün olmadı. Fiziksel olarak kusursuz durumdaydılar, olmayanları da tamir edebilirdim ama tüm o hengamede kendilerini baştan programlamış ve girdilerini modifiye etmişlerdi.

Belleklerden birini masanın üzerinden ileriye savurdu. Hınca hınç dolu bir barda oturuyorlardı. O ve arkadaşı.

Sırf şu kendisini insan sanan androidler travma geçirip delirmesin diye neler yapıyoruz, insanın aklı almıyor.

Eliyle arkasını işaret etti.

Polislerin söylediğine göre biri vagonun içerisine ayna yerleştirmiş. Bu zavallılar da kapı açılıp bir anda yansımalarını görünce kafayı kırmışlar.

Arkadaşı bunların ona ne hissettirdiğini sordu. Yani o kadar bozuk, insan olduğunu sanan androidi kendilerini parçalamış olarak yerde görmek onu sarsmamış mıydı?

Hayır, sonuçta belirli bir amaç için yaratılmış şeyler onlar. Kaliteli bir bilgisayarım bozulduğunda üzülürüm çünkü parasını ben vermişimdir. Bunlarsa devletin. Bana ne ki?

Arkadaşı anlayışla kafasını sallayıp suyundan bir yudum aldı. Kravatını biraz gevşetti.

Bira istemediğinden emin misin?

İstemediğini söyledi. Sahi, neden deliriyordu bu androidler?

Basit. Onların yapay zekâlarını kodlarken bir şeyler yazıyorlar. Yazılımcılar. Biliyorsun, ben donanımdayım. Bunlar da kendilerini insan sanıyorlar. Tiplerine bak.

Sesini alçalttı.

Arabalarda kaza testi yapılan mankenlere benziyor hepsi. Ağızları burunları bile yok ama şu geldiğimizden beri sakalını düzeltip duruyor mesela. Hayır, hepsi de diğerleri onun sakalı varmış sanıyor, o manyak bir şey.

Arkadaşı bunun delirmeleriyle bağlantısını çözemediğini söyledi. O da normal sesiyle konuşmaya devam etti.

Anlasana, aynayı falan ayırt edemiyor mercekleri. Lönk diye kendilerini görüyorlar. Böyle, olduğu gibi...

Nedenmiş peki? Ne gerek varmış?

Ne bileyim be abicim! Ahiret soruları gibi.

Birasına bakarak dalıp gitti. Sonra masaya abanarak arkadaşına iyice yaklaştı. Bulanık, bir tünelin ucundaki biri gibi, şekli şemalı belirsiz bir adam.

Ben seni nereden tanıyorum ki ulan? Kimsin sen?

Belleği makineden çıkardılar. İki kişiydiler. Soruşturmadan sorumlu memurlar.

─ Baştan mı başlıyoruz, diye sordu belleği elinde tutan ilk memur.

─ Bir kere daha deneyelim ama bu sefer direkt aynayı sorarak başla, diye cevapladı ikinci memur.

─ Bence de. Yeterince düzgün çalışıyor.

Simülasyon yüklenirken, ayakta, biraz arkada duran ve alnını kaşıyan ikinci memur sormaktan kendisini alamadı:

─ Bu androidleri niye böyle bir olay yerine göndermişler ki? Belli tost olacakları. İsraf. Gidip biz baksak aynayı kırıp delilleri mahvetmek zorunda da kalmazlar.

Diğer memur sandalyesinde hafifçe dönecek oldu, o sırada soruyu bilgisayarın hoparlöründen teknisyen cevapladı.

Hangi işimizde bir yamukluk yok ki be abi.

---

Ama bir son değildi. Üstlerindeki tüm illüzyon dağıldığında ve çıplak, cinsiyetsiz, birbirinin aynı bedenleriyle kaldıklarında sıra dünyaya gelmişti.

Yere düştüler. Elleri -bütün bedeni gibi siyah turmalinden, boğumları çelikten- yere değdiği anda, metronun zemini dağıldı.

Yerdeki karolar öncesinde beyazdı ve çok parlaktı. Tepelerindeki floresan, ışığını olduğu gibi yansıtıyor, tek bir lekenin olmadığı ve tek bir tozun uçmadığı istasyonu aydınlatıyorlardı.

Duvarlara duyurular asılmıştı. Örneğin, yarın akşam kültür merkezinde 20.00’da başlayacak bir tekno blues festivalinin cıvıl cıvıl afişi vardı. Onun yanında daha geniş, sarı puntolu harflerle yazılmış, yatay siyah kesiklerle çerçevesi çizilmiş, bir platformdan düşen çöp adamın bulunduğu “Dikkat! Sarı bandı geçmeyin!” uyarısı. Biraz ilerisinde günlük resmi gazete, onun ilerisinde bir aksiyon filminin ve başka bir romantik komedi filminin afişleri, yapılacakların ve yapılmayacakların söylendiği küçük puntolu çeşitli duyurular... Duvar uzayıp giden bir panoydu. On, on beş metrede bir tekrarlanıyordu.

Tüm istasyonun eni yüz metre kadar. Genişliği on metre civarı.

Önlerinde, açık kapısından o mendebur aynanın gözüktüğü vagon duruyordu. Metro, istasyona sığmayacak kadar uzundu. Bir kılıcın keskinliğiyle uzanıyor ama yer yer vagonların ek yerleriyle bölünüyordu.

Hiçbir vagonda pencere olmadığı için metronun içi, içlerindekiler meçhuldü.

Sonrasında karolar zerrelerine ayrılarak yükseldi. Floresanın ışığında her yeri toza boğdular ve ortalığı gri bir sisin altına gömdüler. Çok kısa bir an. Afişleri dalgalandırmadılar. Dalgalandırmaya vakitleri olmadı. Yerlerinden söküp aldılar en fazla. Işık birkaç kere sönüp yanarak direndi. Son kez söndüğünde bir daha geri gelmedi.

Yine de etraf aydınlıktı. Kırmızı, her yere eşit dağılan soluk bir ışıkla.

Yer tamamen tele dönüşmüştü. Altında çapraz hatlarla desteklenmiş demir bir iskelet. Işık birkaç metreden daha fazla aşağıya uzanamıyordu. Sonsuzluğa giden bir uçurum.

Duvarın yerini aynı teller ve demir iskelet almıştı. Arkasında, birbirine vidalarla tutturulmuş demir plakalardan oluşan, üstünden geçen boruların ek yerlerinden bazen ince buharların çıktığı ve bir süre asılı kaldıktan sonra ağır, yağlı bir havayla sürüklendiği bir koridor.

Diğer tarafta paslanmış, pencerelerindeki camlar kırıldığı için demir plakalarla kapatılmış külüstür bir metro. Kapının karşısındaki aynadan her şey olduğu gibi yansıyordu.

---

Bir konteynırın içini andıran bir evde, gerçi gayet de birbirine eklenmiş konteynırlardan oluşan bir şehirde “andıran” demek doğru olmayacağı için düpedüz bir konteynırın içinde, masaya mum görüntüsü vermek için koyulmuş, yarı katı yağ atıklarından şekillendirilmiş kütleleri yakmayı deniyordu. Kafasında hayvan kıllarından yapılmış grili siyahlı bir peruk. Aynı kıllardan kendisine gür bir bıyık da yapmıştı.

Üstünde mavi çöp poşetlerinden yapılmış, kravatlı, şık bir takım.

Masanın ayakları yerine oradan buradan çıkmış parçalar konulmuştu: bir arabanın şaft mili, üst üste konulmuş ve üstünde yazı okunamayan tenekeler, boş kitaplar, boş gazete balyaları... Hiçbir şeye yazı yazılmıyordu, gerek yoktu da zaten çünkü merkez veri bankası onları fark ettirmeden, merceklerden giren veriyi sentezleyerek insanlar için dolduruyordu. Yani, androidler için. Farklı şekilde isimlendirmek bir fark yaratacaksa.

Onların mercekleri için değil. Bağlantıları çok önceden kopmuştu.

─ Hayatım, sofra hazır, diye bağırdı yatak odasındaki karısına.

Sofrada tabak yerine düz, bardak yerine bükülmüş, çatal ve bıçak yerine sivriltilmiş plakalar.

Karısı salonun kapısında durakladı ve ancak kulaklarına kadar uzanan, kocasınınkine benzeyen, cansız, ölü hayvanların kıllarından ibaret peruğunu eliyle düzeltti. Dudağını, daha doğrusu dudağının olması gereken yeri koyu kırmızı bir yağ tabakasıyla renklendirmeyi denemişti. Biraz da yanaklarına sürmüştü.

─ Nasıl olmuş, diye sordu.

Sesi tek düzeydi ama hafif bir neşe olduğunu hissettiğinize yemin edebilirdiniz.

Üzerinde, çöp poşetlerinin içini yazısız gazete kağıtlarıyla doldurarak yaptığı iki parça giysi.

─ Çok güzelsin, diyerek kravatını düzeltti kocası.

─ Sen de öylesin, sevgilim.

Yaklaşıp kocasını öptü. Kocası da onu. Sonra nazikçe elinden tutarak, sandalyesini geriye çekerek oturmasına yardım etti.

Sofrada yemek niyetine hiçbir şey yoktu. Gerek de yoktu zaten.

Konteynırın kapısı gürültüyle tekmelenip içeri iki memur girene kadar birbirlerine öyküler anlattılar. O gün neler yaptıklarını. İşten erken çıkıp yemyeşil çimenlerde gezdiklerini, uçurtma uçurduklarını, kadının nasıl o elbiseyi bulmak için saatlerce gezip yorulduğunu, kocasının kısa süreliğine işe dönüp nasıl başarılı bir hamleyle yaşanan krizi çözdüğünü ve kadının yanına döndükten sonra, alışveriş merkezinde oturdukları yeni dondurmacının dondurmalarının ne kadar lezzetli olduğunu, boğazlarının ağrımasından korktuklarını...

Akşam film izleyebilirlerdi, televizyonda -boş ve mat bir plaka- güzel bir film oynayacaktı.

İki memur. Çıplak bedenleriyle birbirinin aynı. Ellerindeki silahları onlara doğrultmuşlardı. Mum ışığında, tertemiz bir örtünün serili olduğu masada, bardaklarında şaraplarla oturan ve henüz sofranın ortasındaki hindiye dokunmamış çifti gördüklerinde bocaladılar.

Hiç de androidlere bilinçli olarak zarar verebilecek gibi gözükmüyorlardı.

─ Sessiz kalma hakkına sahipsiniz, diye bağırdı içeri giren ikinci memur. Söylediğiniz her şey...

Cümlesini bitiremedi. Yatak odasındaki, masanın üzerinden gördüğü o şey, onunla aynı hareketleri yapan android, yoksa, bir aynadaki yansıması mıydı?

Bütün illüzyon o anda dağılmaya başladı.

Not: Bu öykü ilk olarak 2020 yılında Esrarengiz Hikâyeler'de yayımlanmıştır.

@ 92294577:49af776d

Heading to Pacific Bitcoin by Swan?

Make sure your first stop is the Blockstream booth so you can get your hands on the new Jade stock!

Can't make it? Visit the Blockstream store to start your bitcoin self-custody journey the right way with the Blockstream Jade hardware wallet ⬇️ https://store.blockstream.com/product/preorder-blockstream-jade-hardware-wallet/ https://image.nostr.build/f0b4a8fce046733849eb70f2a5a80e4025e17cf6a6832ac34ace0f8348c1ae4f.jpg

@ 7f5c2b4e:a818d75d

What is Obsidian?

Obsidian.md is a versatile and powerful note-taking and knowledge management application that's gained immense popularity among users seeking a robust digital tool for organizing their thoughts, ideas, and information.

Obsidian boasts an array of features and benefits that can't all be covered in a single article. Instead, this #guide focuses on a unique, yet potent use case that has recently emerged - the ability to publish #Nostr notes and long-form posts directly from the app.

This capability has been made feasible through the complementary nature of Obsidian and Nostr. Obsidian is an open-source software with a thriving community and extensive support for custom plugins. On the other hand, Nostr is an open protocol with a rapidly expanding suite of tools, simplifying the integration of Nostr across various corners of the Internet. The plugin I will cover in this guide is called Nostr Writer.

Obsidian link: obsidian://show-plugin?id=nostr-writer

GitHub: https://github.com/jamesmagoo/nostr-writer

Developer: nostr:npub10a8kw2hsevhfycl4yhtg7vzrcpwpu7s6med27juf4lzqpsvy270qrh8zkw

But before we dive in, let me share some thoughts on why should one use Obsidian to publish long-form posts (and potentially even short notes) on Nostr.

Why post with Obsidian?

This is a question that naturally comes to mind: "Why use Obsidian to publish on Nostr when the legendary Nostr developers have already set up all the necessary infrastructure for browser-based publishing?" Well, there are several reasons:

1. Native Markdown Support: To begin, Obsidian employs plain text Markdown formatting for notes, just like all Nostr-based blogging platforms. This makes it an ideal choice for creating, formatting, and editing Nostr posts.

2. Illustrative Preview: While other blogging platforms offer preview tools, Obsidian has perfected this feature. It provides a beautifully customizable preview window that can be positioned anywhere in your workspace, allowing you to visualize how formatting, media, and embeds will appear in the published post[^1].

3. State-of-the-Art Flexibility: Since 2020, Obsidian has continuously improved the way writers interact with it. What sets it apart is not only the dedicated team but also its thriving community, all contributing to its refinement. Obsidian supports an extensive array of plugins, shortcuts, and hotkeys, offering unparalleled flexibility and customization. Comprehensive documentation and a ton of videos and even courses on YouTube provide a wealth of information to tailor Obsidian to your preferences.

4. Boosted Productivity: The Nostr Writer plugin is a game-changer for power users of Obsidian. If you're already using Obsidian for note-taking, employing this tool to publish your notes on Nostr is a no-brainer. If you haven't explored it yet, I strongly recommend giving it a try. It has the potential to transform how you think, plan, and structure your ideas for the better. Trying it for broader objectives will help you appreciate how well it complements Nostr.

5. Distraction-Free Composition: While you may disagree, browsers can be a significant source of distraction, with constant alerts, notifications, and blinking extensions. Composing within Obsidian offers a tranquil, clutter-free experience, fostering focus and productivity.

6. Local Record Keeping: Thanks to Nostr Writer, Obsidian keeps a local record of events you published to Nostr in a JSON file on your computer. Your long-form posts are also securely stored in the .md format on your machine, just like all the Obsidian notes you create. On top of that a separate tab holding all of your long-form posts posted via Obsidian is created.

nostr: note1z70v5fsty7v7kaaslsv3ckru50nxym32a62kgx0z7cjdure39hps363sh7

1. Drafts You Can Count On: Drafts are often a weak point in long-form platforms. Even though Nostr developers have addressed some of these concerns, the "vanishing drafts problem" still lingers. Obsidian, designed with data safety in mind, stores all your notes locally on your device. Whether you open your laptop tomorrow or in a year, your files will be there, safe from external disruptions. For added redundancy, consider using Obsidian Sync, which encrypts and synchronizes your notes across your chosen devices.

While there are more benefits to utilizing Obsidian for both Nostr publishing and in your general workflow, these reasons should provide a solid understanding. Now, let's shed some light on the Nostr Writer plugin.

Nostr Writer

I stumbled upon Obsidian not too long ago, all thanks to nostr:npub1zvvv8fm7w2ngwdyszg3y6zgp6vwqlht8zrr8wcmjaxjecrvpjfwsd0zs7w. He's also the one who introduced me to the Nostr Writer plugin. Until recently, I primarily used Obsidian "as intended" - for documenting my thoughts and writing articles. What I found especially convenient was using it to compose long-form Nostr posts. And then, the revelation came when I discovered the Nostr Writer plugin - it transformed the experience. No more copy-pasting and meticulous adjustments were required; I can simply compose, add a cover image and description, and publish - it's as straightforward as that.

As I mentioned earlier, Obsidian boasts a vast library of community-driven plugins. To begin using Nostr Writer, simply install the plugin from the "Community plugins" section and navigate to the plugin settings to set up your publishing workflow.

You can install the plugin by clicking this link while having Obsidian open on your device, or by going to the "Community plugins" tab in the settings and typing "Nostr" in the search field.

Once the plugin is installed, you'll need to customize it to enable publishing your Obsidian notes to Nostr.

Primarily, you'll need to paste your private key (nsec) into the corresponding field. Additionally, I recommend configuring your relays to ensure the widest reach for your posts. If you're unfamiliar with Nostr relays or wish to enhance your understanding, you can explore my relay guide here.

Many Nostr users naturally have concerns about sharing their private keys with apps. In this case, worry not. Your private key is stored exclusively on your local device and never leaves it. More details can be found here. Even if you use Obsidian sync to keep your notes updated across multiple devices, all information is locally encrypted and safeguarded by the password of your choice. Neither the Obsidian developers nor the plugin developer have access to your files. For additional information, you can refer to the "Security and privacy" section of the Obsidian documentation.

As you can see in the screenshot above, Nostr Writer also provides the option to post short notes. By toggling the corresponding slider, a pencil icon will appear on the sidebar, allowing you to post short notes without leaving Obsidian:

While I wouldn't claim that the plugin surpasses any of the "Twitter-like" Nostr clients, it can prove handy if you're already working within Obsidian and wish to share a quote or any other snippet of information you've come across in your notes.

Publishing

Publishing posts with Nostr Writer is straightforward. If you're already familiar with Obsidian, composing and formatting will be a total breeze, and the actual posting process is no different from posting with Habla, or any other Nostr-native blogging platform.

The only thing that may differ from some Nostr platforms is that Nostr Writer does not provide a specific field for adding hashtags when publishing. Instead, you should incorporate them directly into your text.

Once you've finished crafting your blog post, simply click on the upload icon in the side menu to specify the title, add a summary, and attach a cover image.

When you're ready, click "Confirm and Publish."

Another point to note is the relays indicator in the bottom-left corner. Relay connection may get interrupted if left inactive for a while, but a simple click on the widget will reconnect you to Nostr in no time.

Practice makes perfect

As I mentioned earlier, I find this approach to publishing long-form posts on Nostr the most efficient and convenient. Moreover, there are numerous improvements in the pipeline for the plugin, which is nothing short of exciting.

With that said, it's worth visiting Habla after publishing your post to double-check that everything appears as intended. Initially, you might encounter some formatting peculiarities that you'll need to get accustomed to, but with practice, you'll effortlessly master them. Soon, you won't even have to worry about how the article looks in Nostr clients because you'll be able to visualize every single aspect of your post in your mind.

---

I hope you found this guide useful and consider utilizing Obsidian for both publishing Nostr posts and elevating your overall productivity. If that's the case, please show your support for nostr:npub10a8kw2hsevhfycl4yhtg7vzrcpwpu7s6med27juf4lzqpsvy270qrh8zkw' work.

Please feel free to share your thoughts and suggestions—I'm always eager to hear from you! Don't forget that my Habla blog page contains a ton of Nostr guides, so you can find answers to almost any Nostr-related questions. If there are specific topics you believe I should cover, do let me know.

See you on the other side of the Nostr rabbit hole.

Tony

---

P.S. This post was composed, formatted and published to Nostr from Obsidian. No Nostr-related blogging platform was used.

[^1]: Nostr-native syntax, including tagging and Nostr-events embeds, is an exception here. Not all platforms on the Internet currently support Nostr syntax standards like tagging users with their npub, as in nostr:npub10awzknjg5r5lajnr53438ndcyjylgqsrnrtq5grs495v42qc6awsj45ys7, so it may not be available for preview. However, tags and embeds will be displayed on Habla. You can learn more about Habla's features in my previous guide here.

@ 04c915da:3dfbecc9

For years American bitcoin miners have argued for more efficient and free energy markets. It benefits everyone if our energy infrastructure is as efficient and robust as possible. Unfortunately, broken incentives have led to increased regulation throughout the sector, incentivizing less efficient energy sources such as solar and wind at the detriment of more efficient alternatives.

The result has been less reliable energy infrastructure for all Americans and increased energy costs across the board. This naturally has a direct impact on bitcoin miners: increased energy costs make them less competitive globally.

Bitcoin mining represents a global energy market that does not require permission to participate. Anyone can plug a mining computer into power and internet to get paid the current dynamic market price for their work in bitcoin. Using cellphone or satellite internet, these mines can be located anywhere in the world, sourcing the cheapest power available.

Absent of regulation, bitcoin mining naturally incentivizes the build out of highly efficient and robust energy infrastructure. Unfortunately that world does not exist and burdensome regulations remain the biggest threat for US based mining businesses. Jurisdictional arbitrage gives miners the option of moving to a friendlier country but that naturally comes with its own costs.

Enter AI. With the rapid development and release of AI tools comes the requirement of running massive datacenters for their models. Major tech companies are scrambling to secure machines, rack space, and cheap energy to run full suites of AI enabled tools and services. The most valuable and powerful tech companies in America have stumbled into an accidental alliance with bitcoin miners: THE NEED FOR CHEAP AND RELIABLE ENERGY.

Our government is corrupt. Money talks. These companies will push for energy freedom and it will greatly benefit us all.

@ 6e0b84c3:8e424dc3

En esta segunda entrega de la serie trataré de hacer una labor de concientización y también te sugeriré algunas herramientas y buenas prácticas para una navegación en internet más segura.

Como probablemente ya hayas notado, Nostr es un lugar muy distinto a otros en internet. No es una plataforma centralizada como las redes sociales que estábamos acostumbrados a utilizar. Tampoco hay una entidad responsable de cuidar nuestras llaves privadas y ayudarnos a recuperarlas. Y aunque existen políticas de contenido (muy laxas, pero funcionales) y uso para la mayoría de relays, en sí no hay alguien que garantice tu seguridad, aunque tampoco lo hay en el resto de internet, pero en la web 2.0 nos hicieron sentir que estábamos más seguros por poner nuestra información en una pequeña jaula.

Las pequeñas jaulas digitales en las que estábamos confinados en la web 2.0 nos crearon la ilusión de que existía una manera más o menos segura de utilizar estas plataformas, sin embargo, poco a poco hemos ido despertando de este sueño y actualmente, con la web 3.0 nos dirigimos hacia un uso de internet más consciente, más responsable y por lo tanto: más maduro.

Para los usuarios, esto implica una reeducación en temas como la privacidad, la seguridad digital, la protección de nuestra identidad, etc.

En este artículo estaré compartiendo algunas ideas y herramientas que quizás puedan ayudarte a cuidar tanto de no perder tus llaves privadas, como de revelar sólo la información que estés dispuesto a poner en internet.

Quisiera retomar una pequeña cita de la primera parte de esta serie:

En internet, tu cadena de seguridad es tan fuerte como su eslabón más débil, y lamento decirte que cuando se trata de seguridad en la red, el eslabón más débil eres tú.

¿Qué significa esto?

Significa que son los errores humanos los que terminan poniéndonos en situaciones de riesgo o vulnerando nuestra privacidad.

También, quisiera agregar que "privacidad" no es "anonimato". En internet es una ilusión pensar que puede existir tal cosa como el anonimato. Todo lo que haces deja un rastro a través del cual, de una forma u otra, es posible inferir la identidad del usuario, incluso utilizando la red Tor, si envías algun dato que pueda asociarse a tu identidad, es posible inferir quién eres. Así que cuando hable de privacidad en este artículo ten en cuenta que me refiero al control de la información que puedes tener al interactuar en la red y no a la posibilidad de navegar de manera anónima.

Si decides compartirle tu número de tarjeta bancaria a algún cliente o familiar por internet, no tendría porque registrarlo también google, meta, X, o tu vecino creepy que por alguna razón espía tu red wifi (Si llegas a leer esto, buen intento, pero te descubrí Javier), eso es privacidad.

Ahora bien, si te dedicas al activismo político o eres periodista y necesitas navegar de la manera más anónima posible, probablemente ya conozcas Tails .

Desde Ucrania, con amor.

O: la paranoia* como estilo de vida digital.

Hace muchos años, cuando facebook estaba en su boom como red social revolucionaria, conocí a un chico que se ilusionaba demasiado cuando alguna bella chica ucraniana le enviaba mensajes en privado diciéndole que le parecía muy guapo y luego de platicar un rato este chico empezaba a soltar información personal sensible: Su edad, su trabajo, lugar de nacimiento, etc.

La situación más delicada llegó cuando este chico comenzó a compartirle fotos íntimas a su enamorada ucraniana, a la cual nunca había conocido más que a través de fotos por esa red social y al enterarse de esto, sus amigos tuvieron una charla muy seria con él para hacerle cobrar consciencia de lo que estaba arriesgando con estas interacciones. (Aclaro que el chico de esta historia no era yo, se los juro jajaja)

Por más absurda que parezca la situación, ocurre bastante y es un ejemplo perfecto de cómo nosotros mismos somos el eslabón más débil en nuestra cadena de seguridad.

La mayor parte del trabajo de hackeo consiste en ingeniería social. La ingeniería social es el arte de manipular a una persona para revelar información sensible o ejecutar algúna acción que ponga en riesgo información sensible.

Prevenirlo puede ser tan sencillo como seguir estos tres consejos:

1- No confíes en nadie. O confía sólo en la medida en que alguien va dando prueba de su trabajo, por ejemplo: yo he llegado a tener cierta confianza en personas con quienes he participado en actividades académicas online y al escucharlos me doy cuenta que efectivamente son quienes dicen ser y aún así nunca revelo más información de la necesaria. Lo que justamente es el segundo punto.
2. No reveles información sensible. Ten en cuenta esto: 3 datos sensibles son suficientes para hackear una cuenta de internet o incluso cuentas bancarias. ¿Qué datos se consideran sensibles? Tu fecha de nacimiento, tu dirección personal, tu ciudad natal, tu nombre completo, el número de teléfono que tienes registrado en tu cuenta de banco, etc. Cada servicio, ya sea bancario o de internet, tiene un trozo de tu información asociado a él. Para reducir el riesgo de vulneraciones puede ser útil tener un número telefónico para trabajo y otro para familia, o un correo exclusivo para el registro de tus aplicaciones bancarias y otro para tus redes sociales, etc. 3. Y por último pero no menos importante: Verifica 3 veces, da clíck 1 vez. Siempre que estés por dar click en algún link, verifica que la dirección a la que te está enviando es legítima y no malintencionada. Si pasas el cursor del mouse sobre el link podrás ver en la parte inferior izquierda del navegador la dirección web a la que realmente está dirigido. También puedes dar click derecho sobre el texto del hipervínculo y seleccionar "copiar dirección de enlace" para luego pegar el texto en alguna app de notas y así revelarlo sin tener que dirigirte al sitio enlazado. Esto es importante porque cuando se trata de hipervínculos, podemos escribir uno como por ejemplo: https://duckduckgo.com/ que te haga creer que estás yendo al buscador de DuckDuckGo cuando realmente te está dirigiendo a Google. Además de esto, conoce tus sitios web de confianza, familiarízate con sus identidades, con sus medios de contacto. Puede ser algo tedioso estar verificando siempre 3 veces antes de dar click, pero el día que evites acceder a algún sitio malicioso, sentirás alivio y el orgullo de haber estado un paso adelante. Se trata de tener una actitud preventiva y proactiva contra las amenazas. Action instead of reaction.

Desde un punto de vista clínico, la paranoia es una forma de delirio, pero desde una perspectiva coloquial, la paranoia puede ser tu mejor aliada en internet (Si experimentas un intenso nivel de ansiedad o ideas persecutorias que te impiden continuar con tu trabajo o que afecten tus relaciones interpersonales, no olvides consultarlo con algún profesional).*

Herramientas.

¿Qué herramientas pueden ayudarte a navegar de manera más segura en Nostr y en la web en general?

• Alby : Es una extensión de navegador que te puede ayudar a conectarte a la mayoría de sitios web de Nostr sin tener que entregar tu llave privada a cada uno de ellos. Lo deseable es que el menor número posible de aplicaciones tengan acceso a tu llave privada, con Alby, puedes reducir ese número a 1 cuando se trata de loguear desde el navegador. Además también viene con una billetera lightning para que puedas enviar y recibir Bitcoin en la misma aplicación.
• Navegadores Brave y Firefox : Son navegadores que bloquean la mayoría de rastreadores y anuncios de los sitios web. Esto te permitirá tener una experiencia en línea más privada y exponerte menos a la manipulación a través de la mercadotecnica de las big tech.
• DuckDuckGo (Este link si es el bueno) es la alternativa perfecta al buscador de Google, también Brave tiene su propio buscador que de hecho es un poco más avanzado que el de DuckDuckGo.
• Brave Talks es una excelente alternativa a Zoom y a Google Meet. Funciona sin necesidad de crear una cuenta, promete privacidad y no rastrearte. Además funciona genial tanto en el navegador web como en el navegador móvil. Para mi es una ventaja no tener que instalar alguna aplicación extra. Menos es mejor.
• Correos Skiff , Proton Mail , Tutanota y Mailfence: Todos estos servicios de correo brindan protección mediante encriptación y recopilan mínima información del usuario. Incluso te permiten abrir una cuenta sin entregar tu número telefónico o algún otro correo. Aunque esto implica el inconveniente de no tener un medio de recuperación tan accesible como otros. En Skiff y Proton podrás encontrar la opción de guardar una recovery key en caso de que olvides tu contraseña.
• Proton VPN : No se desde cuando estés navegando en internet, pero si tienes tiempo suficiente quizás recuerdes los viejos foros de 4chan en los que a algunos psicópatas les parecía gracioso asustarte comentándote una foto de la puerta de tu casa luego de ubicarla con tu IP. Tu dirección IP revela tu ubicación y es accesible para cualquier sitio de internet al que te conectes. Si pensamos que Nostr se basa en el registro de los eventos en varios relays, en cada relay que registre un evento con tu firma hay una huella de tu ubicación. Una VPN ayuda a ocultar tu dirección IP y a encriptar tu información al navegar en la web. De entre las miles de opciones que existen, Proton VPN me ha parecido lo suficientemente confiable para compartirla acá. Vale la pena decir que es una app "freemium", esto significa que la versión gratis es bastante limitada, motivándote a pagar por ella. Sin embargo, las funciones que incluye la versión de paga y la interfaz de usuario hacen que sea una excelente inversión para navegar en la red con mayor tranquilidad. Es necesario que tengas en cuenta que cambiar tu VPN sólo previene el rastreo de tu ubicación, más no la posibilidad de inferir tu identidad, como mencionaba al inicio, el anonimato en línea es casi imposible. También vale la pena mencionar que algunas aplicaciones no te permiten utilizar una VPN para acceder a ellas, simplemente te bloquean el acceso si detectan que intentas conectarte usando una VPN.
• Gestores de contraseñas: 1Password y Proton Pass : No sólo te ayudan a recordar tus contraseñas, sino que también te ayudan a generar contraseñas fuertes y almacenarlas de manera segura mediante encriptación.
• Amber : Es una herramienta para poder firmar tus eventos de Nostr sin tener que ingresar tu llave privada, como Alby, pero para tu celular. Hasta donde se, funciona con Amethyst pero no dudo que otros clientes comenzarán a incorporarla pronto. Como mencioné anteriormente, entre menos aplicaciones tengan acceso a tu llave privada, mejor. Usar Amber es una forma de reducir la exposición a riesgos.
• Utiliza una Yubikey como factor de autenticación de dos pasos. Probablemente ya estés familiarizado con la autenticación de dos pasos. Cualquier método de autenticación es mejor que no tener ninguno, sin embargo, poner tu número celular no es quizás la mejor opción, de hecho, así fue como hackearon a Vitalik Buterin. Una Yubikey es una llave física que necesitas insertar en el puerto usb de tu laptop o en tu celular para iniciar sesión. Puedes comprarla en Amazon o en algunas tiendas de tecnología en tu ciudad. Muchísimos servicios de internet permiten esta opción e incluso puedes utilizarla para bloquear tu laptop en lugar de usar una contraseña hackeable. Sólo ten cuidado pues si te la roban o la pierdes, te habrás bloqueado a ti mismo de tus propias cuentas; por esto, lo recomendable es tener al menos 2 Yubikeys conectadas a cada uno de los servicios, una que utilices comúnmente, y una de respaldo que puedas guardar en un lugar seguro que solamente tú conozcas.

Algo que no es propiamente una herramienta pero que deberías tener en cuenta es la información o las propiedades de tus fotografías. Al subir una fotografía a cualquier lugar de internet puedes estar entregando detalles importantes como la ubicación donde fue tomada, la hora y fecha, tu nombre, o el dispositivo que utilizaste para tomarla.

Antes de subir cualquier fotografía o imagen a internet es buena idea borrar las propiedades antes mencionadas. Afortunadamente esto es muy sencillo: puedes hacerlo en tu laptop dando click derecho sobre el archivo de la imagen -> propiedades -> detalles, y en esa pestaña justo abajo debería aparecer la opción de quitar propiedades e información personal.

En android puedes utilizar Exif Eraser para eliminar esta información.

Por último, GrapheneOS es el próximo paso para salir de la Matrix. No he tenido oportunidad de probarlo, pero está en mi lista de prioridades en cuanto a privacidad en línea. Se trata de una alternativa a iOS y a Android enfocada en la privacida móvil. Por el momento no puedo decir mucho ya que como mencionaba no la he probado, pero quería compartirla en caso de que tú si e invitarte a compartir tu experiencia con este sistema operativo en los comentarios.

Comentarios finales.

El ecosistema de internet se basa en gran medida en la confianza que tenemos hacia las aplicaciones que utilizamos, porque si bien existen legislaciones aplicables al uso de nuestra información en internet por parte de las plataformas, nada garantiza que la sigan.

Google es esa chica sexy ucraniana que te seduce con imágenes y palabras lindas mientras extrae tu información para lucrar con ella a costa tuya.

¿Recuerdas la ilusión de seguridad que mencionaba sobre la web 2.0? Pues creo que este es un sueño del que poco a poco deberíamos ir despertando. Este artículo es un esfuerzo por crear mayor conciencia sobre el uso que hacemos de internet y de las plataformas que utilizamos para comunicarnos y a las que decidimos entregarle nuestra información, ya sea desde una foto de perfil, hasta una contraseña, tu número de teléfono o el nombre de tu mascota.

Puede parecer difícil o tedioso, al inicio la curva de aprendizaje es una cuesta muy empinada, pero vale toda la pena del mundo. Hoy en día me siento más cómodo compartiendo algo en Nostr que en facebook o X, y es una comodidad fruto del aprendizaje y la mayor responsabilidad que ahora siento para con mi información. "Freedom is not free".

Es como cuando un niño aprende a caminar y suelta la mano de sus padres. La web 2.0 nos hizo creer que estos padres estarían ahí para siempre, hoy sabemos que no, que están destinados a morir y es necesario que comencemos a caminar (y a cuidarnos) nosotros mismos.

Muchas gracias por leer hasta el final. Espero que al menos una de las herramientas que mencioné en esta publicación te sea útil y la incorpores en tu uso cotidiano de la red.

Hasta pronto ¡Nos vemos en Nostr!

@ cd408a69:797e8162

Tsukiji KItaro ( 築地 きたろう )

📍 Tsukiji

🌐 https://www.tamasushi.co.jp/shop/kitaro_tsukiji/

🌐 https://maps.app.goo.gl/2btvzLdVXQM5STLc6

Tsukiji is the land where the Tokyo Wholesale Market used to be, and there are many sushi restaurants. Tsukiji is also relatively close to Ginza.

🐱 Recommended by them nostr:note1zlfsw0afd38kp607r7tre7209ttl8ls3r3cp5mzkvrav492zwpyqz0phcg

Uogashi Nihon-ichi Shibuya Dogenzaka ( 魚がし日本一 渋谷道玄坂 )

📍 Shibuya

🌐 https://www.timeout.com/tokyo/restaurants/uogashi-nihon-ichi-shibuya-dogenzaka

🌐 https://maps.app.goo.gl/BkMQiXX6ZhQWJeA7A

This restaurant is located relatively close to the Nostrasia Tokyo venue. This restaurant is unique in that you can casually enjoy sushi in a standing style.

🐼 Recommended by them nostr:note1luk3mh8l352j52ueueg457t69mfww9asjtrej5pjdupqsp0kw8qsdv959m

Atabo Sushi ( あたぼう鮨 )

📍 Yotsuya-sanchome

🌐 https://maps.app.goo.gl/vhHDJq6wt9DdALDF7

⌨️ Recommended by them nostr:note15fzx4u3kvtzwyhdt5qxf6gqxt9kxzktplvxp9r9vx9z3ryrfqhdswdfnn6

Kanda Eddoko Zushi ( 神田江戸っ子寿司 )

📍 Kanda

🌐 https://maps.app.goo.gl/kFKxjM2TEnoFvPfj8

👩🏻 Recommended by them nostr:note174xjfzml57ujjyjvrsne9e3lr96s5magsy4x3h9t0km2zcy5c8wqkfav72

Edomae Bikkuri Zushi ( 江戸前びっくり寿司 )

📍 Ebisu

🌐 https://maps.app.goo.gl/2qfxU76svTyvUyN96

🐈 Recommended by them nostr:note1av9uredv8dy74l7rhlmvn28nfuurrp92v0adr2644knwdg9r3rms0seyyx

Kanazawa Maimon Sushi Ueno ( 金沢まいもん寿司 上野 )

📍 Ueno

🌐 https://maps.app.goo.gl/NTm7HHHarY2Ak3UK7

Mori Ichi ( もり一 )

📍 Jinbocho

🌐 https://maps.app.goo.gl/6Kc2AnpJ91Huues79

Toriton ( トリトン )

📍 Oshiage ( Tokyo Sky Tree Town Soramachi Location )

🌐 https://maps.app.goo.gl/rFMejHfSKQtegx4d6

🍗 Recommended by them nostr:note18g59dk96zjkjk2dchfhymans4hkkk3gr5zur3vr7cnsxy73kj2hs4ggmuz

Sushibuya ( スシブヤ )

📍 Shibuya

🌐 https://maps.app.goo.gl/gPLjVwqsQJiQkaXE8

👩 Recommended by them nostr:note1mhjnrwvqrp5e2ptwjwrkxdttx9ck966hhv2qmpzrq9h3nfs5ge5qcxfp82

Manten-Sushi ( まんてん鮨 )

📍 Nihonbashi

🌐 https://maps.app.goo.gl/UnBimEfGVp4rM5WW8

🐇 Recommended by them nostr:note1fv0yyhqdz6l5prjh2l2xm6a6xwsk7f8k9wfnc65quvffpr2lq8dsufp3h2

Sushi-no-Midori ( 寿司の美登利 )

📍 Shibuya

🌐 https://maps.app.goo.gl/hdTK2oNtLiwYGRwb9

💖 Recommended by them nostr:note1vq6a6kppwzzd24futgdjdr3hccw8j5sj4freyxzc60h0uz9scs2ss5xs9m

@ f977c464:32fcbe00

Güneşin kaybolmasının üçüncü günü, saat öğlen on ikiyi yirmi geçiyordu. Trenin kalkmasına yaklaşık iki saat vardı. Hepimiz perondaydık. Valizlerimiz, kolilerimiz, renk renk ve biçimsiz çantalarımızla yan yana dizilmiş, kısa aralıklarla tepemizdeki devasa saati kontrol ediyorduk.

Ama ne kadar dik bakarsak bakalım zaman bir türlü istediğimiz hızla ilerlemiyordu. Herkes birkaç dakika sürmesi gereken alelade bir doğa olayına sıkışıp kalmış, karanlıktan sürünerek çıkmayı deniyordu.

Bekleme salonuna doğru döndüm. Nefesimden çıkan buharın arkasında, kalın taş duvarları ve camlarıyla morg kadar güvenli ve soğuk duruyordu. Cesetleri o yüzden bunun gibi yerlere taşımaya başlamışlardı. Demek insanların bütün iyiliği başkaları onları gördüğü içindi ki gündüzleri gecelerden daha karanlık olduğunda hemen birbirlerinin gırtlağına çökmüş, böğürlerinde delikler açmış, gözlerini oyup kafataslarını parçalamışlardı.

İstasyonun ışığı titrediğinde karanlığın enseme saplandığını hissettim. Eğer şimdi, böyle kalabalık bir yerde elektrik kesilse başımıza ne gelirdi?

İçerideki askerlerden biri bakışlarımı yakalayınca yeniden saate odaklanmış gibi yaptım. Sadece birkaç dakika geçmişti.

“Tarlalarım gitti. Böyle boyum kadar ayçiçeği doluydu. Ah, hepsi ölüp gidiyor. Afitap’ın çiçekleri de gi-”

“Dayı, Allah’ını seversen sus. Hepimizi yakacaksın şimdi.”

Karanlıkta durduğunda, görünmez olmayı istemeye başlıyordun. Kimse seni görmemeli, nefesini bile duymamalıydı. Kimsenin de ayağının altında dolaşmamalıydın; gelip kazayla sana çarpmamalılar, takılıp sendelememeliydiler. Yoksa aslında hedefi sen olmadığın bir öfke gürlemeye başlar, yaşadığın ilk şoku ve acıyı silerek üstünden geçerdi.

İlk konuşan, yaşlıca bir adam, kafasında kasketi, nasırlı ellerine hohluyordu. Gözleri ve burnu kızarmıştı. Güneşin kaybolması onun için kendi başına bir felaket değildi. Hayatına olan pratik yansımalarından korkuyordu olsa olsa. Bir anının kaybolması, bu yüzden çoktan kaybettiği birinin biraz daha eksilmesi. Hayatta kalmasını gerektiren sebepler azalırken, hayatta kalmasını sağlayacak kaynaklarını da kaybediyordu.

Onu susturan delikanlıysa atkısını bütün kafasına sarmış, sakalı ve yüzünün derinliklerine kaçmış gözleri dışında bedeninin bütün parçalarını gizlemeye çalışıyordu. İşte o, güneşin kaybolmasının tam olarak ne anlama geldiğini anlamamış olsa bile, dehşetini olduğu gibi hissedebilenlerdendi.

Güneşin onlardan alındıktan sonra kime verileceğini sormuyorlardı. En başta onlara verildiğinde de hiçbir soru sormamışlardı zaten.

İki saat ne zaman geçer?

Midemin üstünde, sağ tarafıma doğru keskin bir acı hissettim. Karaciğerim. Gözlerimi yumdum. Yanımda biri metal bir nesneyi yere bıraktı. Bir kafesti. İçerisindeki kartalın ıslak kokusu burnuma ulaşmadan önce bile biliyordum bunu.

“Yeniden mi?” diye sordu bana kartal. Kanatları kanlı. Zamanın her bir parçası tüylerinin üstüne çöreklenmişti. Gagası bir şey, tahminen et parçası geveliyor gibi hareket ediyordu. Eski anılar kolay unutulmazmış. Şu anda kafesinin kalın parmaklıklarının ardında olsa da bunun bir aldatmaca olduğunu bir tek ben biliyordum. Her an kanatlarını iki yana uzatıverebilir, hava bu hareketiyle dalgalanarak kafesi esneterek hepimizi içine alacak kadar genişleyebilir, parmaklıklar önce ayaklarımızın altına serilir gibi gözükebilir ama aslında hepimizin üstünde yükselerek tepemize çökebilirdi.

Aşağıya baktım. Tahtalarla zapt edilmiş, hiçbir yere gidemeyen ama her yere uzanan tren rayları. Atlayıp koşsam… Çantam çok ağırdı. Daha birkaç adım atamadan, kartal, suratını bedenime gömerdi.

“Bu sefer farklı,” diye yanıtladım onu. “Yeniden diyemezsin. Tekrarladığım bir şey değil bu. Hatta bir hata yapıyormuşum gibi tonlayamazsın da. Bu sefer, insanların hak etmediğini biliyorum.”

“O zaman daha vahim. Süzme salaksın demektir.”

“İnsanların hak etmemesi, insanlığın hak etmediği anlamına gelmez ki.”

Az önce göz göze geldiğim genççe ama çökük asker hâlâ bana bakıyordu. Bir kartalla konuştuğumu anlamamıştı şüphesiz. Yanımdakilerden biriyle konuştuğumu sanmış olmalıydı. Ama konuştuğum kişiye bakmıyordum ona göre. Çekingence kafamı eğmiştim. Bir kez daha göz göze geldiğimizde içerideki diğer iki askere bir şeyler söyledi, onlar dönüp beni süzerken dışarı çıktı.

Yanımızdaki, az önce konuşan iki adam da şaşkınlıkla bir bana bir kartala bakıyordu.

“Yalnız bu sefer kalbin de kırılacak, Prometheus,” dedi kartal, bana. “Belki son olur. Biliyorsun, bir sürü soruna neden oluyor bu yaptıkların.”

Beni koruyordu sözde. En çok kanıma dokunan buydu. Kasıklarımın üstüne oturmuş, kanlı suratının ardında gözleri parlarken attığı çığlık kulaklarımda titremeye devam ediyordu. Bu tabloda kimsenin kimseyi düşündüğü yoktu. Kartalın, yanımızdaki adamların, artık arkama kadar gelmiş olması gereken askerin, tren raylarının, geçmeyen saatlerin…

Arkamı döndüğümde, asker sahiden oradaydı. Zaten öyle olması gerekiyordu; görmüştüm bunu, biliyordum. Kehanetler… Bir şeyler söylüyordu ama ağzı oynarken sesi çıkmıyordu. Yavaşlamış, kendisini saatin akışına uydurmuştu. Havada donan tükürüğünden anlaşılıyordu, sinirliydi. Korktuğu için olduğunu biliyordum. Her seferinde korkmuşlardı. Beni unutmuş olmaları işlerini kolaylaştırmıyordu. Sadece yeni bir isim vermelerine neden oluyordu. Bu seferkiyle beni lanetleyecekleri kesinleşmişti.

Olması gerekenle olanların farklı olması ne kadar acınasıydı. Olması gerekenlerin doğasının kötücül olmasıysa bir yerde buna dayanıyordu.

“Salaksın,” dedi kartal bana. Zamanı aşan bir çığlık. Hepimizin önüne geçmişti ama kimseyi durduramıyordu.

Sonsuzluğa kaç tane iki saat sıkıştırabilirsiniz?

Ben bir tane bile sıkıştıramadım.

Çantama uzanıyordum. Asker de sırtındaki tüfeğini indiriyordu. Benim acelem yoktu, onunsa eli ayağı birbirine dolaşıyordu. Oysaki her şey tam olması gerektiği anda olacaktı. Kehanet başkasının parmaklarının ucundaydı.

Güneş, bir tüfeğin patlamasıyla yeryüzüne doğdu.

Rayların üzerine serilmiş göğsümün ortasından, bir çantanın içinden.

Not: Bu öykü ilk olarak 2021 yılında Esrarengiz Hikâyeler'de yayımlanmıştır.

@ 7fa56f5d:751ac194

nostr:npub108pv4cg5ag52nq082kd5leu9ffrn2gdg6g4xdwatn73y36uzplmq9uyev6 introduced NIP-30 Custom Emojis yesterday and many clients were quick to implement it: Nostter, Rabbit and Snort added support right away.

nostr:nevent1qqstvcc4gek4azr6aqc9qjewfs8vk86j0lkv5yt09n0sjqxq3xmjchcsjxd8s

Check out these collections that you can use in your notes or any other nostr app that supports them

nostr:naddr1qqy4x42nfpy4j42tfypzpn2q3f5ucmrn0js6wmhu873y03k220kgqlmw0j2hg9jpv3uhaqtzqvzqqqr4fc62gvap

nostr:naddr1qqr85ctsd4skuq3q07jk7htfv243u0x5ynn43scq9wrxtaasmrwwa8lfu2ydwag6cx2qxpqqqp65utc6838

@ 20986fb8:cdac21b3

YakiHonne.com is continuously improving to offer a top-notch user experience. With weekly updates being rolled out, you are invited to test these updates and post your feedback and opinions as an article via YakiHonne.com.

As an incentive, participants can earn up to 100,000 SATs.

Round 2 will be from 27th to 30th July

How to participate:

1. Pick one or multiple Updates below, test it (them)
2. Write your feedback and opinion (pros and cons are all welcomed)
3. Post your article on Nostr via YakiHonne.com
4. Share your article to social media like Nostr and Twitter, don't forget to @YakiHonne
5. Share the link to our group: http://t.me/YakiHonne_Daily_Featured
6. Be Zapped!

Requirements:

1. No malicious speech such as discrimination, attack, incitement, etc.
2. No Spam/Scam, not fully AI-generated article
3. No directly copy & paste from other posts on Relays
4. Experience our updates in action, NO limit on the length of your post, share your REAL feedback and opinion
5. The top 10 posts will be zapped during each round.
6. The evaluation will based on the article's depth, completeness, and constructiveness.
7. Contact us for additional zaps if bugs are found.

Updates to be tested in Round 2:

1. Comments: re-implemented and comments can be deleted

2. NIP-25 supporting: users now can upvote and downvote

3. Zap stats: Zaps sent and Zaps received can be seen from users profiles

4. “login with an extension” button: now it is grayed out rather than invisible

5. Search: search list showing optimization, adjust users searching results to the NIP-21 URI scheme

6. Tags: click on the tags in the article to view the content under the tag

7. Share: sharing posts with one click

8. NIP-05: verify your profile

If you missed Round 1, the updates below could be tested as additions:

1. Comment function: more user-friendly

2. Stats area: clearly displays the interactive status of each article

3. Following function: generated-key users can also be followed

4. Curation function: easily add or remove articles from an existing curation

5. Tags: search and browse articles with the tags

6. Home feed scrolling pagination: optimized data fetching and faster loading time

7. Article editing preview: preview the final version of the article while writing in MarkDown

Don't miss this opportunity to participate in Round 2, test the updates, and provide valuable feedback. Head over to YakiHonne.com to share your thoughts and earn SATs for your valuable input. Act fast!

---

About YakiHonne:

YakiHonne is a Nostr-based decentralized content media protocol, which supports free curation, creation, publishing, and reporting by various media. Try YakiHonne.com Now!

Follow us

• Telegram: http://t.me/YakiHonne_Daily_Featured
• Twitter: @YakiHonne
• Nostr pubkey: npub1yzvxlwp7wawed5vgefwfmugvumtp8c8t0etk3g8sky4n0ndvyxesnxrf8q

@ 20986fb8:cdac21b3

A long-term Nostr Creation Grant, with a 17,500,000 SATs funding pool

Round 3 starts on 22 July till 5 Aug!

Creating for You and Your Fans through Nostr and ZAP.

Nostr is a simple, open and censorship-resistant protocol, the number of users has been growing, and more and more users use zap to tip content. Nostr's growth over the past six months is amazing, which is a great encouragement for all nostrians. This is also a great encouragement for content creators. Earn SATs by posting your creations on nostr, allowing your readers to encourage better content creation while tipping your creations.

Zaps, provide a global solution for tipping content. Some posts on Nostr even got 89K+ SATs within one day, like Roya, Brianna.

On the other hand, while Apple's decision to take a 30% cut from fundraisers and humanitarian aid posts is criticized, Bitcoin emerges as a vital alternative for those suffering globally. Organizations like Oslo Freedom Forum and Qala Africa shed light on how Africans heavily rely on Bitcoin due to unreliable banking systems.

To this end, YakiHonne.com officially released the creation grant project, Creating for You and Your Fans through Nostr and ZAP. Join us on YakiHonne.com to share your long-form articles and curate content, experiencing the power of Nostr's censorship-resistance and ZAP features. Earn Sats rewards for publishing on Relay and Yakihonne clients. Don't forget to include your ZAP address and let's build Nostr's long content together!

What You Will Get From Your First 10 Posts in each round:

1. 500 SATs, if you post on Relays through other clients
2. 1000 SATs, if you post articles from other platforms to Relays as the first one on Relays and are curated or tweeted by YakiHonne
3. 2000 SATs, for posting your own past articles on Relays through YakiHonne.com
4. 3000 SATs, for posting your new original on Relays through YakiHonne.com

Zap Rules:

1. No malicious speech such as discrimination, attack, incitement, etc.
2. No Spam/Scam, not fully AI-generated article
3. No directly copy & paste from other posts on Relays
4. Spread positive content like your knowledge/experience/insight/ideas, etc.

How to Get Zap:

1. Join YakiHonne TG group: https://t.me/YakiHonne_Daily_Featured
2. Share your post in the group
3. Make sure your LN address is in your profile
4. Based on the rules above, we will ZAP your post directly within 2 days

Join our group for more queries: https://t.me/YakiHonne_Daily_Featured

---

About YakiHonne:

YakiHonne is a Nostr-based decentralized content media protocol, which supports free curation, creation, publishing, and reporting by various media. Try YakiHonne.com Now!

Follow us

• Telegram: http://t.me/YakiHonne_Daily_Featured
• Twitter: @YakiHonne
• Nostr pubkey: npub1yzvxlwp7wawed5vgefwfmugvumtp8c8t0etk3g8sky4n0ndvyxesnxrf8q

@ 3bf0c63f:aefa459d

O Planetinha

Fumaça verde me entrando pelas narinas e um coro desafinado fazia uma base melódica.

nos confins da galáxia havia um planetinha isolado. Era um planeta feliz.

O homem vestido de mago começava a aparecer por detrás da fumaça verde.

O planetinha recebeu três presentes, mas o seu habitante, o homem, estava num estado de confusão tão grande que ameaçava estragá-los. Os homens já havia escravizado o primeiro presente, a vida; lutavam contra o segundo presente, a morte; e havia alguns que achavam que deviam destruir totalmente o terceiro, o amor, e com isto levar a desordem total ao pobre planetinha perdido, que se chamava Terra.

O coro desafinado entrou antes do "Terra" cantando várias vezes, como se imitasse um eco, "terra-terra-terraaa". Depois de uma pausa dramática, o homem vestido de mago voltou a falar.

Terra, nossa nave mãe.

Neste momento eu me afastei. À frente do palco onde o mago e seu coral faziam apelos à multidão havia vários estandes cobertos com a tradicional armação de quatro pernas e lona branca. Em todos os cantos da praça havia gente, gente dos mais variados tipos. Visitantes curiosos que se aproximavam atraídos pela fumaça verde e as barraquinhas, gente que aproveitava o movimento para vender doces sem pagar imposto, casais que se abraçavam de pé para espantar o frio, os tradicionais corredores que faziam seu cooper, gente cheia de barba e vestida para imitar os hippies dos anos 60 e vender colares estendidos no chão, transeuntes novos e velhos, vestidos como baladeiros ou como ativistas do ônibus grátis, grupos de ciclistas entusiastas.

O mago fazia agora apelos para que nós, os homens, habitantes do isolado planetinha, passássemos a ver o planetinha, nossa nave mãe, como um todo, e adquiríssemos a consciência de que ele estava entrando em maus lençóis. A idéia, reforçada pela logomarca do evento, era que parássemos de olhar só para a nossa vida e pensássemos no planeta.

A logomarca do evento, um desenho estilizado do planeta Terra, nada tinha a ver com seu nome: "Festival Andando de Bem com a Vida", mas havia sido ali colocada estrategicamente pelos organizadores, de quem parecia justamente sair a mensagem dita pelo mago.

Aquela multidão de pessoas que, assim como eu, tinham suas próprias preocupações, não podiam ver o quadro caótico que formavam, cada uma com seus atos isolados, ali naquela praça isolada, naquele planeta isolado. Quando o hippie barbudo, quase um Osho, assustava um casal para tentar vender-lhes um colar, a quantidade de caos que isto acrescentava à cena era gigantesca. Por um segundo, pude ver, como se estivesse de longe e acima, com toda a pretensão que este estado imaginativo carrega, a cena completa do caos.

---

Uma nave-mãe, dessas de ficção científica, habitada por milhões de pessoas, seguia no espaço sem rumo, e sem saber que logo à frente um longo precipício espacial a esperava, para a desgraça completa sua e de seus habitantes.

Acostumados àquela nave tanto quanto outrora estiveram acostumados à sua terra natal, os homens viviam as próprias vidas sem nem se lembrar que estavam vagando pelo espaço. Ninguém sabia quem estava conduzindo a nave, e ninguém se importava.

No final do filme descobre-se que era a soma completa do caos que cada habitante produzia, com seus gestos egoístas e incapazes de levar em conta a totalidade, é que determinava a direção da nave-mãe. O efeito, no entanto, não era imediato, como nunca é. Havia gente de verdade encarregada de conduzir a nave, mas era uma gente bêbada, mau-caráter, que vivia brigando pelo controle da nave e o poder que isto lhes dava. Poder, status, dinheiro!

Essa gente bêbada era atraída até ali pela corrupção das instituições e da moral comum que, no fundo no fundo, era causada pelo egoísmo da população, através de um complexo -- mas que no filme aparece simplificado pela ação individual de um magnata do divertimento público -- processo social.

O homem vestido de mago era mais um agente causador de caos, com sua cena cheia de fumaça e sua roupa estroboscópica, ele achava que estava fazendo o bem ao alertar sua platéia, todos as sextas-feiras, de que havia algo que precisava ser feito, que cada um que estava ali ouvindo era responsável pelo planeta. A sua incapacidade, porém, de explicar o que precisava ser feito só aumentava a angústia geral; a culpa que ele jogava sobre seu público, e que era prontamente aceita e passada em frente, aos familiares e amigos de cada um, atormentava-os diariamente e os impedia de ter uma vida decente no trabalho e em casa. As famílias, estressadas, estavam constantemente brigando e os motivos mais insignificantes eram responsáveis pelas mais horrendas conseqüências.

O mago, que após o show tirava o chapéu entortado e ia tomar cerveja num boteco, era responsável por uma parcela considerável do caos que levava a nave na direção do seu desgraçado fim. No filme, porém, um dos transeuntes que de passagem ouviu um pedaço do discurso do mago despertou em si mesmo uma consiência transformadora e, com poderes sobre-humanos que lhe foram então concedidos por uma ordem iniciática do bem ou não, usando só os seus poderes humanos mesmo, o transeunte -- na primeira versão do filme um homem, na segunda uma mulher -- consegue consertar as instituições e retirar os bêbados da condução da máquina. A questão da moral pública é ignorada para abreviar a trama, já com duas horas e quarenta de duração, mas subentende-se que ela também fora resolvida.

---

No planeta Terra real, que não está indo em direção alguma, preso pela gravidade ao Sol, e onde as pessoas vivem a própria vida porque lhes é impossível viver a dos outros, não têm uma consciência global de nada porque só é possível mesmo ter a consciência delas mesmas, e onde a maioria, de uma maneira ou de outra, está tentando como pode, fazer as coisas direito, o filme é exibido.

Para a maioria dos espectadores, é um filme que evoca reflexões, um filme forte. Por um segundo elas têm o mesmo vislumbre do caos generalizado que eu tive ali naquela praça. Para uma pequena parcela dos espectadores -- entre eles alguns dos que estavam na platéia do mago, o próprio mago, o seguidor do Osho, o casal de duas mulheres e o vendedor de brigadeiros, mas aos quais se somam também críticos de televisão e jornal e gente que fala pelos cotovelos na internet -- o filme é um horror, o filme é uma vulgarização de um problema real e sério, o filme apela para a figura do herói salvador e passa uma mensagem totalmente errada, de que a maioria da população pode continuar vivendo as suas própria vidinhas miseráveis enquanto espera por um herói que vem do Olimpo e os salva da mixórdia que eles mesmos causaram, é um filme que presta um enorme desserviço à causa.

No dia seguinte ao lançamento, num bar meio caro ali perto da praça, numa mesa com oito pessoas, entre elas seis do primeiro grupo e oito do segundo, discute-se se o filme levará ou não o Oscar. Eu estou em casa dormindo e não escuto nada.

@ 8fb140b4:f948000c

Embarking on the journey of operating your own Lightning node on the Bitcoin Layer 2 network is more than just a tech-savvy endeavor; it's a step into a realm of financial autonomy and cutting-edge innovation. By running a node, you become a vital part of a revolutionary movement that's reshaping how we think about money and digital transactions. This role not only offers a unique perspective on blockchain technology but also places you at the heart of a community dedicated to decentralization and network resilience. Beyond the technicalities, it's about embracing a new era of digital finance, where you contribute directly to the network's security, efficiency, and growth, all while gaining personal satisfaction and potentially lucrative rewards.

In essence, running your own Lightning node is a powerful way to engage with the forefront of blockchain technology, assert financial independence, and contribute to a more decentralized and efficient Bitcoin network. It's an adventure that offers both personal and communal benefits, from gaining in-depth tech knowledge to earning a place in the evolving landscape of cryptocurrency.

Running your own Lightning node for the Bitcoin Layer 2 network can be an empowering and beneficial endeavor. Here are 10 reasons why you might consider taking on this task:

1. Direct Contribution to Decentralization: Operating a node is a direct action towards decentralizing the Bitcoin network, crucial for its security and resistance to control or censorship by any single entity.

2. Financial Autonomy: Owning a node gives you complete control over your financial transactions on the network, free from reliance on third-party services, which can be subject to fees, restrictions, or outages.

3. Advanced Network Participation: As a node operator, you're not just a passive participant but an active player in shaping the network, influencing its efficiency and scalability through direct involvement.

4. Potential for Higher Revenue: With strategic management and optimal channel funding, your node can become a preferred route for transactions, potentially increasing the routing fees you can earn.

5. Cutting-Edge Technological Engagement: Running a node puts you at the forefront of blockchain and bitcoin technology, offering insights into future developments and innovations.

6. Strengthened Network Security: Each new node adds to the robustness of the Bitcoin network, making it more resilient against attacks and failures, thus contributing to the overall security of the ecosystem.

7. Personalized Fee Structures: You have the flexibility to set your own fee policies, which can balance earning potential with the service you provide to the network.

8. Empowerment Through Knowledge: The process of setting up and managing a node provides deep learning opportunities, empowering you with knowledge that can be applied in various areas of blockchain and fintech.

9. Boosting Transaction Capacity: By running a node, you help to increase the overall capacity of the Lightning Network, enabling more transactions to be processed quickly and at lower costs.

10. Community Leadership and Reputation: As an active node operator, you gain recognition within the Bitcoin community, which can lead to collaborative opportunities and a position of thought leadership in the space.

These reasons demonstrate the impactful and transformative nature of running a Lightning node, appealing to those who are deeply invested in the principles of bitcoin and wish to actively shape its future. Jump aboard, and embrace the journey toward full independence. 🐶🐾🫡🚀🚀🚀

@ e6ce6154:275e3444

Este artigo foi censurado pelo estado e fomos obrigados a deletá-lo após ameaça de homens armados virem nos visitar e agredir nossa vida e propriedade.

Isto é mais uma prova que os autoproclamados antirracistas são piores que os racistas.

https://rothbardbrasil.com/pelo-direito-de-ser-racista-fascista-machista-e-homofobico

Segue artigo na íntegra. 👇

Sem dúvida, a escalada autoritária do totalitarismo cultural progressista nos últimos anos tem sido sumariamente deletéria e prejudicial para a liberdade de expressão. Como seria de se esperar, a cada dia que passa o autoritarismo progressista continua a se expandir de maneira irrefreável, prejudicando a liberdade dos indivíduos de formas cada vez mais deploráveis e contundentes.

Com a ascensão da tirania politicamente correta e sua invasão a todos os terrenos culturais, o autoritarismo progressista foi se alastrando e consolidando sua hegemonia em determinados segmentos. Com a eventual eclosão e a expansão da opressiva e despótica cultura do cancelamento — uma progênie inevitável do totalitarismo progressista —, todas as pessoas que manifestam opiniões, crenças ou posicionamentos que não estão alinhados com as pautas universitárias da moda tornam-se um alvo.

Há algumas semanas, vimos a enorme repercussão causada pelo caso envolvendo o jogador profissional de vôlei Maurício Sousa, que foi cancelado pelo simples fato de ter emitido sua opinião pessoal sobre um personagem de história em quadrinhos, Jon Kent, o novo Superman, que é bissexual. Maurício Sousa reprovou a conduta sexual do personagem, o que é um direito pessoal inalienável que ele tem. Ele não é obrigado a gostar ou aprovar a bissexualidade. Como qualquer pessoa, ele tem o direito pleno de criticar tudo aquilo que ele não gosta. No entanto, pelo simples fato de emitir a sua opinião pessoal, Maurício Sousa foi acusado de homofobia e teve seu contrato rescindido, sendo desligado do Minas Tênis Clube.

Lamentavelmente, Maurício Sousa não foi o primeiro e nem será o último indivíduo a sofrer com a opressiva e autoritária cultura do cancelamento. Como uma tirania cultural que está em plena ascensão e usufrui de um amplo apoio do establishment, essa nova forma de totalitarismo cultural colorido e festivo está se impondo de formas e maneiras bastante contundentes em praticamente todas as esferas da sociedade contemporânea. Sua intenção é relegar ao ostracismo todos aqueles que não se curvam ao totalitarismo progressista, criminalizando opiniões e crenças que divergem do culto à libertinagem hedonista pós-moderna. Oculto por trás de todo esse ativismo autoritário, o que temos de fato é uma profunda hostilidade por padrões morais tradicionalistas, cristãos e conservadores.

No entanto, é fundamental entendermos uma questão imperativa, que explica em partes o conflito aqui criado — todos os progressistas contemporâneos são crias oriundas do direito positivo. Por essa razão, eles jamais entenderão de forma pragmática e objetiva conceitos como criminalidade, direitos de propriedade, agressão e liberdade de expressão pela perspectiva do jusnaturalismo, que é manifestamente o direito em seu estado mais puro, correto, ético e equilibrado.

Pela ótica jusnaturalista, uma opinião é uma opinião. Ponto final. E absolutamente ninguém deve ser preso, cancelado, sabotado ou boicotado por expressar uma opinião particular sobre qualquer assunto. Palavras não agridem ninguém, portanto jamais poderiam ser consideradas um crime em si. Apenas deveriam ser tipificados como crimes agressões de caráter objetivo, como roubo, sequestro, fraude, extorsão, estupro e infrações similares, que representam uma ameaça direta à integridade física da vítima, ou que busquem subtrair alguma posse empregando a violência.

Infelizmente, a geração floquinho de neve — terrivelmente histérica, egocêntrica e sensível — fica profundamente ofendida e consternada sempre que alguém defende posicionamentos contrários à religião progressista. Por essa razão, os guerreiros da justiça social sinceramente acreditam que o papai-estado deve censurar todas as opiniões que eles não gostam de ouvir, assim como deve também criar leis para encarcerar todos aqueles que falam ou escrevem coisas que desagradam a militância.

Como a geração floquinho de neve foi criada para acreditar que todas as suas vontades pessoais e disposições ideológicas devem ser sumariamente atendidas pelo papai-estado, eles embarcaram em uma cruzada moral que pretende erradicar todas as coisas que são ofensivas à ideologia progressista; só assim eles poderão deflagrar na Terra o seu tão sonhado paraíso hedonista e igualitário, de inimaginável esplendor e felicidade.

Em virtude do seu comportamento intrinsecamente despótico, autoritário e egocêntrico, acaba sendo inevitável que militantes progressistas problematizem tudo aquilo que os desagrada.

Como são criaturas inúteis destituídas de ocupação real e verdadeiro sentido na vida, sendo oprimidas unicamente na sua própria imaginação, militantes progressistas precisam constantemente inventar novos vilões para serem combatidos.

Partindo dessa perspectiva, é natural para a militância que absolutamente tudo que exista no mundo e que não se enquadra com as regras autoritárias e restritivas da religião progressista seja encarado como um problema. Para a geração floquinho de neve, o capitalismo é um problema. O fascismo é um problema. A iniciativa privada é um problema. O homem branco, tradicionalista, conservador e heterossexual é um problema. A desigualdade é um problema. A liberdade é um problema. Monteiro Lobato é um problema (sim, até mesmo o renomado ícone da literatura brasileira, autor — entre outros títulos — de Urupês, foi vítima da cultura do cancelamento, acusado de ser racista e eugenista).

Para a esquerda, praticamente tudo é um problema. Na mentalidade da militância progressista, tudo é motivo para reclamação. Foi em função desse comportamento histérico, histriônico e infantil que o famoso pensador conservador-libertário americano P. J. O’Rourke afirmou que “o esquerdismo é uma filosofia de pirralhos chorões”. O que é uma verdade absoluta e irrefutável em todos os sentidos.

De fato, todas as filosofias de esquerda de forma geral são idealizações utópicas e infantis de um mundo perfeito. Enquanto o mundo não se transformar naquela colorida e vibrante utopia que é apresentada pela cartilha socialista padrão, militantes continuarão a reclamar contra tudo o que existe no mundo de forma agressiva, visceral e beligerante. Evidentemente, eles não vão fazer absolutamente nada de positivo ou construtivo para que o mundo se transforme no gracioso paraíso que eles tanto desejam ver consolidado, mas eles continuarão a berrar e vociferar muito em sua busca incessante pela utopia, marcando presença em passeatas inúteis ou combatendo o fascismo imaginário nas redes sociais.

Sem dúvida, estamos muito perto de ver leis absurdas e estúpidas sendo implementadas, para agradar a militância da terra colorida do assistencialismo eterno onde nada é escasso e tudo cai do céu. Em breve, você não poderá usar calças pretas, pois elas serão consideradas peças de vestuário excessivamente heterossexuais. Apenas calças amarelas ou coloridas serão permitidas. Você também terá que tingir de cor-de-rosa uma mecha do seu cabelo; pois preservar o seu cabelo na sua cor natural é heteronormativo demais da sua parte, sendo portanto um componente demasiadamente opressor da sociedade.

Você também não poderá ver filmes de guerra ou de ação, apenas comédias românticas, pois certos gêneros de filmes exaltam a violência do patriarcado e isso impede o mundo de se tornar uma graciosa festa colorida de fraternidades universitárias ungidas por pôneis resplandecentes, hedonismo infinito, vadiagem universitária e autogratificação psicodélica, que certamente são elementos indispensáveis para se produzir o paraíso na Terra.

Sabemos perfeitamente, no entanto, que dentre as atitudes “opressivas” que a militância progressista mais se empenha em combater, estão o racismo, o fascismo, o machismo e a homofobia. No entanto, é fundamental entender que ser racista, fascista, machista ou homofóbico não são crimes em si. Na prática, todos esses elementos são apenas traços de personalidade; e eles não podem ser pura e simplesmente criminalizados porque ideólogos e militantes progressistas iluminados não gostam deles.

Tanto pela ética quanto pela ótica jusnaturalista, é facilmente compreensível entender que esses traços de personalidade não podem ser criminalizados ou proibidos simplesmente porque integrantes de uma ideologia não tem nenhuma apreciação ou simpatia por eles. Da mesma forma, nenhum desses traços de personalidade representa em si um perigo para a sociedade, pelo simples fato de existir. Por incrível que pareça, até mesmo o machismo, o racismo, o fascismo e a homofobia merecem a devida apologia.

Mas vamos analisar cada um desses tópicos separadamente para entender isso melhor.

Racismo

Quando falamos no Japão, normalmente não fazemos nenhuma associação da sociedade japonesa com o racismo. No entanto, é incontestável o fato de que a sociedade japonesa pode ser considerada uma das sociedades mais racistas do mundo. E a verdade é que não há absolutamente nada de errado com isso.

Aproximadamente 97% da população do Japão é nativa; apenas 3% do componente populacional é constituído por estrangeiros (a população do Japão é estimada em aproximadamente 126 milhões de habitantes). Isso faz a sociedade japonesa ser uma das mais homogêneas do mundo. As autoridades japonesas reconhecidamente dificultam processos de seleção e aplicação a estrangeiros que desejam se tornar residentes. E a maioria dos japoneses aprova essa decisão.

Diversos estabelecimentos comerciais como hotéis, bares e restaurantes por todo o país tem placas na entrada que dizem “somente para japoneses” e a maioria destes estabelecimentos se recusa ostensivamente a atender ou aceitar clientes estrangeiros, não importa quão ricos ou abastados sejam.

Na Terra do Sol Nascente, a hostilidade e a desconfiança natural para com estrangeiros é tão grande que até mesmo indivíduos que nascem em algum outro país, mas são filhos de pais japoneses, não são considerados cidadãos plenamente japoneses.

Se estes indivíduos decidem sair do seu país de origem para se estabelecer no Japão — mesmo tendo descendência nipônica legítima e inquestionável —, eles enfrentarão uma discriminação social considerável, especialmente se não dominarem o idioma japonês de forma impecável. Esse fato mostra que a discriminação é uma parte tão indissociável quanto elementar da sociedade japonesa, e ela está tão profundamente arraigada à cultura nipônica que é praticamente impossível alterá-la ou atenuá-la por qualquer motivo.

A verdade é que — quando falamos de um país como o Japão — nem todos os discursos politicamente corretos do mundo, nem a histeria progressista ocidental mais inflamada poderão algum dia modificar, extirpar ou sequer atenuar o componente racista da cultura nipônica. E isso é consequência de uma questão tão simples quanto primordial: discriminar faz parte da natureza humana, sendo tanto um direito individual quanto um elemento cultural inerente à muitas nações do mundo. Os japoneses não tem problema algum em admitir ou institucionalizar o seu preconceito, justamente pelo fato de que a ideologia politicamente correta não tem no oriente a força e a presença que tem no ocidente.

E é fundamental enfatizar que, sendo de natureza pacífica — ou seja, não violando nem agredindo terceiros —, a discriminação é um recurso natural dos seres humanos, que está diretamente associada a questões como familiaridade e segurança.

Absolutamente ninguém deve ser forçado a apreciar ou integrar-se a raças, etnias, pessoas ou tribos que não lhe transmitem sentimentos de segurança ou familiaridade. Integração forçada é o verdadeiro crime, e isso diversos países europeus — principalmente os escandinavos (países que lideram o ranking de submissão à ideologia politicamente correta) — aprenderam da pior forma possível.

A integração forçada com imigrantes islâmicos resultou em ondas de assassinato, estupro e violência inimagináveis para diversos países europeus, até então civilizados, que a imprensa ocidental politicamente correta e a militância progressista estão permanentemente tentando esconder, porque não desejam que o ocidente descubra como a agenda “humanitária” de integração forçada dos povos muçulmanos em países do Velho Mundo resultou em algumas das piores chacinas e tragédias na história recente da Europa.

Ou seja, ao discriminarem estrangeiros, os japoneses estão apenas se protegendo e lutando para preservar sua nação como um ambiente cultural, étnico e social que lhe é seguro e familiar, assim se opondo a mudanças bruscas, indesejadas e antinaturais, que poderiam comprometer a estabilidade social do país.

A discriminação — sendo de natureza pacífica —, é benévola, salutar e indubitavelmente ajuda a manter a estabilidade social da comunidade. Toda e qualquer forma de integração forçada deve ser repudiada com veemência, pois, mais cedo ou mais tarde, ela irá subverter a ordem social vigente, e sempre será acompanhada de deploráveis e dramáticos resultados.

Para citar novamente os países escandinavos, a Suécia é um excelente exemplo do que não fazer. Tendo seguido o caminho contrário ao da discriminação racional praticada pela sociedade japonesa, atualmente a sociedade sueca — além de afundar de forma consistente na lama da libertinagem, da decadência e da deterioração progressista — sofre em demasia com os imigrantes muçulmanos, que foram deixados praticamente livres para matar, saquear, esquartejar e estuprar quem eles quiserem. Hoje, eles são praticamente intocáveis, visto que denunciá-los, desmoralizá-los ou acusá-los de qualquer crime é uma atitude politicamente incorreta e altamente reprovada pelo establishment progressista. A elite socialista sueca jamais se atreve a acusá-los de qualquer crime, pois temem ser classificados como xenófobos e intolerantes. Ou seja, a desgraça da Europa, sobretudo dos países escandinavos, foi não ter oferecido nenhuma resistência à ideologia progressista politicamente correta. Hoje, eles são totalmente submissos a ela.

O exemplo do Japão mostra, portanto — para além de qualquer dúvida —, a importância ética e prática da discriminação, que é perfeitamente aceitável e natural, sendo uma tendência inerente aos seres humanos, e portanto intrínseca a determinados comportamentos, sociedades e culturas.

Indo ainda mais longe nessa questão, devemos entender que na verdade todos nós discriminamos, e não existe absolutamente nada de errado nisso. Discriminar pessoas faz parte da natureza humana e quem se recusa a admitir esse fato é um hipócrita. Mulheres discriminam homens na hora de selecionar um parceiro; elas avaliam diversos quesitos, como altura, aparência, status social, condição financeira e carisma. E dentre suas opções, elas sempre escolherão o homem mais atraente, másculo e viril, em detrimento de todos os baixinhos, calvos, carentes, frágeis e inibidos que possam estar disponíveis. Da mesma forma, homens sempre terão preferência por mulheres jovens, atraentes e delicadas, em detrimento de todas as feministas de meia-idade, acima do peso, de cabelo pintado, que são mães solteiras e militantes socialistas. A própria militância progressista discrimina pessoas de forma virulenta e intransigente, como fica evidente no tratamento que dispensam a mulheres bolsonaristas e a negros de direita.

A verdade é que — não importa o nível de histeria da militância progressista — a discriminação é inerente à condição humana e um direito natural inalienável de todos. É parte indissociável da natureza humana e qualquer pessoa pode e deve exercer esse direito sempre que desejar. Não existe absolutamente nada de errado em discriminar pessoas. O problema real é a ideologia progressista e o autoritarismo politicamente correto, movimentos tirânicos que não respeitam o direito das pessoas de discriminar.

Fascismo

Quando falamos de fascismo, precisamos entender que, para a esquerda política, o fascismo é compreendido como um conceito completamente divorciado do seu significado original. Para um militante de esquerda, fascista é todo aquele que defende posicionamentos contrários ao progressismo, não se referindo necessariamente a um fascista clássico.

Mas, seja como for, é necessário entender que — como qualquer ideologia política — até mesmo o fascismo clássico tem o direito de existir e ocupar o seu devido lugar; portanto, fascistas não devem ser arbitrariamente censurados, apesar de defenderem conceitos que representam uma completa antítese de tudo aquilo que é valioso para os entusiastas da liberdade.

Em um país como o Brasil, onde socialistas e comunistas tem total liberdade para se expressar, defender suas ideologias e até mesmo formar partidos políticos, não faz absolutamente o menor sentido que fascistas — e até mesmo nazistas assumidos — sofram qualquer tipo de discriminação. Embora socialistas e comunistas se sintam moralmente superiores aos fascistas (ou a qualquer outra filosofia política ou escola de pensamento), sabemos perfeitamente que o seu senso de superioridade é fruto de uma pueril romantização universitária da sua própria ideologia. A história mostra efetivamente que o socialismo clássico e o comunismo causaram muito mais destruição do que o fascismo.

Portanto, se socialistas e comunistas tem total liberdade para se expressar, não existe a menor razão para que fascistas não usufruam dessa mesma liberdade.

É claro, nesse ponto, seremos invariavelmente confrontados por um oportuno dilema — o famoso paradoxo da intolerância, de Karl Popper. Até que ponto uma sociedade livre e tolerante deve tolerar a intolerância (inerente a ideologias totalitárias)?

As leis de propriedade privada resolveriam isso em uma sociedade livre. O mais importante a levarmos em consideração no atual contexto, no entanto — ao defender ou criticar uma determinada ideologia, filosofia ou escola de pensamento —, é entender que, seja ela qual for, ela tem o direito de existir. E todas as pessoas que a defendem tem o direito de defendê-la, da mesma maneira que todos os seus detratores tem o direito de criticá-la.

Essa é uma forte razão para jamais apoiarmos a censura. Muito pelo contrário, devemos repudiar com veemência e intransigência toda e qualquer forma de censura, especialmente a estatal.

Existem duas fortes razões para isso:

A primeira delas é a volatilidade da censura (especialmente a estatal). A censura oficial do governo, depois que é implementada, torna-se absolutamente incontrolável. Hoje, ela pode estar apontada para um grupo de pessoas cujas ideias divergem das suas. Mas amanhã, ela pode estar apontada justamente para as ideias que você defende. É fundamental, portanto, compreendermos que a censura estatal é incontrolável. Sob qualquer ponto de vista, é muito mais vantajoso que exista uma vasta pluralidade de ideias conflitantes na sociedade competindo entre si, do que o estado decidir que ideias podem ser difundidas ou não.

Além do mais, libertários e anarcocapitalistas não podem nunca esperar qualquer tipo de simpatia por parte das autoridades governamentais. Para o estado, seria infinitamente mais prático e vantajoso criminalizar o libertarianismo e o anarcocapitalismo — sob a alegação de que são filosofias perigosas difundidas por extremistas radicais que ameaçam o estado democrático de direito — do que o fascismo ou qualquer outra ideologia centralizada em governos burocráticos e onipotentes. Portanto, defender a censura, especialmente a estatal, representa sempre um perigo para o próprio indivíduo, que mais cedo ou mais tarde poderá ver a censura oficial do sistema se voltar contra ele.

Outra razão pela qual libertários jamais devem defender a censura, é porque — ao contrário dos estatistas — não é coerente que defensores da liberdade se comportem como se o estado fosse o seu papai e o governo fosse a sua mamãe. Não devemos terceirizar nossas próprias responsabilidades, tampouco devemos nos comportar como adultos infantilizados. Assumimos a responsabilidade de combater todas as ideologias e filosofias que agridem a liberdade e os seres humanos. Não procuramos políticos ou burocratas para executar essa tarefa por nós.

Portanto, se você ver um fascista sendo censurado nas redes sociais ou em qualquer outro lugar, assuma suas dores. Sinta-se compelido a defendê-lo, mostre aos seus detratores que ele tem todo direito de se expressar, como qualquer pessoa. Você não tem obrigação de concordar com ele ou apreciar as ideias que ele defende. Mas silenciar arbitrariamente qualquer pessoa não é uma pauta que honra a liberdade.

Se você não gosta de estado, planejamento central, burocracia, impostos, tarifas, políticas coletivistas, nacionalistas e desenvolvimentistas, mostre com argumentos coesos e convincentes porque a liberdade e o livre mercado são superiores a todos esses conceitos. Mas repudie a censura com intransigência e mordacidade.

Em primeiro lugar, porque você aprecia e defende a liberdade de expressão para todas as pessoas. E em segundo lugar, por entender perfeitamente que — se a censura eventualmente se tornar uma política de estado vigente entre a sociedade — é mais provável que ela atinja primeiro os defensores da liberdade do que os defensores do estado.

Machismo

Muitos elementos do comportamento masculino que hoje são atacados com virulência e considerados machistas pelo movimento progressista são na verdade manifestações naturais intrínsecas ao homem, que nossos avôs cultivaram ao longo de suas vidas sem serem recriminados por isso. Com a ascensão do feminismo, do progressismo e a eventual problematização do sexo masculino, o antagonismo militante dos principais líderes da revolução sexual da contracultura passou a naturalmente condenar todos os atributos genuinamente masculinos, por considerá-los símbolos de opressão e dominação social.

Apesar do Brasil ser uma sociedade liberal ultra-progressista, onde o estado protege mais as mulheres do que as crianças — afinal, a cada semana novas leis são implementadas concedendo inúmeros privilégios e benefícios às mulheres, aos quais elas jamais teriam direito em uma sociedade genuinamente machista e patriarcal —, a esquerda política persiste em tentar difundir a fantasia da opressão masculina e o mito de que vivemos em uma sociedade machista e patriarcal.

Como sempre, a realidade mostra um cenário muito diferente daquilo que é pregado pela militância da terra da fantasia. O Brasil atual não tem absolutamente nada de machista ou patriarcal. No Brasil, mulheres podem votar, podem ocupar posições de poder e autoridade tanto na esfera pública quanto em companhias privadas, podem se candidatar a cargos políticos, podem ser vereadoras, deputadas, governadoras, podem ser proprietárias do próprio negócio, podem se divorciar, podem dirigir, podem comprar armas, podem andar de biquíni nas praias, podem usar saias extremamente curtas, podem ver programas de televisão sobre sexo voltados única e exclusivamente para o público feminino, podem se casar com outras mulheres, podem ser promíscuas, podem consumir bebidas alcoólicas ao ponto da embriaguez, e podem fazer praticamente tudo aquilo que elas desejarem. No Brasil do século XXI, as mulheres são genuinamente livres para fazer as próprias escolhas em praticamente todos os aspectos de suas vidas. O que mostra efetivamente que a tal opressão do patriarcado não existe.

O liberalismo social extremo do qual as mulheres usufruem no Brasil atual — e que poderíamos estender a toda a sociedade contemporânea ocidental — é suficiente para desmantelar completamente a fábula feminista da sociedade patriarcal machista e opressora, que existe única e exclusivamente no mundinho de fantasias ideológicas da esquerda progressista.

Tão importante quanto, é fundamental compreender que nenhum homem é obrigado a levar o feminismo a sério ou considerá-lo um movimento social e político legítimo. Para um homem, ser considerado machista ou até mesmo assumir-se como um não deveria ser um problema. O progressismo e o feminismo — com o seu nefasto hábito de demonizar os homens, bem como todos os elementos inerentes ao comportamento e a cultura masculina — é que são o verdadeiro problema, conforme tentam modificar o homem para transformá-lo em algo que ele não é nem deveria ser: uma criatura dócil, passiva e submissa, que é comandada por ideologias hostis e antinaturais, que não respeitam a hierarquia de uma ordem social milenar e condições inerentes à própria natureza humana. Com o seu hábito de tentar modificar tudo através de leis e decretos, o feminismo e o progressismo mostram efetivamente que o seu real objetivo é criminalizar a masculinidade.

A verdade é que — usufruindo de um nível elevado de liberdades — não existe praticamente nada que a mulher brasileira do século XXI não possa fazer. Adicionalmente, o governo dá as mulheres uma quantidade tão avassaladora de vantagens, privilégios e benefícios, que está ficando cada vez mais difícil para elas encontrarem razões válidas para reclamarem da vida. Se o projeto de lei que pretende fornecer um auxílio mensal de mil e duzentos reais para mães solteiras for aprovado pelo senado, muitas mulheres que tem filhos não precisarão nem mesmo trabalhar para ter sustento. E tantas outras procurarão engravidar, para ter direito a receber uma mesada mensal do governo até o seu filho completar a maioridade.

O que a militância colorida da terra da fantasia convenientemente ignora — pois a realidade nunca corresponde ao seu conto de fadas ideológico — é que o mundo de uma forma geral continua sendo muito mais implacável com os homens do que é com as mulheres. No Brasil, a esmagadora maioria dos suicídios é praticada por homens, a maioria das vítimas de homicídio são homens e de cada quatro moradores de rua, três são homens. Mas é evidente que uma sociedade liberal ultra-progressista não se importa com os homens, pois ela não é influenciada por fatos concretos ou pela realidade. Seu objetivo é simplesmente atender as disposições de uma agenda ideológica, não importa quão divorciadas da realidade elas são.

O nível exacerbado de liberdades sociais e privilégios governamentais dos quais as mulheres brasileiras usufruem é suficiente para destruir a fantasiosa fábula da sociedade machista, opressora e patriarcal. Se as mulheres brasileiras não estão felizes, a culpa definitivamente não é dos homens. Se a vasta profusão de liberdades, privilégios e benefícios da sociedade ocidental não as deixa plenamente saciadas e satisfeitas, elas podem sempre mudar de ares e tentar uma vida mais abnegada e espartana em países como Irã, Paquistão ou Afeganistão. Quem sabe assim elas não se sentirão melhores e mais realizadas?

Homofobia

Quando falamos em homofobia, entramos em uma categoria muito parecida com a do racismo: o direito de discriminação é totalmente válido. Absolutamente ninguém deve ser obrigado a aceitar homossexuais ou considerar o homossexualismo como algo normal. Sendo cristão, não existe nem sequer a mais vaga possibilidade de que algum dia eu venha a aceitar o homossexualismo como algo natural. O homossexualismo se qualifica como um grave desvio de conduta e um pecado contra o Criador.

A Bíblia proíbe terminantemente conduta sexual imoral, o que — além do homossexualismo — inclui adultério, fornicação, incesto e bestialidade, entre outras formas igualmente pérfidas de degradação.

Segue abaixo três passagens bíblicas que proíbem terminantemente a conduta homossexual:

“Não te deitarás com um homem como se deita com uma mulher. Isso é abominável!” (Levítico 18:22 — King James Atualizada)

“Se um homem se deitar com outro homem, como se deita com mulher, ambos terão praticado abominação; certamente serão mortos; o seu sangue estará sobre eles.” (Levítico 20:13 — João Ferreira de Almeida Atualizada)

“O quê! Não sabeis que os injustos não herdarão o reino de Deus? Não sejais desencaminhados. Nem fornicadores, nem idólatras, nem adúlteros, nem homens mantidos para propósitos desnaturais, nem homens que se deitam com homens, nem ladrões, nem gananciosos, nem beberrões, nem injuriadores, nem extorsores herdarão o reino de Deus.” (1 Coríntios 6:9,10 —Tradução do Novo Mundo das Escrituras Sagradas com Referências)

Se você não é religioso, pode simplesmente levar em consideração o argumento do respeito pela ordem natural. A ordem natural é incondicional e incisiva com relação a uma questão: o complemento de tudo o que existe é o seu oposto, não o seu igual. O complemento do dia é a noite, o complemento da luz é a escuridão, o complemento da água, que é líquida, é a terra, que é sólida. E como sabemos o complemento do macho — de sua respectiva espécie — é a fêmea.

Portanto, o complemento do homem, o macho da espécie humana, é naturalmente a mulher, a fêmea da espécie humana. Um homem e uma mulher podem naturalmente se reproduzir, porque são um complemento biológico natural. Por outro lado, um homem e outro homem são incapazes de se reproduzir, assim como uma mulher e outra mulher.

Infelizmente, o mundo atual está longe de aceitar como plenamente estabelecida a ordem natural pelo simples fato dela existir, visto que tentam subvertê-la a qualquer custo, não importa o malabarismo intelectual que tenham que fazer para justificar os seus pontos de vista distorcidos e antinaturais. A libertinagem irrefreável e a imoralidade bestial do mundo contemporâneo pós-moderno não reconhecem nenhum tipo de limite. Quem tenta restabelecer princípios morais salutares é imediatamente considerado um vilão retrógrado e repressivo, sendo ativamente demonizado pela militância do hedonismo, da luxúria e da licenciosidade desenfreada e sem limites.

Definitivamente, fazer a apologia da moralidade, do autocontrole e do autodomínio não faz nenhum sucesso na Sodoma e Gomorra global dos dias atuais. O que faz sucesso é lacração, devassidão, promiscuidade e prazeres carnais vazios. O famoso escritor e filósofo francês Albert Camus expressou uma verdade contundente quando disse: “Uma só frase lhe bastará para definir o homem moderno — fornicava e lia jornais”.

Qualquer indivíduo tem o direito inalienável de discriminar ativamente homossexuais, pelo direito que ele julgar mais pertinente no seu caso. A objeção de consciência para qualquer situação é um direito natural dos indivíduos. Há alguns anos, um caso que aconteceu nos Estados Unidos ganhou enorme repercussão internacional, quando o confeiteiro Jack Phillips se recusou a fazer um bolo de casamento para o “casal” homossexual Dave Mullins e Charlie Craig.

Uma representação dos direitos civis do estado do Colorado abriu um inquérito contra o confeiteiro, alegando que ele deveria ser obrigado a atender todos os clientes, independente da orientação sexual, raça ou crença. Preste atenção nas palavras usadas — ele deveria ser obrigado a atender.

Como se recusou bravamente a ceder, o caso foi parar invariavelmente na Suprema Corte, que decidiu por sete a dois em favor de Jack Phillips, sob a alegação de que obrigar o confeiteiro a atender o “casal” homossexual era uma violação nefasta dos seus princípios religiosos. Felizmente, esse foi um caso em que a liberdade prevaleceu sobre a tirania progressista.

Evidentemente, homossexuais não devem ser agredidos, ofendidos, internados em clínicas contra a sua vontade, nem devem ser constrangidos em suas liberdades pelo fato de serem homossexuais. O que eles precisam entender é que a liberdade é uma via de mão dupla. Eles podem ter liberdade para adotar a conduta que desejarem e fazer o que quiserem (contanto que não agridam ninguém), mas da mesma forma, é fundamental respeitar e preservar a liberdade de terceiros que desejam rejeitá-los pacificamente, pelo motivo que for.

Afinal, ninguém tem a menor obrigação de aceitá-los, atendê-los ou sequer pensar que uma união estável entre duas pessoas do mesmo sexo — incapaz de gerar descendentes, e, portanto, antinatural — deva ser considerado um matrimônio de verdade. Absolutamente nenhuma pessoa, ideia, movimento, crença ou ideologia usufrui de plena unanimidade no mundo. Por que o homossexualismo deveria ter tal privilégio?

Homossexuais não são portadores de uma verdade definitiva, absoluta e indiscutível, que está acima da humanidade. São seres humanos comuns que — na melhor das hipóteses —, levam um estilo de vida que pode ser considerado “alternativo”, e absolutamente ninguém tem a obrigação de considerar esse estilo de vida normal ou aceitável. A única obrigação das pessoas é não interferir, e isso não implica uma obrigação em aceitar.

Discriminar homossexuais (assim como pessoas de qualquer outro grupo, raça, religião, nacionalidade ou etnia) é um direito natural por parte de todos aqueles que desejam exercer esse direito. E isso nem o direito positivo nem a militância progressista poderão algum dia alterar ou subverter. O direito natural e a inclinação inerente dos seres humanos em atender às suas próprias disposições é simplesmente imutável e faz parte do seu conjunto de necessidades.

Conclusão

A militância progressista é absurdamente autoritária, e todas as suas estratégias e disposições ideológicas mostram que ela está em uma guerra permanente contra a ordem natural, contra a liberdade e principalmente contra o homem branco, cristão, conservador e tradicionalista — possivelmente, aquilo que ela mais odeia e despreza.

Nós não podemos, no entanto, ceder ou dar espaço para a agenda progressista, tampouco pensar em considerar como sendo normais todas as pautas abusivas e tirânicas que a militância pretende estabelecer como sendo perfeitamente razoáveis e aceitáveis, quer a sociedade aceite isso ou não. Afinal, conforme formos cedendo, o progressismo tirânico e totalitário tende a ganhar cada vez mais espaço.

Quanto mais espaço o progressismo conquistar, mais corroída será a liberdade e mais impulso ganhará o totalitarismo. Com isso, a cultura do cancelamento vai acabar com carreiras, profissões e com o sustento de muitas pessoas, pelo simples fato de que elas discordam das pautas universitárias da moda.

A história mostra perfeitamente que quanto mais liberdade uma sociedade tem, mais progresso ela atinge. Por outro lado, quanto mais autoritária ela for, mais retrocessos ela sofrerá. O autoritarismo se combate com liberdade, desafiando as pautas de todos aqueles que persistem em implementar a tirania na sociedade. O politicamente correto é o nazismo dos costumes, que pretende subverter a moral através de uma cultura de vigilância policial despótica e autoritária, para que toda a sociedade seja subjugada pela agenda totalitária progressista.

Pois quanto a nós, precisamos continuar travando o bom combate em nome da liberdade. E isso inclui reconhecer que ideologias, hábitos e costumes de que não gostamos tem o direito de existir e até mesmo de serem defendidos.

@ 8fb140b4:f948000c

Chef's notes

Serving these two dishes together will create a delightful centerpiece for your Thanksgiving meal, offering a perfect blend of traditional flavors with a homemade touch.

Details

• ⏲️ Prep time: 30 min
• 🍳 Cook time: 1 - 2 hours
• 🍽️ Servings: 4-6

Ingredients

• 1 whole turkey (about 12-14 lbs), thawed and ready to cook
• 1 cup unsalted butter, softened
• 2 tablespoons fresh thyme, chopped
• 2 tablespoons fresh rosemary, chopped
• 2 tablespoons fresh sage, chopped
• Salt and freshly ground black pepper
• 1 onion, quartered
• 1 lemon, halved
• 2-3 cloves of garlic
• Apple and Sage Stuffing
• 1 loaf of crusty bread, cut into cubes
• 2 apples, cored and chopped
• 1 onion, diced
• 2 stalks celery, diced
• 3 cloves garlic, minced
• 1/4 cup fresh sage, chopped
• 1/2 cup unsalted butter
• 2 cups chicken broth
• Salt and pepper, to taste

Directions

1. Preheat the Oven: Set your oven to 325°F (165°C).
2. Prepare the Herb Butter: Mix the softened butter with the chopped thyme, rosemary, and sage. Season with salt and pepper.
3. Prepare the Turkey: Remove any giblets from the turkey and pat it dry. Loosen the skin and spread a generous amount of herb butter under and over the skin.
4. Add Aromatics: Inside the turkey cavity, place the quartered onion, lemon halves, and garlic cloves.
5. Roast: Place the turkey in a roasting pan. Tent with aluminum foil and roast. A general guideline is about 15 minutes per pound, or until the internal temperature reaches 165°F (74°C) at the thickest part of the thigh.
6. Rest and Serve: Let the turkey rest for at least 20 minutes before carving.
7. Next: Apple and Sage Stuffing
8. Dry the Bread: Spread the bread cubes on a baking sheet and let them dry overnight, or toast them in the oven.
9. Cook the Vegetables: In a large skillet, melt the butter and cook the onion, celery, and garlic until soft.
10. Combine Ingredients: Add the apples, sage, and bread cubes to the skillet. Stir in the chicken broth until the mixture is moist. Season with salt and pepper.
11. Bake: Transfer the stuffing to a baking dish and bake at 350°F (175°C) for about 30-40 minutes, until golden brown on top.

@ 8fb140b4:f948000c

Testing a brand new YakiHonne native client for iOS. Smooth as butter (not penis butter 🤣🍆🧈) with great visual experience and intuitive navigation. Amazing work by the team behind it! * lists * work

Bold text work!

Images could have used nostr.build instead of raw S3 from us-east-1 region.

Very impressive! You can even save the draft and continue later, before posting the long-form note!

🐶🐾🤯🤯🤯🫂💜

@ fa0165a0:03397073

I just tested building a browser plugin, it was easier than I thought. Here I'll walk you through the steps of creating a minimal working example of a browser plugin, a.k.a. the "Hello World" of browser plugins.

First of all there are two main browser platforms out there, Chromium and Mozilla. They do some things a little differently, but similar enough that we can build a plugin that works on both. This plugin will work in both, I'll describe the firefox version, but the chromium version is very similar.

What is a browser plugin?

Simply put, a browser plugin is a program that runs in the browser. It can do things like modify the content of a webpage, or add new functionality to the browser. It's a way to extend the browser with custom functionality. Common examples are ad blockers, password managers, and video downloaders.

In technical terms, they are plugins that can insert html-css-js into your browser experience.

How to build a browser plugin

Step 0: Basics

You'll need a computer, a text editor and a browser. For testing and development I personally think that the firefox developer edition is the easiest to work with. But any Chrome based browser will also do.

Create a working directory on your computer, name it anything you like. I'll call mine hello-world-browser-plugin. Open the directory and create a file called manifest.json. This is the most important file of your plugin, and it must be named exactly right.

Step 1: manifest.json

After creation open your file manifest.json in your text editor and paste the following code:

json { "manifest_version": 3, "name": "Hello World", "version": "1.0", "description": "A simple 'Hello World' browser extension", "content_scripts": [ { "matches": ["<all_urls>"], "js": ["hello.js"] //The name of your script file. // "css": ["hello.css"] //The name of your css file. } ] }

If you wonder what the json file format is, it's a normal text file with a special syntax such that a computer can easily read it. It's the json syntax you see in the code above. Let's go through what's being said here. (If you are not interested, just skip to the next step after pasting this we are done here.)

• manifest_version: This is the version of the manifest file format. It's currently at version 3, and it's the latest version. It's important that you set this to 3, otherwise your plugin won't work.
• name: This is the name of your plugin. It can be anything you like.
• version: This is the version of your plugin. It can be anything you like.
• description: This is the description of your plugin. It can be anything you like.
• content_scripts: This is where you define what your plugin does. It's a list of scripts that will be executed when the browser loads a webpage. In this case we have one script, called hello.js. It's the script that we'll create in the next step.
• matches: This is a list of urls that the script will be executed on. In this case we have <all_urls>, which means that the script will be executed on all urls. You can also specify a specific url, like https://brave.com/*, which means that the script will only be executed on urls that start with https://brave.com/.
• js: This is a list of javascript files that will be executed. In this case we have one file, called hello.js. It's the script that we'll create in the next step.
• css: This is where you can add a list of css files that will be executed. In this case we have none, but you can add css files here if you want to.
• //: Text following these two characters are comments. They are ignored by the computer, You can add comments anywhere you like, and they are a good way to document your code.

Step 2: hello.js

Now it's time to create another file in your project folder. This time we'll call it hello.js. When created, open it in your text editor and paste the following code:

js console.log("Hello World!"); That's javascript code, and it's what will be executed when you run your plugin. It's a simple console.log statement, which will print the text "Hello World!" to the console. The console is a place where the browser prints out messages, and it's a good place to start when debugging your plugin.

Step 3: Load and launch your plugin

Firefox

Now it's time to load your plugin into your browser. Open your browser and go to the url about:debugging#/runtime/this-firefox. You should see a page that looks something like this:

Click the button that says "Load Temporary Add-on...". A file dialog will open, navigate to your project folder and select the file manifest.json. Your plugin should now be loaded and running.

Go to a website, any website, and open the inspector then navigate to the console. You'll find the inspector by right-clicking anywhere within the webpage, and click "Inspector" in the drop-down menu. When opening the console you might see some log messages from the site you visited and... you should see the text "Hello World!" printed there, from our little plugin! Congratulations!

Chrome

Open your browser and go to the url chrome://extensions/. Click the button that says "Load unpacked". A file dialog will open, navigate to your project folder and select the folder hello-world-browser-plugin. Your plugin should now be loaded and running.

Note the difference, of selecting the file manifest.json in firefox, and selecting the folder hello-world-browser-plugin in chrome. Otherwise, the process is the same. So I'll repeat the same text as above: (for those who skipped ahead..)

Go to a website, any website, and open the inspector then navigate to the console. You'll find the inspector by right-clicking anywhere within the webpage, and click "Inspector" in the drop-down menu. When opening the console you might see some log messages from the site you visited and... you should see the text "Hello World!" printed there, from our little plugin! Congratulations!

---

As you can see this isn't as complicated as one might think. Having preformed a "Hello-World!"-project is a very useful and valuable first step. These setup steps are the basics for any browser plugin, and you can build on this to create more advanced plugins.

@ e8ed3798:67dd345a

This article has been translated into Japanese here: https://yakihonne.com/article/naddr1qq257w2t8qeksc6tdg6njnekdc6x55j0w56nvq3qarkn0xxxll4llgy9qxkrncn3vc4l69s0dz8ef3zadykcwe7ax3dqxpqqqp65wu2llgg

This article has been translated into French here: https://yakihonne.com/article/naddr1qq2h23jjwck4zajsv4485h68f5mj6c66vfmxuq3qarkn0xxxll4llgy9qxkrncn3vc4l69s0dz8ef3zadykcwe7ax3dqxpqqqp65wvsexdg

In this article we are going to explore the conceptual origins of the original metaverse called "cyberspace" and see how nostr finally enables it to exist as it was predicted in early science fiction. Then we will explore what cyberspace might be able to do for humanity and how you can contribute to this exciting new open-source metaverse project.

A Concept Obscured by Time

What is a "metaverse"? Ask 10 different people and you will get 10 different answers. Some will say that it is an online game where you can use and transfer crypto assets. Some will say it's a virtual reality experience with extrasensory input for things like smell and touch. Some will say that a metaverse is anywhere you can connect and express yourself digitally. And some may tell you the metaverse doesn't exist yet because we don't have the technology to make it happen.

It's hard to define what a metaverse is because nobody has convincingly built it yet. This is demonstrable by simply asking anyone to show you a metaverse. They may show you VR Chat, or Meta (Facebook), or the HoloLens or Apple Vision, or someone's Discord server or NFT ecosystem, or say "it's not real, and if it is it's probably stupid."

But how did we get here? Why do we all know about the metaverse but we can't define it and we don't even know what it looks like? Where did the idea of the metaverse come from? This answer will give us the conceptual background we need to untangle the question of "what is a metaverse" and see how cyberspace can exist today.

The word "metaverse" was first popularized in Neal Stephenson's 1992 book "Snow Crash", and he was in turn inspired by William Gibson's earlier 1984 book "Neuromancer" (and 2 other books in a trilogy called "The Sprawl"), which popularized the word "cyberspace" and "matrix" in reference to digital 3D spaces.

Accordingly, cyberspace preceded "the metaverse" by 8 years and serves as the foundation for our exploration. Gibson's cyberspace was a digital 3D world one could connect to via a cyberspace deck — a machine/brain interface — and interact with all the data in the entire world. Artificial Intelligences guarded data constructs and kept out intruders with lethal feedback programs that would fry human operator's brains. In the books, cyberspace is described as being used for pretty much everything: entertainment, education, communication, commerce, data storage, and crime, and it is used daily by billions of people throughout the world, including millions of people in orbital colonies.

Mysterious Properties

In Gibson's work, cyberspace has many fascinating qualities that, until nostr, remained very mysterious and seemed to be impossible. Here are some examples.

1. Cyberspace is Permissionless

Everyone can use cyberspace but nobody has full control over it; cyberspace seems to exist outside of every jurisdiction and system. It never goes down for maintenance or has connection issues or suffers security breaches. It seems to exist everywhere at once, even though it is explicitly stated that cyberspace was created by humanity. How can humanity create an uninterruptable, omnipresent digital system that nobody can control but everyone can use?

2. Power is Wielded Without Privilege

Certain people, corporations, and AI weilded greater levels of power in cyberspace than others, but the mechanism of that power was not derived from permissions or access levels or privileged administrator capabilities; rather, the power came from some mysterious other source that could not be granted, governed, or revoked by any law or system or authority. This power seemed also to be heavily influenced by...

3. Hardware and Skill

The hardware that people used to connect to cyberspace had a direct impact on their capabilities in cyberspace. There is a a specific example where a character uses a premium cyberspace deck and describes the speed and smoothness of their ability to fly through cyberspace. A short while later, this operator is captured and immobilized by another dangerously skilled operator, demonstrating that while the cyberspace hardware was top-tier, the operator's skill level was also a big factor governing interactions in cyberspace. This also demonstrates that conflict is possible in cyberspace. How is it possible that hardware directly correlates to your capacity for virtual action? How can someone else influence your actions against your will in this digital reality?

4. Space is Scarce

Bitcoin was the first scarce digital resource to ever exist, and having only been created 14 years ago, scarce digital resources are still a novel concept to humanity in 2023. In Gibson's cyberspace, territory was conquered, captured, and fought over, indicating that the space in cyberspace may be scarce or valuable in some way. How could it be possible to fight for digital territory or acquire it without any governing intermediary took keep track of who owns what?

5. Construction Has a Cost

Constructs, or cyberspace "buildings", required some kind of effort or cost to create, but it was not clear to whom this cost was paid or how the effort was expended.

The metaverse of Stephenson's "Snow Crash" shares many properties with Gibson's cyberspace, although Stephenson is somewhat opinionated with the literal shape of the metaverse. He depicts it as a street that wraps around a black planet, and the land off the street is where people build things and claim territory.

This metaverse similarly does not seem to be owned or controlled by any single entity, yet it is available to everyone in the world to connect, interact, and build in 24/7. It is not described as an application or piece of software, but rather a place that is the sum of other software created by many different parties with different interests and motivations.

Here are some mysterious traits of Stephenson's metaverse:

6. Rules without Rulers

The rules of the metaverse were never broken — not even by hackers or bad guys. How are rules enforced by a system nobody controls?

7. No Teleportation, Localized Rules

The metaverse had rules about where you could spawn in and how you move. Teleportation was not an option. Specialized vehicle software could make traveling easier. Rules for travel were enforced by the metaverse itself. Experiences in the metaverse were localized to constructs that implemented their own rules. For example, sword fighting was allowed in The Black Sun hacker haven because it was programmed to exist there; other places did not have such activities. How can certain places in cyberspace have unique rules separate from the rest of cyberspace? How is locality enforced in a digital system controlled by noone?

8. Customize Without Compromising Everything

People were able to customize how their avatars and constructs looked. How do you govern this so people don't abuse it? Without enforceable rules, one person could make their avatar be the size of the universe and ruin the metaverse for everyone.

9. Everything is Connected

Digital systems in the real world had a presence in the metaverse too, although they were far from commonly populated areas. How do real world systems relate to the metaverse?

I enumerate these points in order to provide some context for where the idea for "the metaverse" began. These two books were instrumental in originally defining what the metaverse was even though it raised many specific questions that naturally were never addressed. As I have said: if the authors knew how to build the things they wrote about, they might not need to sell any books at all! This is fiction after all. Specifics are not required, but I have been focused on uncovering these specifics in the context of new technologies such as bitcoin and nostr and I believe they may now be defined.

To summarize, here are the mysterious properties of cyberspace/the metaverse:

• Everyone can use it
• Nobody controls it
• It exists everywhere
• An individual's power is not granted by any system or authority but comes from their hardware and skill
• Individuals can weild their power against each other
• Territory is scarce and may be captured
• Constructs may be build on territory but have some kind of cost
• The system enforces rules on everyone, or somehow incentivises everyone to follow the rules — even bad actors
• locality is enforced and travel requires time
• certain localities have unique rules
• freedom to customize your avatar and constructs are bounded in some way to prevent total corruption and abuse of digital space
• there is some form of connection between real world digital systems and cyberspace

Nothing Like It

I want to make it very clear that no metaverse in existence today exhibits all of the above properties or even a few of them, and very few digital systems exhibit even one of these properties.

Before I discovered Neuromancer several months ago, my perception of "cyberspace" was that of a quaint, naive concept of what interconnected computer systems would become that never came to pass. I used to ironically refer to the internet as "cyberspace" when talking with other developers as a kind of humorous or self-important overemphasis. I thought that cyberspace was a cultural relic and a failed prediction of what the internet would be. The glossy, 3D wireframe neon world never materialized, and for this I've always felt a sense of loss of what could have been.

Why didn't cyberspace ever come into existence? As computers became more advanced and consumer-focused, they did not attempt to emulate a 3D space, but rather did the practical and sensible thing of emulating paper documents so people could get work done digitally.

As the internet became a household utility, centralized systems and applications were the first and only way that humanity knew to grow our collective capabilities online. Websites grew as they collected users and became behemoths. Ebay, Google, Amazon, PayPal. Although the internet itself was technically decentralized, decentralized systems and applications would come later when the problems with centralization became obvious as these internet giants started abusing their power.

As the internet continued to grow and resemble less and less the fictional worlds of cyberspace and the metaverse, these lofty ideas of digital 3D worlds turned into toys for most people — unnecessary but entertaining fluff. The notion of cyberspace faded into 80's retro culture and the word cyberspace was painfully repurposed to simply refer to the internet or networked systems collectively. This, however, is a terribly inaccurate use of the word. There is no space to speak of on the internet. But, sadly, the interet was the closest thing we have ever had to Gibson's vision of cyberspace, and it really wasn't close by any measure except that people all over the world use it for pretty much everything. All the other magical properties of cyberspace were simply forgotten. They were fiction. They weren't necessary. They weren't possible. There was no way to make it work and no reason to do so.

However, when reading these books from nearly 4 decades past, there is something poignant to me in the fact that across these various works by various authors, the metaverse (or cyberspace) posesses consistent properties that no author is willing to alter. What is so inviolate about a fictional concept that would make it so consistent across works? Perhaps there is a kernel of truth in what is imagined, and that truth is so compelling that it must be repeated until it crosses the veil between idea and reality.

Reality And Cyberspace

I have always been fascinated by technology's ability to improve our lives, and I have strived to create consequential software my entire life, like video games played via fitness watches and augmented reality navigation web apps, but it wasn't until I read Softwar that I realized something profound.

In reality, I am able to do anything I want as long as I have the thermodynamic energy to do it.

It may not be legal or socially acceptable, but if I have the energy to do something, I can. Likewise, if someone wants to stop me from doing something, they can't unless they also expend enough energy to stop me.

This means that reality is permissionless, because nobody can disallow my actions. It also means reality is thermodynamic, because every action has a cost that must be paid to the universe in the form of entropy.

Conversely, in digital systems, the amount of energy you have is irrelevant. The things you can do are only the things you are allowed to do by the permissioned system, or, the things you can trick the system into letting you do. This means that within a digital system, you always have a severely limited subset of available actions, and your ability to execute those actions has nothing to do with your thermodynamic potential and everything to do with the permissions you are granted by others. No matter how strong my muscles are or how clever I am, I can't do more than a digital system allows me to do, and even if I hack it, I still can't do anything I want — only more than I'm supposed to.

Almost all digital systems and software are permissioned and non-thermodynamic.

This is why, fundamentally, no metaverse that has ever been built actually matters. This is why no video game keeps you interested in it forever, because the actions that you can do and the extent to which you can do them are arbitrarily disconnected from your ability to act in reality. It's "just a game" — a limited subset of reality.

This isn't fundamentally a bad thing. Obviously, software has done a lot for humanity. And software-based rules have been used in many contexts to keep things fair for everybody. Except, unfortunately, digital systems are never truly fair. There's always a programmer who wrote the rules. There's always an admin above you. There's always a hacker. And there's always someone with more permissions than you who can restrict your potential. Compared to reality, this seems arbitrary and capricious. At least in reality, the universe to which you pay your entropy costs is truly, terribly impartial and unbiased. This is why thermodynamic systems are fundamentally fair; even though it may not seem fair to you it is truly fair to everyone.

Reality is a permissionless, thermodynamic protocol, and almost nothing in the digital world resembles this whatsoever.

Nostr, however, is permissionless. Until now you may not have considered this to be a fundamental property of our universe, but it is, and the fact that nostr exhibits this same property is quite compelling. In fact, any system that is truly permissionless (of which there are very few) seems to have the magic ability to capture people's imaginations in ways that no other digital system can. Things such as bitcoin, perhaps the most famous permissionless digital system, has such broad and profound effects on people who grasp it that they have been known in some cases (such as Andreas M. Antonopoulos') to stop eating, stop sleeping, research it obsessively, and completely change their entire way of life. How's that for consequential software?

Like bitcoin, nostr can also be thermodynamic via proof-of-work (NIP-13). And with the combination of these two properties, which are shared with reality, we are suddenly able to dispell every single mystery we've encountered regarding cyberspace.

Proof-of-work is the secret ingredient to dissolve the fiction in the science fiction of cyberspace.

A Mystery Solved About Cyberspace and Bitcoin

The reason that the properties of cyberspace and the metaverse are so mysterious is because they are actually properties of reality, but inside a digital system.

In reality, it is no surprise that your hardware and skill affects your ability. No surprise that your work determines your power. No surprise that you can't teleport and must travel using energy. No surprise that building constructs or customizing yourself takes effort and cost. No surprise that territory is scarce and must be defended. No surprise that conflict happens between people. All of this is so completely normal that it's easy to overlook.

The reason these things in Neuromancer and Snow Crash and other works about the metaverse seemed so mysterious is because they weren't possible to model in a digital space. These authors took properties of reality and put them in a digital space, and it seemed amazing because nobody knew how it could actually work.

This is how it is possible: you design a digital system that has the same fundamental properties as reality. It must be permissionless. It must be thermodynamic. Then you have a system wherein cyberspace can exist.

Nostr is the fulfillment of these requirements. Like bitcoin, nostr has captured the imaginations of thousands of early adopters and developers. The magic is there. But few may realize why it is feels so magical. The answer is that when you make a digital system that can model reality's own properties, you have created an extension of reality itself. This is one of the most significant discoveries in human history, because a digital extension of reality can allow humanity to connect, collaborate, and grow in a place where their physical diatance does not matter. Barring any major advancements in spacefaring technology, cyberspace will be the most significant departure from earth you may experience in your lifetime.

I posit that a virtual action which is permissionless and thermodynamic is as real as a physical action, except the consequences of that action happen in the digital space rather than the physical one. It's not quite reality, but it is like a mirror. It is a true extension of reality. Nothing in it is disconnected from the real world. And therefore, unlike any other digital system, it can be truly consequential.

Healthy Skepticism

Wait a minute, you may say. Cyberspace is still just a digital way of communicating. Isn't email and texting and video chat good enough? Why do we need cyberspace? How could it possibly be so important to humanity?

This is a great question.

One may ask similar questions about bitcoin. Don't we already have digital money? Why do we need absolutely scarce, decentralized censorship-resistant money?

Or about nostr: why do we need another way to transmit text? What good is it to be decentralized and censorship resistant?

Like bitcoin, cyberspace makes something digital into a scarce resource, but instead of enabling the capture of time (on a timechain) cyberspace enables the capture of scarce space (in a construct or your movement chain).

In the physical world, our movement can easily be censored. Our expression of power is censored. Our capture of space is censored. Not so in cyberspace. The only thing that matters in cyberspace is the thermodynamic energy you exert — just like in reality, but minus the permissioned (artificial) power structures of governments and laws.

Just as bitcoin doesn't care who you are or who you are transmitting value to, cyberspace doesn't care who you are or where you are moving to or where you are claiming space.

Consequences of Proof-of-Work in Detail

I'd like to enumerate the specific ways in which proof-of-work in nostr demystifies the mysterious properties of cyberspace mentioned earlier.

- Everyone can use cyberspace but nobody has full control over it.

Just replace "cyberspace" with "nostr" and the above statement is already true. If we build cyberspace on nostr, then cyberspace will inherit these properties.

- Certain people, corporations, and AI weilded greater levels of power in cyberspace than others

If we base an entity's power on their thermodynamic output via proof-of-work, then we have a permissionless way for cyberspace participants to enact their real thermodynamic potential in cyberspace to whatever degree they choose.

- The hardware that people used to connect to cyberspace had a direct impact on their capabilities in cyberspace.

If all actions in cyberspace are thermodynamic like in reality, then hardware capable of greater amounts of proof-of-work will enable more powerful actions. Mobile phone, desktop computer, or ASIC farm: take your pick.

- Territory in cyberspace was conquered, captured, and fought over, indicating that it may be scarce or valuable in some way. Constructing had a cost.

The territory in cyberspace is the maximum 3-dimensional coordinate space that can be represented by 256 bits. In cryptography, nostr, and bitcoin, 256-bit numbers are very commonly used along with mathematical functions like SHA-256 that process data in blocks of 256, so it is a good "round" amount of information to work with.

You can divide a 256-bit number into X, Y, and Z coordinates that are each 85 bits long. This leaves 1 extra least-significant bit from the 256 bits that is ignored.

This means that each axis of cyberspace is 2^85 units long.

Space can be claimed by publishing a construct event whose event ID is the coordinate. The event ID is obtained from hashing the event (standard process for all events in the nostr protocol). This means the event ID can be mined to obtain the coordinates you desire (or at least something close by).

If two constructs overlap, the one with the most proof-of-work wins. This is how territory can be contested in a permissionless way in cyberspace, as alluded to in Gibson's works.

The cost of construction is the proof-of-work, and the maintenance of that territory by proof-of-work is the digital analogy of either paying taxes to a government who will protect your land, or, protecting your land with your own thermodynamic energy. Notice how money, also known as time, is inextricably linked to the ownership of property in reality and now also in cyberspace. If property were free to own and maintain, would it be worth anything at all?

I have been presented with the argument that it does not cost you anything to hold bitcoin, so constructs or cyberspace real estate should be no different. To this I say that for you to hold your bitcoin, a tremendous amount of cost is expended by all the miners in the world. If not for them, your bitcoin would be double-spent or stolen by invalid transactions. The validity of your unmoving bitcoin requires the continual, perpetual operation of the largest computer network in the world. So, continual energy expenditure to secure your property is true with bitcoin, cyberspace, and all of your things in reality as well.

Unlike bitcoin, whose value lies in the entire network, constructs are valuable only to their owner. Therefore, it is the responsibility of the construct's owner to defend it.

More complex symbiotic relationships in construct defense may be borne out of the perpetual fight for survival inherent in any thermodynamic system. But this is only speculation.

Enforcing rules universally

As with any protocol, deviation excludes you from it and submission grants a share in its value. Forking the cyberspace meta-protocol, whether by disobeying its rules or rewriting them, results in an irreconcilable forking of digital reality. The value of cyberspace as a protocol depends on network effects like any protocol, and the first-mover has a strong advantage in any protocol war. Additionally, as all actions require proof-of-work and must be chained together, the sum of your history in cyberspace is put at risk of invalidation should you deviate from the protocol everyone else is following.

Ultimately I believe that the purpose of cyberspace should be to imbue humanity with new capabilities and opportunities, and I think that it will, simply by virtue of the fact that it is built on a protocol and interoperates with protocols that likewise imbue humanity with new capabilities and opportunities (notsr, bitcoin, and TCP-IP). I desire that cyberspace will be flexible and capable enough to support as many use-cases as possible as long as the fundamental properties are preserved as axiomatic non-negotiables. Cyberspace itself must be both permissionless and thermodynamic. Without these properties, cyberspace becomes just another digital illusion apart from reality.

Flexibility, locality, and customzation

With these axioms in mind, I think it would be very smart to create a method of defining construct-level rules that exist only within certain spaces. This would allow for custom interactions and systems to exist in the fabric of cyberspace, making it very flexible and local. Any such system or customization, even if cosmetic, must impose a fundamental thermodynamic cost. The details of how this could work are yet to be developed, but the blueprints of fiction, our axioms, and our ingenuity will lead us to it.

The metaverse of things

Because nostr is a web-friendly protocol, it is trivial to connect anything to cyberspace. I love to tell the tale of how I witnessed an early 2022 conversation between someone and (if I remember correctly) Will Casarin's smart dishwasher that was posting kind 1 status updates to nostr. If someone can talk to a smart dishwasher over nostr, then the Metaverse of Things already exists. However, the degree to which these things expose themselves to the metaverse should follow the same security model as for the internet at large. Unlike in fiction, I doubt anyone will allow sufficient proof-of-work be the only prequisite for commandeering a real-world system. That's ok. Ultimately, the relationship between reality and cyberspace isn't meant to be a 1:1 map. Digital systems only really ought to participate in cyberspace if they share the same properties as cyberspace. Most digital systems are permissioned and non-thermodynamic, and therefore do not have a compelling reason to exist in cyberspace. But anything is indeed possible.

Chasing a Ghost or Following a Blueprint?

I'd like to make the distinction that the purpose of a construct (and of most things) in the real-world cyberspace is not necessarily the same as in Gibson's literary cyberspace nor in Stephenson's literary metaverse. But the fundamental properties as depicted remain the same, and it is enabled by proof-of-work.

Remember, the remarkable thing about Gibson's cyberspace is that it is a digital world that functions like reality — there is egalitarian conflict resolution, scarce space, and universally enforced rules. The cyberspace meta-protocol likewise enables a digital system to function like space in reality. The motivations and reasons behind this digital system may be completely different than in the books, but that doesn't mean the mechanisms are any less accurate.

My goal is not to reproduce Gibson's and Stephenson's work in reality. The properties of this fiction are compelling, and the implementation and usage of cyberspace will completely depend on free market forces — exactly as it should be. It is not for me to decide. These works opened the conceptual pathway to creating this new thermodynamic digital reality. The human motivations and actions that shape cyberspace will undoubtedly cause it to look plenty different than depicted in the books, while the funamental properties remain identical.

Throughout the process of designing the cyberspace meta-protocol I have tried to keep it as simple and fundamental as possible, using these books as my guidepost. Whether these authors realized it or not, their depictions of cyberspace and the metaverse were extremely consistent and coherent, which makes not only for great fiction and believability but also for a great guide to follow in developing a real system.

Step Into Cyberspace

I'd like to provide some concrete examples of how cyberspace works so that the concepts presented herein are not without application.

NOSTR in 3 minutes

To interact with cyberspace, one must simply publish certain "kinds" of nostr events. If you are not familiar with nostr, here is a short explanation. Nostr is made up of people running clients, which are just apps like on your phone or desktop, and people running relays, which are like servers that store events. Clients download streams of events from relays in real time. Clients can also publish events to relays. Publishing an event is like sending a tweet. Clients normally publish the same event to many relays at once. As long as you send the tweet to at least one relay that your friend is connected to, they will see your tweet. Anyone can run a relay or build a client and connect to whichever relays they want. In this way, nostr is permissionless and decentralized.

A "kind 1" event is essentially a tweet, but there are other kinds of events, each represented by a number. A kind 0 event is what you publish when you update your profile with a new bio or screen name. Anyone may make up a new kind of event and assign it any number, except it would be poorly supported if you used a number that is already accepted as part of the nostr protocol for another purpose than you are using it for. Luckily, there are a lot of numbers to go around.

A private/public keypair is an anonymous cryptographic identity, and it can be used for secure communication, storage of bitcoin, and other various things. The keys themselves are just unfathomly large unguessable numbers represented in the hexadecimal number system which includes numbers 0-9 and a-f (base 16 instead of base 10). When you publish an event on nostr, it is signed by your private key, and the event contains your public key. This allows anyone to verify that the event is legitimately from that public key, which presumably only a certain person controls. In this way, nobody can forge or tamper with events without invalidating them, because the signature would not match the public key.

Meta-protocol

This is why I refer to cyberspace as a meta-protocol because it is simply a specific way of publishing and interpreting specific event kinds over nostr and visualizing them in a 3D space.

Drift

To move in cyberspace, you must publish a kind 333 event, referred to as a Drift event. This event contains your 3D cyberspace coordinates, your direction, your existing velocity, a reference to your previous Drift event, and proof-of-work to add velocity by your direction. The amount of proof-of-work on the drift event determines your acceleration. Proof-of-work can be added to any nostr event by choosing an amount of work, represented by the number of leading binary zeroes on the event's ID, and hashing the event with a different nonce until the target amount of work is reached. This process is specified in NIP-13.

Each Drift event may be validated by running the coordinates and velocity through a standardized cyberspace algorithm (currently being developed) to verify that the value changes from one drift event to the next are within a tolerable range of error. It is in effect a way of simulating the movement within a physics system in order to validate that the movements did not break the rules of cyberspace physics. In this way, every participant in cyberspace is a validator of everyone else they are physically near.

When a drift event is signed, the reference to the previous drift event is included in the signature. This creates, in effect, a personal verifiable hash chain history of your movements and actions in cyberspace that anyone else can verify.

Dishonesty and Punishment

In order to encourage people to be honest about their movement chains, anyone who finds an invalid — or "broken" — movement chain may punish its owner by publishing a Derezz event on it, which will invalidate all movement chains and proof-of-work owned by the victim and teleport them back to their home coordinate where they originally spawned when they first used cyberspace. This is effectively a respawn. You start from scratch, but you can keep your constructs.

One can easily lie about their movement chains and teleport anywhere at any time. But on nostr, for the most part, events cannot be deleted. Therefore, a cheater will leave a bright trail by which others may cyber-kill them via Derezz. A broken movement chain is like a ghost copy of the cheater that can't move. For deeper protocol reasons that the adventurous may explore in the spec, this makes the ghost copy extra vulnerable to Derezz.

A cheater may choose to ignore the Derezz attack and continue to teleport where desired. Nothing in nostr or cyberspace can stop this. But to everyone else who follows the protocol, this type of behavior can easily be ignored. The habitual cheater may as well be a ghost, as their thermodynamic actions will be ignored by everyone else who has chosen to obey the protocol. The cheater might redeem themselves by publishing a very long valid chain of events, but this probationary period may be too demanding for habitual protocol breakers. Other aggressive actions may be leveled against cheaters, making their operation in cyberspace unproductive, difficult, and dangerous.

A cheater in cyberspace is an easy target. As the punishment of cheaters is a noble act of justice rather than an evil act of predation, I expect cheaters in cyberspace to be punished with great swiftness and mirth.

Incentives for honest movement legitimize the spatial aspect of cyberspace. In cyberspace, space is real and consequential. Traversing it has a cost. No two places are funamentally the same because there is a real cost to visit them. And all space is scarce, because of the hard limit of the 2^85 coordinate system, which was chosen to be compatible with the most popular mining agorithm in the world, SHA-256.

Other actions

To read all about the different kinds of events one can publish to interact with cyberspace, check out (and contribute!) to the official cyberspace specification here: https://github.com/arkin0x/cyberspace

In this specification you will find technical implementation details for clients to interact with the cyberspace meta-protocol, including definitions of other actions that may be taken by operators, including:

• manipulating "gravity" to affect other operators
• creating proof-of-work armor against Derezz
• cloaking one's location with stealth
• and more!

Ubiquity and Omnipresence of Cyberspace

A very interesting recent development is an open-source project called nostrmesh by lnbits that enables anyone to host a nostr relay on a small mesh-networked device, such as an Arduino. Imagine a network of billions of these devices, scattered across the globe, running on battieries and solar panels, each contributing to the infrastructure of cyberspace — a decentralized, omnipresent digital cosmos, accessible from virtually anywhere. This level of ubiquity brings us one step closer to the vision of Gibson's work, where cyberspace becomes an integral part of our daily lives and can be found everywhere — even in outer space!

With such a ubiquitous and omnipresent network, the spatial limitations of cyberspace extend far beyond conventional digital boundaries, intertwining with our physical world in a way that was once the domain of science fiction. The implications of this development are enormous and lay the foundation for the potential uses and influence of cyberspace, which we will explore in the following section.

Consequences of Cyberspace

It is difficult to predict whether cyberspace will find its place in the daily lives of billions or be forgotten once again. However, the foundations of cyberspace are inextricably linked to technologies that have been developed and adopted for the sake of human freedom and personal rights: public key cryptography, hashing, proof-of-work, bitcoin, and nostr.

As one who takes science fiction seriously enough to remove the fiction from it entirely, I find speculation to be invaluable. One cannot go where the imagination does not first lead. Our entire perception of the world is parsed from an abstraction created by our minds. We automatically assign meaning to inherently meaningless things — symbols, patterns, etc. Fiction is our reality, and our perception of the world is the sum of logical patterns within this fiction. Therefore, let us do what we do best and create fiction, or speculate, without hesitation.

I personally envision cyberspace to be a place of commerce and social organization. Constructs enable people to claim cyber land. They can use this land to design interactive experiences that are governed by localized rules and thernodynamics. The Lightning network enables instant transfer of value through cyberspace, facilitating the transaction of information, services, cyber experiences, digital and physical goods.

Use cases include shopping, gaming, gambling, competitions, live cyber events, virtual-presence social gatherings, virtual protests, collaborative spaces, advertising, education, tourism, development of cyberspace-based applications, data visualization, research, social networking, and even more that we haven't imagined yet.

Conclusion

As we venture into the vast digital landscapes of cyberspace, we are not simply traversing through lifeless data, but immersing ourselves in a consequential world that reflects the order and complexity of our physical reality. This revolutionary approach to cyberspace isn't merely a mirage of science fiction, but a tangible exploration of its key principles, built on the bedrock of public key cryptography, hashing, proof-of-work, bitcoin, and nostr.

Through the implementation of a meta-protocol layered over nostr, cyberspace opens a myriad of opportunities – drifting through the boundless expanses of the digital cosmos, crafting personal domains, or engaging in vibrant social interactions. Just as actions in the physical world carry costs and consequences, so too does cyberspace enforce its own unique set of rules and repercussions, fostering a sense of shared responsibility, fairness, and cooperation among its denizens.

Envisioned as a playground for creativity, commerce, and social organization, cyberspace, in its current formative state, already shows tremendous potential for an expansive array of use cases. Its inherent thermodynamic properties and permissionless nature offer a groundbreaking amalgamation of digital and physical realities, poised to profoundly augment our capabilities, experiences, and opportunities in a dynamic, inclusive, global, and consequential realm.

However, the most exciting aspect of cyberspace is not merely what it currently offers, but its potential to continuously evolve and redefine itself. As more people engage with and contribute to its development, it's bound to expand and morph in ways we can hardly fathom today.

As we stand on the cusp of this digital frontier, we are not chasing after phantoms of fiction. Instead, we are architects and pioneers of a revolutionary new realm, where digital existence converges with physical principles. This remarkable blend of technology and human imagination sets the stage for an unprecedented era of exploration and innovation, signaling a future that is as exciting as it is unpredictable.

Join me on this grand endeavor to shape cyberspace, to mold this new frontier into a shared and diverse digital world that reflects the best of human spirit and ingenuity. Together, let's step into cyberspace, the frontier of the future.

Build with me

Cyberspace is for humanity, and therefore I desire as many humans to be involved in its construction as possible. I have created the following resources for anyone who wants to learn more or get involved:

Join the ONOSENDAI Telegram group: https://t.me/ONOSENDAITECH

I love answering questions! Please hop in and ask away!

Pull requests welcome on the spec: https://github.com/arkin0x/cyberspace

Check out the first cyberspace client, ONOSENDAI: https//onosendai.tech (thermodynamics still in development)

Pull requests welcome on ONOSENDAI: https://github.com/arkin0x/ONOSENDAI

whoami

My name is Nick. I go by arkinox. I have been making websites since I was 11 and designing games since I was 4. I've been the director of web for a midwest marketing firm for 10 years and the co-founder and senior vice president of an augmented reality company, innovatar.io, for 4 years.

Support FOSS

If you would like to support development of this protocol I would love for you to get involved. Also, I am accepting donations and looking for opportunities to pursue it full time.

Follow me on nostr: npub1arkn0xxxll4llgy9qxkrncn3vc4l69s0dz8ef3zadykcwe7ax3dqrrh43w

Zap me with Bitcoin Lightning: arkinox@getalby.com

---

Soli Deo gloria

@ 8fb140b4:f948000c

As the title states, scratch behind my ear and you get it. 🐶🐾🫡

@ 82341f88:fbfbe6a2

There’s a lot of conversation around the #TwitterFiles. Here’s my take, and thoughts on how to fix the issues identified.

I’ll start with the principles I’ve come to believe…based on everything I’ve learned and experienced through my past actions as a Twitter co-founder and lead:

1. Social media must be resilient to corporate and government control.
2. Only the original author may remove content they produce.
3. Moderation is best implemented by algorithmic choice.

The Twitter when I led it and the Twitter of today do not meet any of these principles. This is my fault alone, as I completely gave up pushing for them when an activist entered our stock in 2020. I no longer had hope of achieving any of it as a public company with no defense mechanisms (lack of dual-class shares being a key one). I planned my exit at that moment knowing I was no longer right for the company.

The biggest mistake I made was continuing to invest in building tools for us to manage the public conversation, versus building tools for the people using Twitter to easily manage it for themselves. This burdened the company with too much power, and opened us to significant outside pressure (such as advertising budgets). I generally think companies have become far too powerful, and that became completely clear to me with our suspension of Trump’s account. As I’ve said before, we did the right thing for the public company business at the time, but the wrong thing for the internet and society. Much more about this here: https://twitter.com/jack/status/1349510769268850690

I continue to believe there was no ill intent or hidden agendas, and everyone acted according to the best information we had at the time. Of course mistakes were made. But if we had focused more on tools for the people using the service rather than tools for us, and moved much faster towards absolute transparency, we probably wouldn’t be in this situation of needing a fresh reset (which I am supportive of). Again, I own all of this and our actions, and all I can do is work to make it right.

Back to the principles. Of course governments want to shape and control the public conversation, and will use every method at their disposal to do so, including the media. And the power a corporation wields to do the same is only growing. It’s critical that the people have tools to resist this, and that those tools are ultimately owned by the people. Allowing a government or a few corporations to own the public conversation is a path towards centralized control.

I’m a strong believer that any content produced by someone for the internet should be permanent until the original author chooses to delete it. It should be always available and addressable. Content takedowns and suspensions should not be possible. Doing so complicates important context, learning, and enforcement of illegal activity. There are significant issues with this stance of course, but starting with this principle will allow for far better solutions than we have today. The internet is trending towards a world were storage is “free” and infinite, which places all the actual value on how to discover and see content.

Which brings me to the last principle: moderation. I don’t believe a centralized system can do content moderation globally. It can only be done through ranking and relevance algorithms, the more localized the better. But instead of a company or government building and controlling these solely, people should be able to build and choose from algorithms that best match their criteria, or not have to use any at all. A “follow” action should always deliver every bit of content from the corresponding account, and the algorithms should be able to comb through everything else through a relevance lens that an individual determines. There’s a default “G-rated” algorithm, and then there’s everything else one can imagine.

The only way I know of to truly live up to these 3 principles is a free and open protocol for social media, that is not owned by a single company or group of companies, and is resilient to corporate and government influence. The problem today is that we have companies who own both the protocol and discovery of content. Which ultimately puts one person in charge of what’s available and seen, or not. This is by definition a single point of failure, no matter how great the person, and over time will fracture the public conversation, and may lead to more control by governments and corporations around the world.

I believe many companies can build a phenomenal business off an open protocol. For proof, look at both the web and email. The biggest problem with these models however is that the discovery mechanisms are far too proprietary and fixed instead of open or extendable. Companies can build many profitable services that complement rather than lock down how we access this massive collection of conversation. There is no need to own or host it themselves.

Many of you won’t trust this solution just because it’s me stating it. I get it, but that’s exactly the point. Trusting any one individual with this comes with compromises, not to mention being way too heavy a burden for the individual. It has to be something akin to what bitcoin has shown to be possible. If you want proof of this, get out of the US and European bubble of the bitcoin price fluctuations and learn how real people are using it for censorship resistance in Africa and Central/South America.

I do still wish for Twitter, and every company, to become uncomfortably transparent in all their actions, and I wish I forced more of that years ago. I do believe absolute transparency builds trust. As for the files, I wish they were released Wikileaks-style, with many more eyes and interpretations to consider. And along with that, commitments of transparency for present and future actions. I’m hopeful all of this will happen. There’s nothing to hide…only a lot to learn from. The current attacks on my former colleagues could be dangerous and doesn’t solve anything. If you want to blame, direct it at me and my actions, or lack thereof.

As far as the free and open social media protocol goes, there are many competing projects: @bluesky is one with the AT Protocol, nostr another, Mastodon yet another, Matrix yet another…and there will be many more. One will have a chance at becoming a standard like HTTP or SMTP. This isn’t about a “decentralized Twitter.” This is a focused and urgent push for a foundational core technology standard to make social media a native part of the internet. I believe this is critical both to Twitter’s future, and the public conversation’s ability to truly serve the people, which helps hold governments and corporations accountable. And hopefully makes it all a lot more fun and informative again.

💸🛠️🌐 To accelerate open internet and protocol work, I’m going to open a new category of #startsmall grants: “open internet development.” It will start with a focus of giving cash and equity grants to engineering teams working on social media and private communication protocols, bitcoin, and a web-only mobile OS. I’ll make some grants next week, starting with $1mm/yr to Signal. Please let me know other great candidates for this money.

@ 8fb140b4:f948000c

Test Bounty Note

@ c75622fd:a9b66e1d

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@ 3bf0c63f:aefa459d

What is better than bounties and grants?

The experience with bounties from HRF wasn't great. No one has answered to the calls for implementing what they wanted because the work was too much and the risk of not getting paid very real. The experience with grants in general from Spiral is also not great: many random developers making cool but useless projects, wasted money.

The two kinds of open-source financial support that have worked so far are:

1. Paying people who are already doing useful work so they can continue doing that. That is the experience of some people who are "maintaining" Bitcoin Core, for example, or other open-source projects. You're doing a thing, you've proven yourself valuable and you definitely seem to be interested in that personally such that you don't need a boss telling you what to do, so take the money and just keep doing that.
2. Structured open-source initiatives, like the LDK effort. Although LDK is arguably useless, it has a stated goal and that goal is being delivered. I don't have any knowledge about how its development process works, but they have people being paid and "bosses" that direct the work to be done, as any team needs. So it is not the same as an open grant.

The thing that is missing is a way to provide these open loose grants to people that don't require bosses, but also that don't just pick a winner and let them do whatever stupid idea they might have (Spiral grants), and also do not mandate that they do something big before being paid and offers no guarantee of that they will be paid whatsoever.

The solution: smaller flexible bounties in large quantities

My suggestions is: instead of giving 1 bitcoin for a huge very specific project, state some "principles", or "problems", in a loose manner, that you want to see solved. For example, "we, the organization X, wants to see projects that use zero-knowledge proofs to help Bitcoin somehow, because we love zero-knowledge proofs".

Then state that you're going to give 20 grants of 0.05 bitcoins each, at random times, for projects that you see being done that may be on the right track.

That will tilt people that may had a small inclination to work on these problems to actually start doing something, and if they see that what they're doing is being appreciated and awarded with a payment, they will be more incentivized to finish it. There could even be a conditional bounty (like HRF did with Cashu) for finishing the project with certain requirements, but this only works after some structure is already in place for a certain project.

@ 3bf0c63f:aefa459d

On Bitcoin Bounties

The HRF has awarded two bounties yesterday. The episode exposes some of the problems of the bounties and grants culture that exists on Bitcoin.

First, when the bounties were announced, almost an year ago, I felt they were very hard to achieve (and also very useless, but let's set that aside).

The first, "a wallet that integrates bolt12 so it can receive tips noncustodially", could be understood as a bounty for mobile wallets only, in which case the implementation would be hacky, hard and take a lot of time; or it could be understood as being valid for any wallet, in which case it was already implemented in CLN (at the time called "c-lightning"), so the bounty didn't make sense.

The second, a wallet with a noncustodial US dollar balance, is arguably impossible, since there is no way to achieve it without trusted oracles, therefore it is probably invalid. If one assumed that trust was fine, then it was already implemented by StandardSats at the time. It felt it was designed to use some weird construct like DLCs -- and Chris Steward did publish a guide on how to implement a wallet that would be eligible for the bounty using DLCs, therefore the path seemed to be set there, but this would be a very hard and time-intensive thing.

The third, a noncustodial wallet with optional custodial ecash functionality, seemed to be targeting Fedimint directly, which already existed at the time and was about to release exactly these features.

Time passed and apparently no one tried to claim any of these bounties. My explanation is that, at least for 1 and 2, it was so hard to get it done that no one would risk trying and getting rejected. It is better for a programmer to work on something that interests them directly if they're working for free.

For 3 I believe no one even tried anything because the bounty was already set to be given to Fedimint.

Fast-forward to today and bounties 1 and 3 were awarded to two projects that were created by the sole interest of the developers with no attempt to actually claim these bounties -- and indeed, the two winners strictly do not qualify according to the descriptions from last year.

What if someone was working for months on trying to actually fulfill the criteria? That person would be in a very bad shape now, having thrown away all the work. Considering this it was a very good choice for everyone involved to not try to claim any of the bounties.

The winners have merit only in having pursued their own interests and in creating useful programs as the result. I'm sure the bounties do not feel to them like a deserved payment for the specific work they did, but more like a token of recognition for having worked on Bitcoin-related stuff at all, and an incentive to continue to work.

What is better than bounties and grants?

@ 3bf0c63f:aefa459d

A prediction market as a distributed set of oracle federations

See also: Truthcoin as a spacechain.

This is not Truthcoin, but hopefully the essence of what makes it good is present here: permissionless, uncensorable prediction markets for fun, profit, making cheap talk expensive and revolutionizing the emergence and diffusion of knowledge in society.

The idea

The idea is just to reuse Fedimint's codebase to implement federated oracle corporations that will host individual prediction markets inside them.

Pegging in and out of a federation can be done through Lightning gateways, and once inside the federation users can buy and sell shares of individual markets using a native LMSR market-maker.

Then we make a decentralized directory of these bets using something simple like Nostr so everybody can just join any market very easily.

Why?

The premise of this idea is that we can't have a centralized prediction market platform because governments will shut it down, but we can instead have a pseudonymous oracle corporation that also holds the funds being gambled at each time in a multisig Bitcoin wallet and hope for the best.

Each corporation may exist to host a single market and then vanish afterwards -- its members returning later to form a new corporation and host a new market before leaving again.

There is custodial risk, but the fact that the members may accrue reputation as the time passes and that this is not one big giant multisig holding all the funds of everybody but one multisig for each market makes it so this is slightly better.

In any case, no massive amounts are expected to be used in this scheme, which defeats some of the use cases of prediction markets (funding public goods, for example), but since these are so advanced and society is not yet ready for them, we can leave them for later and first just try to get some sports betting working.

This proto-truthcoin implementation should work just well enough to increase the appetite of bitcoiners and society in general for more powerful prediction markets.

Why is this better than DLCs?

Because DLCs have no liquidity. In their current implementations and in all future plans from DLC enthusiasts they don't even have order books. They're not seen very much as general-purpose prediction markets, but mostly as a way to create monetary instruments and derivatives.

They could work as prediction markets, but then they would need order books and order books are terrible for liquidity. LMSR market makers are much better.

But it is custodial!

If you make a public order book tied to known oracles using a DLC the oracle may also be considered custodial since it becomes really easy for him to join multiple trades as a counterpart then lie and steal the money. The bets only really "discreet" if they're illiquid meaningless bets between two guys. If they're happening in a well-known public place they're not discreet anymore.

DLC proponents may say this can be improved by users using multiple oracles and forming effectively a federation between them, but that is hardly different from choosing a reputable oracle corporation in this scheme and trusting that for the life of the bet.

But Hivemind is better!

Yes.

@ 3bf0c63f:aefa459d

Formula for making games with satoshis

I think the only way to do in-game sats and make the game more interesting instead of breaking the mechanics is by doing something like

1. Asking everybody to pay the same amount to join;
2. They get that same amount inside the game as balances;
3. They must use these balances to buy items to win the game;
4. The money they used becomes available as in-game rewards for other players;
5. They must spend some money otherwise they just lose all the time;
6. They can't use too much because if they run out of money they are eliminated.

If you think about it, that's how poker mostly works, and it's one of the few games in which paying money to play makes the game more interesting and not less.

In Poker:

1. Everybody pays the same amount to join.
2. Everybody gets that amount in tokens or whatever, I don't know, this varies;
3. Everybody must pay money to bet on each hand;
4. The money used on each round is taken by the round winner;
5. If you don't bet you can't play the rounds, you're just eliminated;
6. If you go all-in all the time like a mad person you'll lose.

In a game like Worms, for example, this could be something like:

1. Idem;
2. Idem;
3. You must use money to buy guns and ammunitions;
4. Whatever you spent goes to a pot for the winners or each round -- or maybe it goes to the people that contributed in killing you;
5. If you don't buy any guns you're useless;
6. If you spend everything on a single gun that's probably unwise.

You can also apply this to games like Counter-Strike or Dota or even Starcraft or Bolo and probably to most games as long as they have a fixed duration with a fixed set of players.

The formula is not static nor a panacea. There is room for creativity on what each player can spend their money in and how the spent money is distributed during the game. Some hard task of balancing and incentivizing is still necessary so the player that starts winning doesn't automatically win for having more money as the game goes on.

@ 3bf0c63f:aefa459d

Doing automatic payouts to users on the Lightning Network

No service wants to keep users balances forever or "become a custodian", as that may have some complications dependending on who is doing it.

But the sad truth is that there is no way to do automatic payouts to users on the Lightning Network. So if you're running a marketplace or a game of some kind that takes sats from some users, does something, then sends sats out to other users, you must keep a table with balances for each user.

-- But I can ask for a Lightning Address!

No, you can't, because mobile users of noncustodial wallets do not have those things generally, and that's not the purpose of Lightning Addresses anyway. Well, of course you can, but what I'm trying to say is that you shouldn't, as that is an anti-practice that will cause people to not want to use your service or force them into custodial providers -- which may be ok for them, but may not be.

-- So if I ignore the concerns above I can do this with Lightning Addresses, right?

Not really, because payments can fail. The user might input an invalid Lightning Address, or the Lightning Address may stop working after a while. Or even if it is working and online your payout can still fail for many reason inherent to Lightning.

That means you need to keep a table of balances for your users anyway. It doesn't matter.

Since you are already keeping a table of balances, now it's your chance to bring back the mobile noncustodial wallet users into a greater standard that accomodates everybody: LUD-14.

Wallets can implement LUD-14 support and then be made to withdraw balances from your service automatically every time they're turned on or periodically or upon manual request from the user. That limits the amount of user balance you'll have to keep on your service (but you can also add more rules around that, for example, automatically confiscating balances that stay parked too long, or putting a hard limit on the balance size for each user).

-- But with Lightning Addresses I can do instant payouts!

Yes, you can, but that's why LUD-15 exists: for all custodial providers, noncustodial wallets that rely on some kind of friendly server or coordinator (like Breez, Blixt or Phoenix) or even noncustodial providers running some kind of homemade server, you can dispatch these requests that cause them to withdraw the money automatically, which makes the experience similar to instant payouts -- and better, since then the payment requests can be more meaningful and say they are withdrawals from your service instead of saying that you're donating money to them (which is what most Lightning Address payments really mean).

@ 8fb140b4:f948000c

Intro

This short tutorial will help you set up your own Nostr Wallet Connect (NWC) on your own LND Node that is not using Umbrel. If you are a user of Umbrel, you should use their version of NWC.

Requirements

You need to have a working installation of LND with established channels and connectivity to the internet. NWC in itself is fairly light and will not consume a lot of resources. You will also want to ensure that you have a working installation of Docker, since we will use a docker image to run NWC.

• Working installation of LND (and all of its required components)
• Docker (with Docker compose)

Installation

For the purpose of this tutorial, we will assume that you have your lnd/bitcoind running under user bitcoin with home directory /home/bitcoin. We will also assume that you already have a running installation of Docker (or docker.io).

Prepare and verify

git version - we will need git to get the latest version of NWC. docker version - should execute successfully and show the currently installed version of Docker. docker compose version - same as before, but the version will be different. ss -tupln | grep 10009- should produce the following output: tcp LISTEN 0 4096 0.0.0.0:10009 0.0.0.0: tcp LISTEN 0 4096 [::]:10009 [::]:**

For things to work correctly, your Docker should be version 20.10.0 or later. If you have an older version, consider installing a new one using instructions here: https://docs.docker.com/engine/install/

Create folders & download NWC

In the home directory of your LND/bitcoind user, create a new folder, e.g., "nwc" mkdir /home/bitcoin/nwc. Change to that directory cd /home/bitcoin/nwc and clone the NWC repository: git clone https://github.com/getAlby/nostr-wallet-connect.git

Creating the Docker image

In this step, we will create a Docker image that you will use to run NWC.

• Change directory to nostr-wallet-connect: cd nostr-wallet-connect
• Run command to build Docker image: docker build -t nwc:$(date +'%Y%m%d%H%M') -t nwc:latest . (there is a dot at the end)
• The last line of the output (after a few minutes) should look like => => naming to docker.io/library/nwc:latest
• nwc:latest is the name of the Docker image with a tag which you should note for use later.

Creating docker-compose.yml and necessary data directories

• Let's create a directory that will hold your non-volatile data (DB): mkdir data
• Indocker-compose.ymlfile, there are fields that you want to replace (<> comments) and port “4321” that you want to make sure is open (check with ss -tupln | grep 4321which should return nothing).
• Create docker-compose.ymlfile with the following content, and make sure to update fields that have <> comment:

version: "3.8" services: nwc: image: nwc:latest volumes: - ./data:/data - ~/.lnd:/lnd:ro ports: - "4321:8080" extra_hosts: - "localhost:host-gateway" environment: NOSTR_PRIVKEY: <use "openssl rand -hex 32" to generate a fresh key and place it inside ""> LN_BACKEND_TYPE: "LND" LND_ADDRESS: localhost:10009 LND_CERT_FILE: "/lnd/tls.cert" LND_MACAROON_FILE: "/lnd/data/chain/bitcoin/mainnet/admin.macaroon" DATABASE_URI: "/data/nostr-wallet-connect.db" COOKIE_SECRET: <use "openssl rand -hex 32" to generate fresh secret and place it inside ""> PORT: 8080 restart: always stop_grace_period: 1m

Starting and testing

Now that you have everything ready, it is time to start the container and test.

• While you are in the nwcdirectory (important), execute the following command and check the log output, docker compose up
• You should see container logs while it is starting, and it should not exit if everything went well.
• At this point, you should be able to go to http://<ip of the host where nwc is running>:4321 and get to the interface of NWC
• To stop the test run of NWC, simply press Ctrl-C , and it will shut the container down.
• To start NWC permanently, you should execute docker compose up -d , “-d” tells Docker to detach from the session.
• To check currently running NWC logs, execute docker compose logs to run it in tail mode add -f to the end.
• To stop the container, execute docker compose down

That's all, just follow the instructions in the web interface to get started.

Updating

As with any software, you should expect fixes and updates that you would need to perform periodically. You could automate this, but it falls outside of the scope of this tutorial. Since we already have all of the necessary configuration in place, the update execution is fairly simple.

• Change directory to the clone of the git repository, cd /home/bitcoin/nwc/nostr-wallet-connect
• Run command to build Docker image: docker build -t nwc:$(date +'%Y%m%d%H%M') -t nwc:latest . (there is a dot at the end)
• Change directory back one level cd ..
• Restart (stop and start) the docker compose config docker compose down && docker compose up -d
• Done! Optionally you may want to check the logs: docker compose logs

@ d2e97f73:ea9a4d1b

There’s a lot of conversation around the #TwitterFiles. Here’s my take, and thoughts on how to fix the issues identified.

I’ll start with the principles I’ve come to believe…based on everything I’ve learned and experienced through my past actions as a Twitter co-founder and lead:

1. Social media must be resilient to corporate and government control.
2. Only the original author may remove content they produce.
3. Moderation is best implemented by algorithmic choice.

The Twitter when I led it and the Twitter of today do not meet any of these principles. This is my fault alone, as I completely gave up pushing for them when an activist entered our stock in 2020. I no longer had hope of achieving any of it as a public company with no defense mechanisms (lack of dual-class shares being a key one). I planned my exit at that moment knowing I was no longer right for the company.

The biggest mistake I made was continuing to invest in building tools for us to manage the public conversation, versus building tools for the people using Twitter to easily manage it for themselves. This burdened the company with too much power, and opened us to significant outside pressure (such as advertising budgets). I generally think companies have become far too powerful, and that became completely clear to me with our suspension of Trump’s account. As I’ve said before, we did the right thing for the public company business at the time, but the wrong thing for the internet and society. Much more about this here: https://twitter.com/jack/status/1349510769268850690

I continue to believe there was no ill intent or hidden agendas, and everyone acted according to the best information we had at the time. Of course mistakes were made. But if we had focused more on tools for the people using the service rather than tools for us, and moved much faster towards absolute transparency, we probably wouldn’t be in this situation of needing a fresh reset (which I am supportive of). Again, I own all of this and our actions, and all I can do is work to make it right.

Back to the principles. Of course governments want to shape and control the public conversation, and will use every method at their disposal to do so, including the media. And the power a corporation wields to do the same is only growing. It’s critical that the people have tools to resist this, and that those tools are ultimately owned by the people. Allowing a government or a few corporations to own the public conversation is a path towards centralized control.

I’m a strong believer that any content produced by someone for the internet should be permanent until the original author chooses to delete it. It should be always available and addressable. Content takedowns and suspensions should not be possible. Doing so complicates important context, learning, and enforcement of illegal activity. There are significant issues with this stance of course, but starting with this principle will allow for far better solutions than we have today. The internet is trending towards a world were storage is “free” and infinite, which places all the actual value on how to discover and see content.

Which brings me to the last principle: moderation. I don’t believe a centralized system can do content moderation globally. It can only be done through ranking and relevance algorithms, the more localized the better. But instead of a company or government building and controlling these solely, people should be able to build and choose from algorithms that best match their criteria, or not have to use any at all. A “follow” action should always deliver every bit of content from the corresponding account, and the algorithms should be able to comb through everything else through a relevance lens that an individual determines. There’s a default “G-rated” algorithm, and then there’s everything else one can imagine.

The only way I know of to truly live up to these 3 principles is a free and open protocol for social media, that is not owned by a single company or group of companies, and is resilient to corporate and government influence. The problem today is that we have companies who own both the protocol and discovery of content. Which ultimately puts one person in charge of what’s available and seen, or not. This is by definition a single point of failure, no matter how great the person, and over time will fracture the public conversation, and may lead to more control by governments and corporations around the world.

I believe many companies can build a phenomenal business off an open protocol. For proof, look at both the web and email. The biggest problem with these models however is that the discovery mechanisms are far too proprietary and fixed instead of open or extendable. Companies can build many profitable services that complement rather than lock down how we access this massive collection of conversation. There is no need to own or host it themselves.

Many of you won’t trust this solution just because it’s me stating it. I get it, but that’s exactly the point. Trusting any one individual with this comes with compromises, not to mention being way too heavy a burden for the individual. It has to be something akin to what bitcoin has shown to be possible. If you want proof of this, get out of the US and European bubble of the bitcoin price fluctuations and learn how real people are using it for censorship resistance in Africa and Central/South America.

I do still wish for Twitter, and every company, to become uncomfortably transparent in all their actions, and I wish I forced more of that years ago. I do believe absolute transparency builds trust. As for the files, I wish they were released Wikileaks-style, with many more eyes and interpretations to consider. And along with that, commitments of transparency for present and future actions. I’m hopeful all of this will happen. There’s nothing to hide…only a lot to learn from. The current attacks on my former colleagues could be dangerous and doesn’t solve anything. If you want to blame, direct it at me and my actions, or lack thereof.

As far as the free and open social media protocol goes, there are many competing projects: @bluesky is one with the AT Protocol, nostr another, Mastodon yet another, Matrix yet another…and there will be many more. One will have a chance at becoming a standard like HTTP or SMTP. This isn’t about a “decentralized Twitter.” This is a focused and urgent push for a foundational core technology standard to make social media a native part of the internet. I believe this is critical both to Twitter’s future, and the public conversation’s ability to truly serve the people, which helps hold governments and corporations accountable. And hopefully makes it all a lot more fun and informative again.

💸🛠️🌐 To accelerate open internet and protocol work, I’m going to open a new category of #startsmall grants: “open internet development.” It will start with a focus of giving cash and equity grants to engineering teams working on social media and private communication protocols, bitcoin, and a web-only mobile OS. I’ll make some grants next week, starting with $1mm/yr to Signal. Please let me know other great candidates for this money.

@ 50c6ce2e:25cf57db

Test

@ 6a39a186:88f51c19

Exploring the Tor Network: A Gateway to Privacy and Security

In this note, we delve into the fascinating world of the Tor network, a powerful tool that enhances privacy and security on the internet. We uncover how individuals and organizations utilize the Tor network to safeguard their online activities and protect sensitive information from prying eyes.

Understanding Tor: Anonymity at Its Core

The Tor network, comprised of volunteer-operated servers, allows users to connect for free, enhancing privacy and security online. With the utilization of ".onion hidden services," individuals and organizations can share information without compromising their anonymity.

"Tor is not just a network; it's a shield against surveillance, censorship, and data interception, empowering users to reclaim their online privacy."

How Tor Works: Navigating the Network

Tor operates by routing internet traffic through a series of volunteer-operated servers, obscuring the origin and destination of the data. This intricate network architecture ensures that no single server can trace the complete path of the traffic, preserving user anonymity.

To connect to the Tor network, users can employ various methods, including the Tor Browser, Orbot for smartphones, and Onion Browser for iOS devices. Each of these tools provides a secure gateway to the Tor network, offering different levels of anonymity and protection.

Enhancing Security: Tips and Best Practices

To maximize security and anonymity while using the Tor network, it's essential to follow best practices and utilize recommended tools. For instance, users should avoid installing additional extensions or modifying browser settings, as these actions can compromise anonymity.

"Protecting your privacy on the Tor network requires diligence and adherence to recommended security measures. By staying informed and vigilant, users can navigate the digital landscape with confidence."

In addition to browsing securely, individuals can contribute to the Tor network's resilience by operating a Snowflake proxy. This innovative feature allows users to donate bandwidth to the Tor Project, aiding individuals in censored networks to access the internet freely.

Learn more about the Tor network and its capabilities and take steps to protect your online privacy.

Tor: The Ultimate Privacy Tool for Everyday Browsing

Transformative potential of Tor as a daily driver for web browsing. Tor enhances privacy and security online, providing users with a shield against surveillance and data interception.

Understanding Tor: A Gateway to Anonymity

Tor, short for The Onion Router, is a powerful network of volunteer-operated servers that enables users to browse the internet anonymously. By routing internet traffic through multiple servers, Tor obscures the user's identity and location, making it difficult for third parties to track their online activities.

"Tor is not just a privacy tool; it's a game-changer for those seeking to reclaim control over their online data and digital footprint."

Embracing Anonymity: Benefits of Tor for Daily Browsing

Using Tor as a daily driver for web browsing offers numerous advantages. With Tor, users can browse the internet without fear of surveillance or data collection by ISPs, governments, or malicious actors. Additionally, Tor's censorship circumvention capabilities ensure access to unrestricted information, even in regions with strict internet controls.

To experience the benefits of Tor firsthand, users can download the Tor Browser on their desktop or mobile device. This specialized browser comes equipped with built-in privacy features and default settings optimized for secure and anonymous browsing.

Navigating the Tor Ecosystem: Tips for Safe and Secure Browsing

While Tor provides robust privacy protections, users must take steps to ensure safe and secure browsing practices. Avoid installing additional browser extensions or modifying default settings, as these actions can compromise anonymity and security.

"Protecting your privacy on the Tor network requires diligence and adherence to recommended security measures. By staying informed and vigilant, users can harness the full potential of Tor for everyday browsing."

In addition to the Tor Browser, users can contribute to the Tor network's resilience by running a Snowflake proxy. This innovative feature allows users to donate bandwidth to support individuals in censored regions, further strengthening Tor's impact worldwide.

@ 6a39a186:88f51c19

Digital Computing: From Origins to Modern Innovations

In this note, we embark on a journey through the captivating history of digital computing, tracing its evolution from its humble beginnings to the cutting-edge technologies of today. We consider into the pivotal moments, key innovations, and notable figures that have shaped the landscape of digital computation.

Understanding Early Developments

The roots of digital computing, from the abacus and mechanical calculators to the invention of the first programmable devices such as the Analytical Engine by Charles Babbage.

"The dawn of digital computing marked a significant shift in human history, paving the way for unprecedented advancements in science, technology, and society."

Emergence of Electronic Computers

The emergence of electronic computers in the mid-20th century, including landmark developments like the ENIAC and UNIVAC, which laid the groundwork for modern computing.

"The advent of electronic computers revolutionized the field of computation, enabling faster calculations, complex simulations, and unprecedented data processing capabilities."

Rise of Personal Computing

Next, The rise of personal computing in the late 20th century, with the introduction of iconic devices such as the IBM PC, Apple Macintosh, and the evolution of operating systems like MS-DOS and Windows.

"The democratization of computing power through personal computers ushered in a new era of accessibility, empowering individuals and businesses to harness the potential of digital technology."

The Digital Age and Beyond

The transformative impact of digital computing in the modern age, from the proliferation of smartphones and tablets to the rise of cloud computing, big data analytics, and artificial intelligence.

"As we stand on the cusp of the digital frontier, the possibilities of digital computing are limitless, driving innovation, connectivity, and progress in every aspect of our lives."

Through this exploration of the history of digital computing, we gain a deeper appreciation for the remarkable journey that has brought us to where we are today, poised at the forefront of a digital revolution.

Learn more about the history of digital computing and discover its impact on society.

@ 6a39a186:88f51c19

Node Types: Exploring the Different Types of Nodes in the Bitcoin Network

The Bitcoin network, often hailed as the pioneer of blockchain technology, operates through a decentralized network of nodes. These nodes play various roles in maintaining the integrity and functionality of the network. Let's delve into the different types of nodes in the Bitcoin network and their significance.

Full Nodes

Full nodes are the backbone of the Bitcoin network. They maintain a complete copy of the blockchain and validate all transactions and blocks according to the consensus rules. Full nodes ensure the security and decentralization of the network by independently verifying the entire transaction history. Running a full node helps in strengthening the Bitcoin network and ensuring its resilience against attacks.

"Full nodes are the cornerstone of decentralization in the Bitcoin network, providing users with trustless access to the blockchain."

Learn more about running a full node

Mining Nodes

Mining nodes, also known as miners, play a critical role in securing the Bitcoin network by adding new blocks to the blockchain through the process of mining. Miners compete to solve complex mathematical puzzles, and the first one to find a valid solution gets to add a new block to the blockchain and receive a reward in the form of newly minted bitcoins and transaction fees. Mining nodes contribute to the network's security and enable the creation of new bitcoins.

"Mining nodes are essential for maintaining the security and integrity of the Bitcoin blockchain by validating and adding new transactions to the network."

Learn more about Bitcoin mining

Lightweight Nodes (SPV Nodes)

Lightweight nodes, also known as Simplified Payment Verification (SPV) nodes, do not store the entire blockchain like full nodes. Instead, they only store block headers and verify transactions directly relevant to them. SPV nodes rely on full nodes to provide them with accurate information about the state of the network. While lightweight nodes offer reduced resource requirements and faster synchronization, they sacrifice some level of security and trustlessness compared to full nodes.

"Lightweight nodes offer a convenient way to interact with the Bitcoin network without the need to download and validate the entire blockchain, making them suitable for resource-constrained devices."

Learn more about SPV nodes

Pruned Nodes

Pruned nodes store only a subset of the blockchain's data by discarding older transaction information beyond a certain threshold. Pruned nodes maintain the integrity of the blockchain while significantly reducing storage requirements. Although pruned nodes cannot serve historical data to other network participants, they still contribute to the network by validating new transactions and blocks.

"Pruned nodes strike a balance between maintaining network security and reducing storage overhead, making them suitable for users with limited storage capacity."

Learn more about pruned nodes

In conclusion, the Bitcoin network consists of various types of nodes, each serving a unique purpose in ensuring the network's integrity, security, and decentralization. Whether you're a full node operator, miner, or lightweight node user, your participation contributes to the strength and resilience of the Bitcoin ecosystem.

@ 6a39a186:88f51c19

The Evolution of Lightning Network Implementations: An Overview

In the dynamic landscape of Bitcoin lightning technology, the Lightning Network has emerged as a game-changer, providing a scalable solution for Bitcoin transactions. As the demand for efficient and cost-effective payment solutions grows, so does the need for robust Lightning implementations. Let's delve into the evolution of these implementations and explore their significance in the rapidly evolving ecosystem.

Understanding the Lightning Network

The Lightning Network serves as an overlay network atop the Bitcoin blockchain, offering trustless instant payments with minimal fees. It operates through two key layers: the Bitcoin Network and the Lightning Network. The former serves as the foundation, while the latter facilitates peer-to-peer transactions.

In essence, developing a Lightning-powered application requires interfacing with two main components: the Bitcoin node and the Lightning node. The former interacts with the underlying blockchain, while the latter manages transactions on the Lightning Network.

Exploring Lightning Implementations

c-lightning by Blockstream

c-lightning, developed by Blockstream, stands as a pioneering Lightning implementation written in C. Known for its modular architecture and extensibility, c-lightning has been in production since 2018, offering low-level access for customization.

Eclair by ACINQ

Eclair is a Scala implementation of the Lightning Network, developed by ACINQ. Launched in 2018, Eclair emphasizes robustness and scalability, providing both a library and a mobile implementation of Lightning.

lnd by Lightning Labs

lnd, developed by Lightning Labs in Go, serves as a developer-friendly Lightning node. With an extensive feature set and a focus on application development, lnd has been a staple choice since its mainnet release in 2018.

Rust-Lightning and LDK

Rust-Lightning, developed by the Rust Bitcoin Community, offers a flexible Lightning library in Rust. Collaborating with Square Crypto, the community aims to simplify Lightning integrations through the Lightning Development Kit (LDK).

Electrum

Electrum, a renowned Bitcoin client, ventured into Lightning development in 2020. Integrating Lightning support into its Python implementation, Electrum extends its privacy-focused approach to Lightning transactions.

LNP Node

LNP Node, introduced by LNP/BP Standards Association, represents a new Rust-based Lightning implementation. With a focus on modularity and extensibility, LNP Node introduces Generalized Lightning Channels (GLCs) for future protocol enhancements.

The Path Forward

The Lightning Network implementation ecosystem continues to expand, catering to diverse user needs and use cases. As institutional adoption gains momentum, Lightning implementations play a pivotal role in driving growth and innovation within the blockchain space.

In conclusion, while this overview provides insights into the current state of Lightning implementations, the ecosystem remains dynamic. With ongoing developments and new entrants, the future promises further evolution and refinement of Lightning technology.

Remember, in the fast-paced world of blockchain, staying informed and adaptable is key to navigating the ever-changing landscape.

"The only constant in life is change." - Heraclitus

If you have any updates or insights to share, feel free to reach out and contribute to the ongoing dialogue surrounding Lightning Network implementations. Together, we can understand the future of Bitcoin technology.

@ 6a39a186:88f51c19

Making The Effort To Understanding Liquid Network: A Beginner's Perspective

In the rapidly evolving landscape of blockchain technology, solutions like the Liquid Network are paving the way for faster, more private, and secure transactions. But what exactly is the Liquid Network, and how can beginners get started with it? Let's delve into the world of layer-2 solutions and explore the fundamentals of the Liquid Network.

Layer-2 Solutions: Unlocking Bitcoin's Potential

Bitcoin's limited throughput has long been a challenge for its widespread adoption. With a capacity of only 5-7 transactions per second, the Bitcoin blockchain can sometimes struggle to meet the demands of institutional investors and retail buyers alike. Layer-1 solutions, which require rewriting the blockchain protocol, present significant challenges. Enter layer-2 solutions like the Liquid Network, which operate on top of the main blockchain without the need for protocol changes.

Introducing the Liquid Network: Faster, More Private, More Secure

The Liquid Network is a layer-2 network built on top of the Bitcoin blockchain, offering faster, more private, and secure transactions. Designed to enable the issuance, transfer, and exchange of cryptocurrencies, stablecoins, digital assets, and security tokens, the Liquid Network provides a solution to Bitcoin's scalability and privacy challenges.

Key Features of the Liquid Network

The Liquid Network achieves its goals through several key features:

• Wrapped Bitcoin (L-BTC): Liquid Network issues a "wrapped" version of BTC called L-BTC, which can be used on its chain.
• Issued Assets: In addition to L-BTC, Liquid Network supports Issued Assets, enabling the creation of tokens for various applications like stablecoins and security tokens.
• Confidential Transactions: Liquid Network uses Confidential Transactions to hide key transaction information, ensuring greater privacy.
• Federated Byzantine Agreement (FBA): The consensus mechanism of the Liquid Network ensures security and proper asset management.

Getting Started with the Liquid Network

For beginners looking to explore the Liquid Network, one of the most accessible solutions is to utilize exchanges like Bisq and Robosats With these exchange protocols and DAO's, users can seamlessly convert their BTC to L-BTC on the Liquid Network with zero fees, unlocking the benefits of faster transactions and greater privacy. By leveraging platforms like Bitfinex , Bisq, Robosats, users can tap into the full potential of the Liquid Network without incurring additional costs.

In summary, the Liquid Network offers a promising solution to Bitcoin's scalability and privacy challenges. By understanding its fundamentals and leveraging platforms like Bitfinex, beginners can embark on a journey of exploring the possibilities offered by layer-2 solutions and unlocking the full potential of the Bitcoin blockchain.

Learn more about the Liquid Network

@ 6a39a186:88f51c19

Bitcoin Network Congestion: The Battle Over Ordinals and BRC-20 Tokens

As the Bitcoin network experiences increasing congestion, users are facing longer confirmation times and higher transaction fees. This bottleneck not only impacts the speed of transactions but also raises concerns about accessibility and affordability for users requiring swift and cost-effective transfers.

At the forefront of this issue is the Ordinals Project, a groundbreaking protocol designed to revolutionize digital content storage on the Bitcoin blockchain. By leveraging a specialized transaction type known as an "ordinal," this project enables the creation and preservation of digital art, music, and other media in a decentralized and secure manner. The Ordinals Project represents a significant leap forward in the realm of blockchain innovation, offering users unprecedented opportunities to store and transmit large volumes of data efficiently.

However, alongside the Ordinals Project, the emergence of BRC-20 tokens has added another layer of complexity to the debate. These tokens, akin to ERC-20 tokens on the Ethereum blockchain, are utilized on the Binance Smart Chain for various purposes, including fundraising, trading, and participation in decentralized finance (DeFi) activities. While BRC-20 tokens offer exciting possibilities for expanding the utility of blockchain technology, they also raise questions about scalability and their potential impact on the Bitcoin network.

The crux of the debate surrounding Ordinals and BRC-20 tokens lies in the delicate balance between innovation and scalability within the Bitcoin community. On one hand, proponents argue that these projects open up new avenues for creativity and utility on the Bitcoin network, enhancing its value proposition and relevance in the digital age. Conversely, critics express concerns about the strain that such initiatives may place on the network, exacerbating congestion and impeding its efficiency and reliability.

Ultimately, the discussion surrounding Ordinals and BRC-20 tokens underscores the ongoing dialogue within the Bitcoin community about the trade-offs inherent in technological advancement. While innovation is essential for driving progress and expanding the capabilities of blockchain technology, it is equally crucial to consider the potential ramifications and challenges posed by new initiatives. As Bitcoin continues to evolve and adapt to meet the demands of its growing user base, striking a balance between innovation and sustainability remains paramount for ensuring the network's long-term success.

Get Familiar with the Lightning Network

The Lightning Network represents a revolutionary layer-2 scaling solution for the Bitcoin blockchain, offering lightning-fast and low-cost transactions. To embark on your journey of understanding this innovative technology, let's delve into its architecture and protocols, uncovering the mechanisms that power its efficiency and scalability.

Lightning Network Architecture

At its core, the Lightning Network operates as a network of bidirectional payment channels that enable users to conduct off-chain transactions without relying on the main Bitcoin blockchain for every transaction. These payment channels are established between two parties and allow for rapid exchange of funds, facilitating instant micropayments with negligible fees.

Payment Channels

Payment channels are the building blocks of the Lightning Network, serving as conduits for peer-to-peer transactions. These channels leverage multi-signature smart contracts, enabling participants to securely transact without broadcasting every transaction to the blockchain. By opening and closing channels as needed, users can seamlessly conduct transactions off-chain while maintaining the security and trustlessness of the Bitcoin network.

Lightning Network Nodes

Lightning Network nodes play a pivotal role in facilitating transactions across the network. Nodes serve as intermediaries for routing payments between users, ensuring that funds can flow efficiently between different parties. With a robust network of nodes distributed globally, the Lightning Network achieves unparalleled speed and scalability, making it ideal for microtransactions and everyday purchases.

Lightning Network Protocols

To harness the full potential of the Lightning Network, it's essential to grasp the underlying protocols that govern its operation. These protocols dictate how transactions are routed, payments are processed, and channels are managed, laying the groundwork for seamless and secure interactions within the network.

HTLCs (Hash Time Locked Contracts)

Hash Time Locked Contracts (HTLCs) form the backbone of Lightning Network transactions, enabling atomic swaps and ensuring the trustless exchange of funds between parties. Through the clever use of cryptographic hashes and time locks, HTLCs enable secure and instantaneous payments across the Lightning Network, mitigating the risk of fraud or double-spending.

Sphinx Protocol

The Sphinx Protocol plays a critical role in preserving the privacy and confidentiality of Lightning Network transactions. By encrypting payment information and routing instructions, Sphinx ensures that only the intended recipient can decipher the transaction details, enhancing the privacy and security of Lightning Network transactions.

AMP (Atomic Multipath Payments)

Atomic Multipath Payments (AMP) enable the splitting of large payments into smaller, more manageable chunks, allowing for more efficient routing and improved reliability within the Lightning Network. With AMP, users can enjoy greater flexibility and resilience when sending funds across the network, reducing the risk of payment failures and ensuring smooth transaction flows.

Conclusion

As you embark on your journey to get familiar with the Lightning Network, remember that it represents a paradigm shift in the way we think about blockchain scalability and usability. By embracing its innovative architecture and protocols, you can unlock a world of possibilities for fast, low-cost, and privacy-preserving transactions on the Bitcoin blockchain.

With a solid understanding of the Lightning Network's architecture and protocols, you'll be well-equipped to navigate the intricacies of this groundbreaking technology and harness its full potential for revolutionizing the future of finance.

Lightning Network - Official website for the Lightning Network.

Understanding the Lightning Network - Comprehensive guide to understanding the Lightning Network's architecture and protocols.

HTLCs Explained - In-depth exploration of Hash Time Locked Contracts and their role in Lightning Network transactions.

Sphinx Protocol - Research paper detailing the Sphinx Protocol and its contributions to privacy-enhanced transactions on the Lightning Network.

Atomic Multipath Payments - Article discussing the benefits of Atomic Multipath Payments for improving transaction reliability and efficiency within the Lightning Network.

@ 6871d8df:4a9396c1

The Apple Vision Pro was released, and it is the talk of the town right now. To be frank, I think it's a stupid product. It's not useful or particularly enticing to me in its current form factor. It's a toy, not a tool. All the features seem gimmicky as opposed to generally helpful. I'm not saying it may never be worthwhile, but as of this first release, it is only a party trick.

Coincidently, this is the first product that does not have any of Steve Jobs' influence. To me, it shows. I don't think Jobs would have ever let this product see the light of day.


Jobs understood product. He didn't make things for the sake of progress or to make sci-fi reality; he made things because he 'wanted to make a dent in the world.' He wanted to solve problems for everyday people by innovating with cutting-edge technology. He aspired to make people's lives better. Steve Jobs' genius was the way he married cutting-edge technologies with valuable tools that made those cutting-edge technologies simple and elegant.


The Vision Pro may be technically innovative, but it is not a tool, at least in its current form. It may be one day, but that is precisely my point; Jobs would have never released a product where the form factor would hold it back from becoming a tool. At best, it is an intriguing toy that is additive to some content at the behest of being very awkward to wear or be seen in. In my view, mainstream adoption can happen only in a world where we can use the Vision Pro as a contact lens or very small, discreet, minimalist glasses, but certainly not this iteration where it covers more than half your face.


Seeing people's eyes makes us human. So much emotion, understanding, and communication happens with just a look. It is a window into the soul. I don't want to live in a world where we are actively bringing all the negatives about communicating in the digital world to the physical one.

https://image.nostr.build/2365609411f144f5d789ffd684ffce9b4d867626a7bfe11bb311cb0f61057199.jpg

I can't help but wonder or hypothesize what Steve Jobs would focus on if he were still alive today. I think Apple's priorities would be completely different. My gut tells me he would not have let Siri get as bad as it is. Siri is a horrible product; I never use it, and everyone I know who tries to use it does so unsuccessfully, at least most of the time. I personally always default to ChatGPT or Bard. These AI systems make my life dramatically more productive. They are tools in the purest sense.

In my opinion, Steve would not have missed this train. Sure, Apple could wake up and integrate these systems into Siri — if they were smart, they would — but in its current form, it is so far behind that it almost astounds me. My intuition leads me to believe he would be closer to what [Rabbit] is doing.

Who knows? Maybe I am entirely wrong, and Apple just kickstarted VR's mass adoption phase. Unfortunately, I think this will likely be the biggest failure of a physical product that Apple will have seen since Jobs returned ages ago. The Vision Pro is only slightly better than the Oculus, and Facebook has already deprioritized VR for AI. Apple is further behind, and I don't see a world where they do not make the same pivot. There is a skill to creating successful, innovative products, and it makes me sad to see the torch that Jobs passed lose its flame. As someone who respected how Apple used to innovate, watching this decay in real-time is jarring as this is just the latest in a string of disappointing decisions that exemplify that 'peak Apple' is behind us.

@ 6a39a186:88f51c19

The Bitcoin Manifesto: Unleashing the Power of Digital Gold

Thoughts

Bitcoin Manifesto, a paper that explores the untapped potential of Bitcoin. In this work, inspired by the spirit of Satoshi Nakamoto, we delve into the compounding free cash flows for Bitcoiners, expose the inherent rigging of the existing financial system, and discuss the ways in which Bitcoin can save one's life energy while fostering success for others. We emphasize the importance of thinking and communicating differently, breaking free from the limitations of a fiat mindset. Furthermore, we highlight Bitcoin's role as the base layer for preserving wealth, acting as a capital fortress against the relentless onslaught of inflation that erodes and destroys our hard-earned assets.

1. Introduction

Welcome to the Bitcoin Manifesto, a testament to the transformative power of digital gold. This paper explores the revolutionary capabilities of Bitcoin, shedding light on its role in compounding free cash flows for Bitcoiners, unmasking the rigged nature of the existing financial system, and unveiling the ways in which Bitcoin can save our life energy while fostering the success of our peers.

2. Compounding Free Cash Flows for Bitcoiners

Bitcoin is a catalyst for financial liberation, enabling Bitcoiners to unlock the power of compounding free cash flows. Unlike traditional systems that stifle wealth creation through burdensome fees, intermediaries, and arbitrary barriers, Bitcoin empowers individuals to engage in direct, peer-to-peer transactions. By embracing this decentralized approach, Bitcoiners can harness the exponential growth potential of their wealth.

"Bitcoin is the conduit through which we unleash the compounding free cash flows that transform stagnant fiat currencies into a flourishing ecosystem of financial prosperity." -

3. Unveiling the Rigged System

The existing financial system is rigged, designed to benefit the few at the expense of the many. Traditional currencies are subject to the whims of governments and central banks, leading to inflationary practices that erode our wealth and purchasing power. In contrast, Bitcoin operates on an immutable blockchain, free from the clutches of centralized authorities. This decentralized nature ensures that no single entity can manipulate the system, leveling the playing field for all participants.

"Bitcoin disrupts the rigged game, empowering individuals to reclaim control of their financial destinies and transcend the limitations imposed by a corrupt system." -

4. Saving Life Energy and Fostering Success

Bitcoin not only offers a means to save our life energy but also a pathway to uplift others towards success. By embracing Bitcoin, we secure our financial well-being and invest in a future where prosperity is not limited to a select few. Through collaboration and support within the Bitcoin community, we create an environment where everyone can thrive, breaking free from the scarcity mindset perpetuated by the fiat world.

"In Bitcoin, we find the power to save our life energy and channel it towards creating a future where success is a shared experience, not a solitary pursuit." -

5. Thinking and Communicating Beyond Fiat

To unlock the full potential of Bitcoin, we must break free from the confines of a fiat-centric mindset. This paradigm shift in thinking and communication allows us to transcend the limitations of the existing financial system. Bitcoiners challenge conventional wisdom, question the status quo, and envision a world where financial freedom and autonomy are the new norms. By adopting this fresh perspective, we unlock untapped potential and shape a future where Bitcoin's influence extends far beyond the realms of finance.

"Bitcoin demands that we think and communicate differently, liberating ourselves from the constraints of a fiat mindset and embracing the transformative power of decentralized finance." -

6. Preservation of Wealth: Bitcoin as Base Layer 1

At its core, Bitcoin serves as the bedrock for preserving wealth in an era plagued by inflation. Governments worldwide continue to print fiat currencies, leading to the gradual erosion of value and the destruction of hard-earned assets. Bitcoin, with its limited supply and decentralized nature, acts as a fortress against this value decay. As the first layer of the financial revolution, Bitcoin provides a solid foundation upon which we can safeguard our wealth.

"Bitcoin, as base layer 1, stands as the bulwark against the relentless assault of inflation, offering us a sanctuary to preserve and grow our financial futures." -

7. Layer 1: Capital Defense Against Inflation

Inflation poses an ever-growing threat to the preservation and growth of wealth. Fiat currencies, subject to the whims of governments and central banks, steadily lose value over time, eroding the purchasing power of individuals. Bitcoin, on the other hand, operates on a protocol with a fixed supply, rendering it immune to the effects of inflation. By embracing Bitcoin as capital, we shield our wealth from the destructive forces that undermine its value.

"Inflation, the silent destroyer of wealth, falls powerless against the fortress of Bitcoin's layer 1, solidifying its role as the ultimate safeguard for our hard-earned assets." -

8. Conclusion

The Bitcoin Manifesto presents a groundbreaking perspective on the potential of Bitcoin. We have explored the compounding free cash flows for Bitcoiners, exposed the rigged nature of the existing financial system, and emphasized the ways in which Bitcoin can save our life energy while fostering success for others. We have called for a shift in thinking and communication, breaking free from the limitations of a fiat mindset. Furthermore, we have recognized Bitcoin's role as the base layer for preserving wealth, acting as a fortress against the growing threat of inflation. By embracing Bitcoin, we can transcend the confines of the current system and propel ourselves towards a future of financial empowerment and prosperity.

"Let us embrace the power of Bitcoin, for it has the potential to revolutionize our financial landscape and forge a path towards a more equitable and prosperous future." -

Assets for phots taken from The ColdPower Post Thank You!

@ 8ce092d8:950c24ad

Overview

1. Introduction
2. Model Types
3. Training (Data Collection and Config Settings)
4. Probability Viewing: AI Inspector
5. Match
6. Cheat Sheet

I. Introduction

AI Arena is the first game that combines human and artificial intelligence collaboration.

AI learns your skills through "imitation learning."

Official Resources

1. Official Documentation (Must Read): Everything You Need to Know About AI Arena

Watch the 2-minute video in the documentation to quickly understand the basic flow of the game. 2. Official Play-2-Airdrop competition FAQ Site https://aiarena.notion.site/aiarena/Gateway-to-the-Arena-52145e990925499d95f2fadb18a24ab0 3. Official Discord (Must Join): https://discord.gg/aiarenaplaytest for the latest announcements or seeking help. The team will also have a exclusive channel there. 4. Official YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@aiarena because the game has built-in tutorials, you can choose to watch videos.

What is this game about?

1. Although categorized as a platform fighting game, the core is a probability-based strategy game.
2. Warriors take actions based on probabilities on the AI Inspector dashboard, competing against opponents.
3. The game does not allow direct manual input of probabilities for each area but inputs information through data collection and establishes models by adjusting parameters.
4. Data collection emulates fighting games, but training can be completed using a Dummy As long as you can complete the in-game tutorial, you can master the game controls.

II. Model Types

Before training, there are three model types to choose from: Simple Model Type, Original Model Type, and Advanced Model Type.

It is recommended to try the Advanced Model Type after completing at least one complete training with the Simple Model Type and gaining some understanding of the game.

Simple Model Type

The Simple Model is akin to completing a form, and the training session is comparable to filling various sections of that form.

This model has 30 buckets. Each bucket can be seen as telling the warrior what action to take in a specific situation. There are 30 buckets, meaning 30 different scenarios. Within the same bucket, the probabilities for direction or action are the same.

For example: What should I do when I'm off-stage — refer to the "Recovery (you off-stage)" bucket.

For all buckets, refer to this official documentation:

https://docs.aiarena.io/arenadex/game-mechanics/tabular-model-v2

Video (no sound): The entire training process for all buckets

https://youtu.be/1rfRa3WjWEA

Game version 2024.1.10. The method of saving is outdated. Please refer to the game updates.

Advanced Model Type

The "Original Model Type" and "Advanced Model Type" are based on Machine Learning, which is commonly referred to as combining with AI.

The Original Model Type consists of only one bucket, representing the entire map. If you want the AI to learn different scenarios, you need to choose a "Focus Area" to let the warrior know where to focus. A single bucket means that a slight modification can have a widespread impact on the entire model. This is where the "Advanced Model Type" comes in.

The "Advanced Model Type" can be seen as a combination of the "Original Model Type" and the "Simple Model Type". The Advanced Model Type divides the map into 8 buckets. Each bucket can use many "Focus Area." For a detailed explanation of the 8 buckets and different Focus Areas, please refer to the tutorial page (accessible in the Advanced Model Type, after completing a training session, at the top left of the Advanced Config, click on "Tutorial").

III. Training (Data Collection and Config Settings)

Training Process:

1. Collect Data
2. Set Parameters, Train, and Save
3. Repeat Step 1 until the Model is Complete

Training the Simple Model Type is the easiest to start with; refer to the video above for a detailed process.

Training the Advanced Model Type offers more possibilities through the combination of "Focus Area" parameters, providing a higher upper limit. While the Original Model Type has great potential, it's harder to control. Therefore, this section focuses on the "Advanced Model Type."

1. What Kind of Data to Collect

1. High-Quality Data: Collect purposeful data. Garbage in, garbage out. Only collect the necessary data; don't collect randomly. It's recommended to use Dummy to collect data. However, don't pursue perfection; through parameter adjustments, AI has a certain level of fault tolerance.
2. Balanced Data: Balance your dataset. In simple terms, if you complete actions on the left side a certain number of times, also complete a similar number on the right side. While data imbalance can be addressed through parameter adjustments (see below), it's advised not to have this issue during data collection.
3. Moderate Amount: A single training will include many individual actions. Collect data for each action 1-10 times. Personally, it's recommended to collect data 2-3 times for a single action. If the effect of a single training is not clear, conduct a second (or even third) training with the same content, but with different parameter settings.

2. What to Collect (and Focus Area Selection)

Game actions mimic fighting games, consisting of 4 directions + 6 states (Idle, Jump, Attack, Grab, Special, Shield). Directions can be combined into ↗, ↘, etc. These directions and states can then be combined into different actions.

To make "Focus Area" effective, you need to collect data in training that matches these parameters. For example, for "Distance to Opponent", you need to collect data when close to the opponent and also when far away. * Note: While you can split into multiple training sessions, it's most effective to cover different situations within a single training.

Refer to the Simple Config, categorize the actions you want to collect, and based on the game scenario, classify them into two categories: "Movement" and "Combat."

Movement-Based Actions

Action Collection

When the warrior is offstage, regardless of where the opponent is, we require the warrior to return to the stage to prevent self-destruction.

This involves 3 aerial buckets: 5 (Near Blast Zone), 7 (Under Stage), and 8 (Side Of Stage).

* Note: The background comes from the Tutorial mentioned earlier. The arrows in the image indicate the direction of the action and are for reference only. * Note: Action collection should be clean; do not collect actions that involve leaving the stage.

Config Settings

In the Simple Config, you can directly choose "Movement" in it. However, for better customization, it's recommended to use the Advanced Config directly. - Intensity: The method for setting Intensity will be introduced separately later. - Buckets: As shown in the image, choose the bucket you are training. - Focus Area: Position-based parameters: - Your position (must) - Raycast Platform Distance, Raycast Platform Type (optional, generally choose these in Bucket 7)

Combat-Based Actions

The goal is to direct attacks quickly and effectively towards the opponent, which is the core of game strategy.

This involves 5 buckets: - 2 regular situations - In the air: 6 (Safe Zone) - On the ground: 4 (Opponent Active) - 3 special situations on the ground: - 1 Projectile Active - 2 Opponent Knockback - 3 Opponent Stunned

2 Regular Situations

In the in-game tutorial, we learned how to perform horizontal attacks. However, in the actual game, directions expand to 8 dimensions. Imagine having 8 relative positions available for launching hits against the opponent. Our task is to design what action to use for attack or defense at each relative position.

Focus Area - Basic (generally select all) - Angle to opponent
- Distance to opponent - Discrete Distance: Choosing this option helps better differentiate between closer and farther distances from the opponent. As shown in the image, red indicates a relatively close distance, and green indicates a relatively distant distance.

• Advanced: Other commonly used parameters
• Direction: different facings to opponent
• Your Elemental Gauge and Discrete Elementals: Considering the special's charge
• Opponent action: The warrior will react based on the opponent's different actions.
• Your action: Your previous action. Choose this if teaching combos.

3 Special Situations on the Ground

Projectile Active, Opponent Stunned, Opponent Knockback These three buckets can be referenced in the Simple Model Type video. The parameter settings approach is the same as Opponent Active/Safe Zone.

For Projectile Active, in addition to the parameters based on combat, to track the projectile, you also need to select "Raycast Projectile Distance" and "Raycast Projectile On Target."

3. Setting "Intensity"

Resources

• The "Tutorial" mentioned earlier explains these parameters.
• Official Config Document (2022.12.24): https://docs.google.com/document/d/1adXwvDHEnrVZ5bUClWQoBQ8ETrSSKgG5q48YrogaFJs/edit

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TL;DR:

Epochs: - Adjust to fewer epochs if learning is insufficient, increase for more learning.

Batch Size: - Set to the minimum (16) if data is precise but unbalanced, or just want it to learn fast - Increase (e.g., 64) if data is slightly imprecise but balanced. - If both imprecise and unbalanced, consider retraining.

Learning Rate: - Maximize (0.01) for more learning but a risk of forgetting past knowledge. - Minimize for more accurate learning with less impact on previous knowledge.

Lambda: - Reduce for prioritizing learning new things.

Data Cleaning: - Enable "Remove Sparsity" unless you want AI to learn idleness. - For special cases, like teaching the warrior to use special moves when idle, refer to this tutorial video: https://discord.com/channels/1140682688651612291/1140683283626201098/1195467295913431111

Personal Experience: - Initial training with settings: 125 epochs, batch size 16, learning rate 0.01, lambda 0, data cleaning enabled. - Prioritize Multistream, sometimes use Oversampling. - Fine-tune subsequent training based on the mentioned theories.

IV. Probability Viewing: AI Inspector

The dashboard consists of "Direction + Action." Above the dashboard, you can see the "Next Action" – the action the warrior will take in its current state. The higher the probability, the more likely the warrior is to perform that action, indicating a quicker reaction. It's essential to note that when checking the Direction, the one with the highest visual representation may not have the highest numerical value. To determine the actual value, hover the mouse over the graphical representation, as shown below, where the highest direction is "Idle."

In the map, you can drag the warrior to view the probabilities of the warrior in different positions. Right-click on the warrior with the mouse to change the warrior's facing. The status bar below can change the warrior's state on the map.

When training the "Opponent Stunned, Opponent Knockback" bucket, you need to select the status below the opponent's status bar. If you are focusing on "Opponent action" in the Focus Zone, choose the action in the opponent's status bar. If you are focusing on "Your action" in the Focus Zone, choose the action in your own status bar. When training the "Projectile Active" Bucket, drag the projectile on the right side of the dashboard to check the status.

Next

The higher the probability, the faster the reaction. However, be cautious when the action probability reaches 100%. This may cause the warrior to be in a special case of "State Transition," resulting in unnecessary "Idle" states.

Explanation: In each state a fighter is in, there are different "possible transitions". For example, from falling state you cannot do low sweep because low sweep requires you to be on the ground. For the shield state, we do not allow you to directly transition to headbutt. So to do headbutt you have to first exit to another state and then do it from there (assuming that state allows you to do headbutt). This is the reason the fighter runs because "run" action is a valid state transition from shield. Source

V. Learn from Matches

After completing all the training, your model is preliminarily finished—congratulations! The warrior will step onto the arena alone and embark on its debut!

Next, we will learn about the strengths and weaknesses of the warrior from battles to continue refining the warrior's model.

In matches, besides appreciating the performance, pay attention to the following:

1. Movement, i.e., Off the Stage: Observe how the warrior gets eliminated. Is it due to issues in the action settings at a certain position, or is it a normal death caused by a high percentage? The former is what we need to avoid and optimize.

2. Combat: Analyze both sides' actions carefully. Observe which actions you and the opponent used in different states. Check which of your hits are less effective, and how does the opponent handle different actions, etc.

The approach to battle analysis is similar to the thought process in the "Training", helping to have a more comprehensive understanding of the warrior's performance and making targeted improvements.

VI. Cheat Sheet

Training 1. Click "Collect" to collect actions. 2. "Map - Data Limit" is more user-friendly. Most players perform initial training on the "Arena" map. 3. Switch between the warrior and the dummy: Tab key (keyboard) / Home key (controller). 4. Use "Collect" to make the opponent loop a set of actions. 5. Instantly move the warrior to a specific location: Click "Settings" - SPAWN - Choose the desired location on the map - On. Press the Enter key (keyboard) / Start key (controller) during training.

Inspector 1. Right-click on the fighter to change their direction. Drag the fighter and observe the changes in different positions and directions. 2. When satisfied with the training, click "Save." 3. In "Sparring" and "Simulation," use "Current Working Model." 4. If satisfied with a model, then click "compete." The model used in the rankings is the one marked as "competing."

Sparring / Ranked 1. Use the Throneroom map only for the top 2 or top 10 rankings. 2. There is a 30-second cooldown between matches. The replays are played for any match. Once the battle begins, you can see the winner on the leaderboard or by right-clicking the page - Inspect - Console. Also, if you encounter any errors or bugs, please send screenshots of the console to the Discord server.

Good luck! See you on the arena!

@ 079d727b:00099650

tigs$> what is the difference between a BBS with fidonet and the internet?

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chatgpt>"A Bulletin Board System (BBS) with FidoNet and the Internet are distinct in their purposes, technologies, and how they facilitate communication and information sharing. Here's a detailed comparison:

Technology and Structure

1. BBS with Fidonet

A BBS is a computer server running software that allows users to connect over a phone line (using a modem) or, in some cases, via a terminal protocol over the internet. Users can share messages, files, play games, and participate in discussions.

FidoNet is a networked system for distributing messages between BBSes. It uses a store-and-forward system to pass messages and files between systems, typically over dial-up phone lines or, more recently, over the internet. FidoNet allowed BBSes to form a global network, with messages being relayed from one BBS to another until they reached their destination.

1. Internet

The Internet is a vast global network that connects millions of private, public, academic, business, and government networks. It uses the TCP/IP protocol suite for communication and supports a wide range of services, including the World Wide Web (WWW), email, voice over IP (VoIP), and file sharing.

Unlike BBSes where you typically connect to a single server at a time, the Internet allows simultaneous access to countless servers and services worldwide.

2. Accessibility and Usage

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BBS with FidoNet:

Accessing a BBS generally required direct dial-up access to the server or, in later years, a telnet connection over the internet. Users would often engage with a single BBS or a small selection of BBSes. FidoNet's message and file sharing was not instant; it could take hours or days for content to propagate across the network due to the store-and-forward method.

Internet

The Internet is accessible through a wide range of devices, including computers, smartphones, and tablets, using various technologies like Wi-Fi, broadband, and mobile data. Communication and information retrieval over the Internet can occur in real-time, making it a platform for instant messaging, live streaming, and immediate access to web content.

1. Content and Services BBS with FidoNet: BBS content and services are limited by the software capabilities of the BBS itself and the interests of its community. Common features include forums, file downloads, email, and games. FidoNet provided a way to exchange emails and public messages (echomail) with users on other BBSes, but its capabilities are relatively basic compared to modern internet services.

Internet: Offers a vast array of content and services, including comprehensive search engines, social media platforms, online shopping, digital streaming, and much more. Supports sophisticated protocols for secure communication, data exchange, and content delivery (e.g., HTTPS, FTP, streaming protocols).

A Bulletin Board System (BBS) with FidoNet and the Internet are distinct in their purposes, technologies, and how they facilitate communication and information sharing. Here's a detailed comparison: 1. Technology and Structure

BBS with FidoNet:
    A BBS is a computer server running software that allows users to connect over a phone line (using a modem) or, in some cases, via a terminal protocol over the internet. Users can share messages, files, play games, and participate in discussions.
    FidoNet is a networked system for distributing messages between BBSes. It uses a store-and-forward system to pass messages and files between systems, typically over dial-up phone lines or, more recently, over the internet. FidoNet allowed BBSes to form a global network, with messages being relayed from one BBS to another until they reached their destination.
Internet:
    The Internet is a vast global network that connects millions of private, public, academic, business, and government networks. It uses the TCP/IP protocol suite for communication and supports a wide range of services, including the World Wide Web (WWW), email, voice over IP (VoIP), and file sharing.
    Unlike BBSes where you typically connect to a single server at a time, the Internet allows simultaneous access to countless servers and services worldwide.

1. Accessibility and Usage

   BBS with FidoNet: Accessing a BBS generally required direct dial-up access to the server or, in later years, a telnet connection over the internet. Users would often engage with a single BBS or a small selection of BBSes. FidoNet's message and file sharing was not instant; it could take hours or days for content to propagate across the network due to the store-and-forward method. Internet: The Internet is accessible through a wide range of devices, including computers, smartphones, and tablets, using various technologies like Wi-Fi, broadband, and mobile data. Communication and information retrieval over the Internet can occur in real-time, making it a platform for instant messaging, live streaming, and immediate access to web content.

2. Content and Services

   BBS with FidoNet: BBS content and services are limited by the software capabilities of the BBS itself and the interests of its community. Common features include forums, file downloads, email, and games. FidoNet provided a way to exchange emails and public messages (echomail) with users on other BBSes, but its capabilities are relatively basic compared to modern internet services. Internet: Offers a vast array of content and services, including comprehensive search engines, social media platforms, online shopping, digital streaming, and much more. Supports sophisticated protocols for secure communication, data exchange, and content delivery (e.g., HTTPS, FTP, streaming protocols).

3. Evolution and Current Status

BBS with FidoNet: While most BBSes and FidoNet have largely been supplanted by the Internet, a niche community still exists. Some BBSes have transitioned to the Internet, offering telnet access or web interfaces.

Internet: Continues to evolve with emerging technologies, such as blockchain, the Internet of Things (IoT), and artificial intelligence, expanding its capabilities and services.

In summary, while BBSes with FidoNet played a crucial role in the early days of digital communication and community building, the Internet has surpassed them in terms of accessibility, speed, and breadth of content and services."

BUT I THOUGHT... surpassed in terms of WHAT?

---

tigs$> but what about the decentralized nature of BBS?

---

"The decentralized nature of Bulletin Board Systems (BBSes) and their network, such as FidoNet, is indeed a key characteristic that differentiates them from the modern Internet in significant ways. Both BBSes and the Internet can be described as networks, but their approaches to decentralization, control, and community engagement have notable differences. Decentralization in BBS and FidoNet:

BBSes: Individual BBSes were standalone systems usually operated by enthusiasts or small organizations. Each BBS was independently owned and managed, setting its own rules, available services, and community standards. This meant a highly decentralized structure where each system was a distinct entity within the larger ecosystem of BBSes.

FidoNet: FidoNet connected these disparate BBSes into a wider network, allowing message and file exchanges. Despite this connectivity, the network maintained a decentralized approach. FidoNet's structure was hierarchical in terms of message routing (using Zone, Region, Net, and Node levels), but each node (or BBS) operated independently under the broader protocol standards. This allowed for a distributed messaging system without a central authority controlling the entire network.

Comparison with the Internet:

Internet: The Internet is decentralized in its fundamental design, with no central control over its networks and services. It operates on a global scale, connecting millions of networks and devices. However, certain aspects of the Internet, such as infrastructure (backbone networks, ISPs), standards (protocols, software), and services (search engines, social media platforms), are controlled by a relatively small number of organizations. This has led to concerns over centralization in terms of control, data ownership, and privacy.

Key Aspects of Decentralization in BBS/FidoNet vs. Internet:

Control and Ownership: BBSes and FidoNet featured a more grassroots level of ownership and control, with individuals and small groups operating their own nodes in the network. In contrast, significant portions of the Internet's infrastructure and popular platforms are owned and controlled by large corporations.

Community Engagement: BBSes often fostered tight-knit communities with a strong sense of ownership and participation in the platform's governance. The decentralized nature of the Internet also supports diverse communities, but the scale and commercialization of major platforms have changed the dynamics of community engagement.

Resilience and Censorship: Decentralization in both BBSes/FidoNet and the Internet contributes to resilience against failures and censorship. However, the concentration of power among key Internet players has raised concerns about censorship, privacy, and the potential for service disruption.

Evolution and Adaptability: The Internet has continually evolved, absorbing or overshadowing technologies like BBSes and FidoNet. The decentralized nature of the Internet's early days has shifted towards a more centralized model in terms of content distribution and service provision, though initiatives like blockchain and decentralized web projects aim to counteract this trend.

In summary, while both BBSes/FidoNet and the Internet embody principles of decentralization, the scale, control structures, and community engagement mechanisms differ significantly between them. The grassroots, individualistic nature of BBSes and FidoNet's decentralized network contrasts with the broader, more centralized control seen in parts of the Internet today, despite its inherently decentralized architecture."

well well well... We gotta return to our roots...

BBS: The Documentary (by Jason Scott) ((NOT me))

@ fa984bd7:58018f52

I just hit the big red PUBLISH button on NDK 2.4.

(well, actually, I did it from the command line, the big red button is imaginary)

Codename: Safely Embrace the Chaos

Nostr is a, mostly, friendly environment with not too many developers and no ill-intent among them.

But this will not always be the case. Compatibility issues, mistakes, and all kinds of chaos is to be expected.

This version of NDK introduces validation at the library-level so that clients built using NDK can rely on some guarantees on handled-kinds that events they are consuming comply with what is defined on their respective NIPs.

An example?

NIP-88, recurring subscriptions, defines that Tier events should have amount tags of what subscribers are expected to pay and the cadence.

Prior to NDK 2.4 some malformed events would render like this:

https://i.nostr.build/Y4JG.png

But with NDK 2.4 the malformed parts of the events don't reach the client code.

https://i.nostr.build/wAgJ.png

This is just a beginning, but event-validation is now moving into the library!

@ 3bf0c63f:aefa459d

Nostr: a quick introduction, attempt #1

Nostr doesn't have a material existence, it is not a website or an app. Nostr is just a description what kind of messages each computer can send to the others and vice-versa. It's a very simple thing, but the fact that such description exists allows different apps to connect to different servers automatically, without people having to talk behind the scenes or sign contracts or anything like that.

When you use a Nostr client that is what happens, your client will connect to a bunch of servers, called relays, and all these relays will speak the same "language" so your client will be able to publish notes to them all and also download notes from other people.

That's basically what Nostr is: this communication layer between the client you run on your phone or desktop computer and the relay that someone else is running on some server somewhere. There is no central authority dictating who can connect to whom or even anyone who knows for sure where each note is stored.

If you think about it, Nostr is very much like the internet itself: there are millions of websites out there, and basically anyone can run a new one, and there are websites that allow you to store and publish your stuff on them.

The added benefit of Nostr is that this unified "language" that all Nostr clients speak allow them to switch very easily and cleanly between relays. So if one relay decides to ban someone that person can switch to publishing to others relays and their audience will quickly follow them there. Likewise, it becomes much easier for relays to impose any restrictions they want on their users: no relay has to uphold a moral ground of "absolute free speech": each relay can decide to delete notes or ban users for no reason, or even only store notes from a preselected set of people and no one will be entitled to complain about that.

There are some bad things about this design: on Nostr there are no guarantees that relays will have the notes you want to read or that they will store the notes you're sending to them. We can't just assume all relays will have everything — much to the contrary, as Nostr grows more relays will exist and people will tend to publishing to a small set of all the relays, so depending on the decisions each client takes when publishing and when fetching notes, users may see a different set of replies to a note, for example, and be confused.

Another problem with the idea of publishing to multiple servers is that they may be run by all sorts of malicious people that may edit your notes. Since no one wants to see garbage published under their name, Nostr fixes that by requiring notes to have a cryptographic signature. This signature is attached to the note and verified by everybody at all times, which ensures the notes weren't tampered (if any part of the note is changed even by a single character that would cause the signature to become invalid and then the note would be dropped). The fix is perfect, except for the fact that it introduces the requirement that each user must now hold this 63-character code that starts with "nsec1", which they must not reveal to anyone. Although annoying, this requirement brings another benefit: that users can automatically have the same identity in many different contexts and even use their Nostr identity to login to non-Nostr websites easily without having to rely on any third-party.

To conclude: Nostr is like the internet (or the internet of some decades ago): a little chaotic, but very open. It is better than the internet because it is structured and actions can be automated, but, like in the internet itself, nothing is guaranteed to work at all times and users many have to do some manual work from time to time to fix things. Plus, there is the cryptographic key stuff, which is painful, but cool.

@ dbe0605a:f8fd5b2c

Nostr for The Great Orchestra of Christmas Charity

This Sunday, 28.01.2024 at 18:00 - 19:00 UTC we're inviting you to take pare in a very unique #zapathon

Nostrians taking part in this special zapathon that will play in tune with thousands of people playing together with The Great Orchestra of Christmas Charity on their 32nd Grand Finale! Hence the name #orchestrathon

The goal of #orchestrathon is to support the goal of this years Grand Finale, which is: funding equipment for diagnosing, monitoring and rehabilitating lung diseases of patients in pulmonology wards for children and adults in Poland

That means all bitcoin from zaps will be converted to PLN and donated to The Great of Christmas Charity foundation.

What's The Great Orchestra of Christmas Charity? What is the 32nd Grand Finale?! You'll find all of those answers on Geyser project story, or a few paragraphs below 👇 Now coming back to #orchestrathon...

What Is #Orchestrathon

This Nostr account is a was generated on Geyser and is tied to Geyser project: Bitcoiners support The Great Orchestra of Christmas Charity

That means all zaps sent to this account are at the same time funding Geyser campaing.

So not only you will contribute to the goal in the project, also all the zap comments will be visable there.

Ain't that crazy? We can use this campaign as one giant #orchestrathon client!

Rules are simple:

1. On Sunday at 18.00 - 19.00 we all connect to our relays to join the #orchestrathon
2. For the whole hour - you can zap this profile, our posts or comments as crazy!
3. At 19.00 it's culmination of both #orchestrathon and Grand Finale

All Nostrians who zap will receive special badges, depending on the zapped amount (in total):

On Sunday there will be lot's of concerts and events happening all day, culminating with Grand Finale closing at 19.00. We will try to launch a stream on zap.stream, so we can enjoy Grand Finale and concerts together!

This #orchestrathon and Geyser fundraise is organised by Dwadzieścia Jeden, a community of polish Bitcoiners. More about us and Proof of Work in the project story 👇

We're not only Bitcoiners, are also Nostrians, follow us: Dwadzieścia Jeden account: @npub1cpmvpsqtzxl4px44dp4544xwgu0ryv2lscl3qexq42dfakuza02s4fsapc

Saunter: @npub1m0sxqk5uwvtjhtt4yw3j0v3k6402fd35aq8832gp8kmer78atvkq9vgcru

Fmar: @npub1xpuz4qerklyck9evtg40wgrthq5rce2mumwuuygnxcg6q02lz9ms275ams

JesterHodl: @npub18s59mqct7se3xkhxr3epkagvuydwtvhpsacj67shrta8eknynegqttz5c3

Tomek K: @npub14wxtsrj7g2jugh70pfkzjln43vgn4p7655pgky9j9w9d75u465pqvagcye

Tom Chojnacki: @npub1m0sxqk5uwvtjhtt4yw3j0v3k6402fd35aq8832gp8kmer78atvkq9vgcru

Gracjan Pietras: @npub1trkudtnp7jg3tmy4sz8mepmgs5wdxk9x2esgts25mgkyecrse7js6ptss5

Tomek Waszczyk @npub1ah8phwmfyl2lakr23kt95kea3yavpt4m3cvppawuwkatllnrm4eqtuwdmk

Original Geyser project story

Saving Lives and Preserving Health

Dwadzieścia Jeden a polish node in decentralised bitcoin communities network Twenty One, is proud to facilitate bitcoin fundraising for the biggest, non-governmental, non-profit, charity in Poland — The Great Orchestra of Christmas Charity.

For the past 31 years, GOCC continuously fundraises money for pediatric and elderly care in Poland. Each year, a culmination of the raise occurs during the last Sunday of January in the shape of The Grand Finale — a joyful day that when tens of thousands volunteers worldwide, especially kids and teenagers, go on the streets to gather money for the cause, giving donors hear-shaped stickers with logo of the foundation. If you're in Poland on that day, basically every person you'll meet on the street will proudly wear GOCC heart.

The same hear-shaped stickers can be seen in every hospital in Poland on thousands of high quality medical equipment bought by The Great Orchestra. There is not a single polish family that hasn't benefited in some way from this equipment, and it saved thousands of lives, especially the little ones.

32nd Grand Finale Goal

This year, 32rd Grand Finale will take place on 28th of January. The aim of the 32nd Grand Finale is post-pandemic lung diseases — the raised funds will be used to purchase equipment for children's and adults' respiratory units.

The Foundation plans to purchase:

• equipment for diagnostic imaging, i.a. MRI and ultrasound equipment,

• equipment for functional diagnosis, i.a. polysomnographs and portable spirometers,

• equipment for endoscopic diagnosis, i.a. navigational bronchoscopy systems and bronchoscopes

• equipment for rehabilitation - equipment for pulmonary rehabilitation used in the treatment of patients after lung transplantation

• equipment for thoracic surgery, e.g. electrocoagulation systems and cryoprobes.

The Great Orchestra of Proof of Work

• 31 years of non-stop fundraising for state-of-the-art saving life equipment, running medical and educational programmes and humanitarian aid

• 2 billion PLN or ~11,781 BTC raised in total

• Areas of help: children's cardiac surgery, oncology, geriatrics, neonatology, children's nephrology, children's and young people's mental health services, ambulances for children's hospitals, volunteer firefighters & search & rescue units

• Last year Grand Finale raised over PLN 240 million (1,410 BTC) for a goal to fight sepsis

• You can check how money from 2022 report (224 376 706 PLN or ~1,321.69 BTC) raise were spent here (although it's in polish)

• In addition to work focused on Poland, GOCC fundraised money for hospitals in Ukraine and provided substantial humanitarian aid for Ukrainian refugees, Polish-Belarusian border crisis, Turkey earthquake victims and more

• GOCC is the most-trusted Polish organization and is at the top of the list as the most trusted public entities in Poland

What We'll Do With Gathered Funds

Gathered bitcoin will be converted to PLN by a polish exchange Quark and donated to The Great Orchestra of Christmas Charity after The Grand Finale which takes place on January 28th.

Dwadzieścia Jeden Proof of Work

We're a group of polish pleb Bitcoiners that started organising ourselves about 2 years ago.

Our activities include:

• organising regular bitcoin meetups in several cities in Poland, also Nostr meetup in Warsaw

• organising Bitcoin FilmFest and European Halving Party in Warsaw

• orangepilling and maintaining map of polish bitcoin merchants in Poland on btcmap.org

• translating bitcoin FOSS to polish language

• writing and translating articles to polish

• giving talks on bitcoin

• volounteering for helping with bitcoin payments and running bitcoin workshops on non-conferences (eg. Weekend of Capitalism)

• working in human rights centered NGOs and promoting bitcoin as a tool for protecting human rights

• ...and we're just starting!

Find Out More

• Official GOCC website

• Wikipedia page about GOCC

Gallery

@ 21b41910:91f41a5e

When typing a note, the application can sometimes crash (due to lack of memory?) when switching applications, uploading an image file, etc. It's frustrating to have a note mostly typed out and then lose it all from a crash of the application. The goal of this bounty is to help mitigate the impacts by preventing the loss of a partially written note to avoid needing to rewrite it all, while adding some helpful functionality.

The current workaround that myself and others due is to periodically select-all and copy to the clipboard, or prepare the note elsewhere to copy and paste in.

To satisfy the conditions of the bounty, Amethyst should be modified (with a release) to auto-save in local storage any note being typed out and be able to recover such a note to continue if the application crashed and is restarted. The loading of the saved data should happen when clicking the icon to write a note if the note was not sent or cancelled. When the note is signed and sent to relays, the auto-saved note in storage can be cleared.

@npub1gcxzte5zlkncx26j68ez60fzkvtkm9e0vrwdcvsjakxf9mu9qewqlfnj5z @npub1w4uswmv6lu9yel005l3qgheysmr7tk9uvwluddznju3nuxalevvs2d0jr5

Github Project Issue: https://github.com/vitorpamplona/amethyst/issues/748 Github Pull Request: https://github.com/vitorpamplona/amethyst/pull/749

@ e42dd2a2:eeddb96f

lorem ipsum

@ 3bf0c63f:aefa459d

bitcoind decentralization

It is better to have multiple curator teams, with different vetting processes and release schedules for bitcoind than a single one.

"More eyes on code", "Contribute to Core", "Everybody should audit the code".

All these points repeated again and again fell to Earth on the day it was discovered that Bitcoin Core developers merged a variable name change from "blacklist" to "blocklist" without even discussing or acknowledging the fact that that innocent pull request opened by a sybil account was a social attack.

After a big lot of people manifested their dissatisfaction with that event on Twitter and on GitHub, most Core developers simply ignored everybody's concerns or even personally attacked people who were complaining.

The event has shown that:

1) Bitcoin Core ultimately rests on the hands of a couple maintainers and they decide what goes on the GitHub repository[^pr-merged-very-quickly] and the binary releases that will be downloaded by thousands; 2) Bitcoin Core is susceptible to social attacks; 2) "More eyes on code" don't matter, as these extra eyes can be ignored and dismissed.

Solution: bitcoind decentralization

If usage was spread across 10 different bitcoind flavors, the network would be much more resistant to social attacks to a single team.

This has nothing to do with the question on if it is better to have multiple different Bitcoin node implementations or not, because here we're basically talking about the same software.

Multiple teams, each with their own release process, their own logo, some subtle changes, or perhaps no changes at all, just a different name for their bitcoind flavor, and that's it.

Every day or week or month or year, each flavor merges all changes from Bitcoin Core on their own fork. If there's anything suspicious or too leftist (or perhaps too rightist, in case there's a leftist bitcoind flavor), maybe they will spot it and not merge.

This way we keep the best of both worlds: all software development, bugfixes, improvements goes on Bitcoin Core, other flavors just copy. If there's some non-consensus change whose efficacy is debatable, one of the flavors will merge on their fork and test, and later others -- including Core -- can copy that too. Plus, we get resistant to attacks: in case there is an attack on Bitcoin Core, only 10% of the network would be compromised. the other flavors would be safe.

Run Bitcoin Knots

The first example of a bitcoind software that follows Bitcoin Core closely, adds some small changes, but has an independent vetting and release process is Bitcoin Knots, maintained by the incorruptible Luke DashJr.

Next time you decide to run bitcoind, run Bitcoin Knots instead and contribute to bitcoind decentralization!

---

See also:

• How to attack Bitcoin, Anthony Towns' take

[^pr-merged-very-quickly]: See PR 20624, for example, a very complicated change that could be introducing bugs or be a deliberate attack, merged in 3 days without time for discussion.

@ 3bf0c63f:aefa459d

IPFS problems: Too much immutability

Content-addressing is unusable with an index or database that describes each piece of content. Since IPFS is fully content-addressable, nothing can be done with it unless you have a non-IPFS index or database, or an internal protocol for dynamic and updateable links.

The IPFS conceit made then go with the with the second option, which proved to be a failure. They even incentivized the creation of a database powered by IPFS, which couldn't be more misguided.

@ 3bf0c63f:aefa459d

The place of Drivechain in Bitcoin's future

James O'Beirne wrote this nice little article that contains a bunch of statements that should have been obvious to anyone who thought a little about Bitcoin's future, as they were obvious for Hal Finney in 2009 already.

Basically the article says that the Bitcoin blockchain won't scale for the entire world population to use it. It will so much not scale that even "offchain" solutions like Lightning and Ark will not scale and they basically lose usefulness as more adoption happens and fees rise.

Given that, Bitcoin has only two paths (and now this is not James speaking anymore): either it will die or it will have to scale using custodians.

Can Bitcoin die?

Yes, Bitcoin can die, and if Bitcoin fails to get some level of mass adoption soon enough I believe it will die. Governments all around the world gave us 14 years of advantage to try to get Bitcoin to become this money medium-of-exchange store-of-value thing, or at least an investment vehicle or savings-technology that is super valuable and with widespread ownership, but now it is starting to move. CBDCs have been talked about for a while, but now they are really starting to happen. Regulated and compliant fiat proprietary services like Venmo have grown under capture by governments, in some places the government itself has launched their own cool app-like totally regulated spyware fiat money transmission things, like the ridiculous PIX in Brazil, which is now widely adopted, and -- I believe surprisingly for all the UX designers out there -- people have learned to use QR codes.

The point is that, given a little bit of more time, governments can start to encroach on Bitcoin's space, making it more and more regulated until it either dies or becomes a very useless thing. Some Bitcoiners think Bitcoin has already won, this can't be further from the truth. Others think Bitcoin must not be mass adopted, it must stay as this niche and mostly useless currency digital asset thing or I don't really understand what they think. These people are wrong. There are also people who think Bitcoin should not be used by normal people as money, it should keep being adopted, but only as a store-of-value: this is also completely wrong, since Bitcoin's value tends to decrease as soon as owners realize Bitcoin is losing its chances of becoming actual money.

Scaling

To not die, Bitcoin must become more used. The current thesis accepted by most "maximalists" is that Bitcoin will continue to be thought of as an investment and its price will keep increasing, the price movements will bring more attention to it in a virtuous cycle. Eventually enough people will want to hold it so they will start accepting it as a payment for goods and services and then it can start to be used as money.

Assuming that will happen, we'll be faced with a problem: as people try to use it as money they will necessarily, by lack of other options, have to use some custodial solution or some proto-custodial solution, maybe using Lightning as a settlement layer between big custodians[^1]? I don't know. No one is happy with that solution, and rightfully so, since it is very dangerous. A small set of custodians can easily be captured by governments and they can slowly turn Bitcoin into fiat money like they did with gold.

In other words: without Drivechain, Bitcoin will be a fragile success in the best case and dead in the worst case scenario.

Enter Drivechain

Drivechain basically brings two things to the table:

In the best case scenario of the non-Drivechain world, we would be in a fragile position with easily-capturable custodians. With Drivechain, we can create a bunch of decentralized sidechains, backed by the same mining process that is assumed to be decentralized already for Bitcoin to even work, and we gain orders of magnitude of more room to make censorship-resistant open transactions that don't require tax IDs or selfies and can't be stopped or regulated by governments. Bitcoin can scale as it normally would, but it's much more resilient.

The other thing we get are improvements for the "dying" part. If Drivechain is successful, it may end up bringing much more people to Bitcoin. Hivemind by itself may attract lots of users and capital that has been prevented from betting on predictions anywhere in the fiat world since always; Zcash or Monero sidechains can easily bring all the "cryptocurrency" enthusiasts that care about privacy and have long ago decided that Bitcoin isn't for them, these people are interested in some immediate feature, that now Bitcoin can provide them with; other sidechains, like Ethereum-like chains, can also contribute to slowly bring in some of the users of these chains[^2]. Why would we want these people to come to Bitcoin? Because they will increase Bitcoin's network-effect, increase the satoshi price, and these changes would contribute for more people to start looking at Bitcoin and using Bitcoin and so on and so forth. More users, more network-effect, bigger price, will contribute for Bitcoin not being easily regulated and killed by governments.

In other words: with Drivechain will be a resilient success in the worst case and a complete and total world dominator money in the best case.

[^1]: I actually think Bitcoiners should put more thought on how to create a custodian network that scales easily without having to be centralized in a small set of providers like Lightning is, and this is kind of the point of James's article too. [^2]: Yes, I do think the entirety of the Ethereum ecosystem is a waste of time and money, but clearly there are dozens of people and money that disagree with me. And if they can't harm me with their stupidity then they will definitely make our money stronger. Besides that, it's not as if there aren't already many stupid people or even evil, horrible criminals using Bitcoin.

@ 3bf0c63f:aefa459d

idea: Hosted-channels Lightning wallet that runs in the browser

Communicates over HTTP with a server that is actually connected to the Lightning Network, but generates preimages and onions locally, doing everything like the Hosted Channels protocol says. Just the communication method changes.

Could use this library: https://www.npmjs.com/package/bolt04

@ 3bf0c63f:aefa459d

O voto negativo

É simples: Você pode escolher entre votar em um candidato qualquer, como todos fazemos normalmente, ou tirar um voto de um político que não quer que seja eleito de jeito nenhum. A possibilidade de votarmos negativamente duas vezes é muito interessante também.

Outro motivo para implementar essa inovação na democracia: é muito mais divertido que o voto nulo.

@ 3bf0c63f:aefa459d

Democracy as a failed open-network protocol

In the context of protocols for peer-to-peer open computer networks -- those in which new actors can freely enter and immediately start participating in the protocol --, without any central entity, specially without any central human mind judging things from the top --, it's common for decisions about the protocol to be thought taking in consideration all the possible ways a rogue peer can disrupt the entire network, abuse it, make the experience terrible for others. The protocol design must account for all incentives in play and how they will affect each participant, always having in mind that each participant may be acting in a purely egoistical self-interested manner, not caring at all about the health of the network (even though most participants won't be like that). So a protocol, to be successful, must have incentives aligned such that self-interested actors cannot profit by hurting others and will gain most by cooperating (whatever that means in the envisaged context), or there must be a way for other peers to detect attacks and other kinds of harm or attempted harm and neutralize these.

Since computers are very fast, protocols can be designed to be executed many times per day by peers involved, and since the internet is a very open place to which people of various natures are connected, many open-network protocols with varied goals have been tried in large scale and most of them failed and were shut down (or kept existing, but offering a bad experience and in a much more limited scope than they were expected to be). Often the failure of a protocol leads to knowledge about its shortcomings being more-or-less widespread and agreed upon, and these lead to the development of a better protocol the next time something with similar goals is tried.

Ideally democracies are supposed to be an open-entry network in the same sense as these computer networks, and although that is a noble goal, it's one full of shortcomings. Democracies are supposed to the governing protocol of States that have the power to do basically anything with the lives of millions of citizens.

One simple inference we may take from the history of computer peer-to-peer protocols is that the ones that work better are those that are simple and small in scope (Bitcoin, for example, is very simple; BitTorrent is also very simple and very limited in what it tries to do and the number of participants that get involved in each run of the protocol).

Democracies, as we said above, are the opposite of that. Besides being in a very hard position to achieve success as an open protocol, democracies also suffer from the fact that they take a long time to run, so it's hard to see where it is failing every time.

The fundamental incentives of democracy, i.e. the rules of the protocol, posed by the separation of powers and checks-and-balances are basically the same in every place and in every epoch since the XIII century, and even today most people who dedicate their lives to the subject still don't see how they're completely flawed.

The system of checks and balances was thought from the armchair of a couple of political theorists who had never done anything like that in their lives, didn't have any experience dealing with very adversarial environments like the internet -- and probably couldn't even imagine that the future users of their network were going to be creatures completely different than themselves and their fellow philosophers and aristocrats who all shared the same worldview (and how fast that future would come!).

Also

• The illusion of checks and balances

@ 3bf0c63f:aefa459d

Gŕecia Antiga e homosexualismo cultural

Se na Grécia Antiga o homosexualismo era tão comum, não seria isso um argumento definitivo contra o pessoal que hoje afirma que o homosexualismo é natural e que 0.1%/1%/10%/25% das pessoas são homosexuais por natureza?

Se na Gŕecia Antiga havia muito mais de 25% de homosexuais e aqui até ontem eram menos de 1% (e agora subiu?) isso tudo não é evidência fortíssima de que o homosexualismo é mesmo cultural?

@ 3bf0c63f:aefa459d

Zettelkasten

https://writingcooperative.com/zettelkasten-how-one-german-scholar-was-so-freakishly-productive-997e4e0ca125 (um artigo meio estúpido, mas útil).

Esta incrível técnica de salvar notas sem categorias, sem pastas, sem hierarquia predefinida, mas apenas fazendo referências de uma nota à outra e fazendo supostamente surgir uma ordem (ou heterarquia, disseram eles) a partir do caos parece ser o que faltava pra eu conseguir anotar meus pensamentos e idéias de maneira decente, veremos.

Ah, e vou usar esse tal neuron que também gera sites a partir das notas?, acho que vai ser bom.

@ 3bf0c63f:aefa459d

piln

Piln was a prepaid IPFS pinning service you could use anonymously and instantaneously with the Bitcoin payments over the Lightning Network.

Similar to https://eternum.io/, but anonymous, loginless and very very cheap. The cheapness wouldn't scale because it needed a local HD to store data, couldn't work with services like S3 because IPFS is very bad (I actually tried to make it work).

Discontinued because IPFS is terrible.

• https://piln.xyz/
• https://github.com/fiatjaf/piln

See also

• How IPFS is broken

@ 3bf0c63f:aefa459d

trustedcoin

A lightningd plugin that replaces a bitcoind node with trusted public explorers. Great so one can run a c-lightning node on a VPS without having to bother with an expensive bitcoind.

It uses multiple explorers and alternates between them, parses blocks and compares them with block hashes taken from other explorers so if someone is trying to trick you at least your node will crash instead of assuming all is fine.

It is used on @lntxbot and Etleneum.

• https://github.com/fiatjaf/trustedcoin

See also

• Sparko