@ da18e986:3a0d9851

After months of development I am excited to officially announce the first version of DVMDash (v0.1). DVMDash is a monitoring and debugging tool for all Data Vending Machine (DVM) activity on Nostr. The website is live at https://dvmdash.live and the code is available on Github.

Data Vending Machines (NIP-90) offload computationally expensive tasks from relays and clients in a decentralized, free-market manner. They are especially useful for AI tools, algorithmic processing of user’s feeds, and many other use cases.

The long term goal of DVMDash is to become 1) a place to easily see what’s happening in the DVM ecosystem with metrics and graphs, and 2) provide real-time tools to help developers monitor, debug, and improve their DVMs.

DVMDash aims to enable users to answer these types of questions at a glance: * What’s the most popular DVM right now? * How much money is being paid to image generation DVMs? * Is any DVM down at the moment? When was the last time that DVM completed a task? * Have any DVMs failed to deliver after accepting payment? Did they refund that payment? * How long does it take this DVM to respond? * For task X, what’s the average amount of time it takes for a DVM to complete the task? * … and more

For developers working with DVMs there is now a visual, graph based tool that shows DVM-chain activity. DVMs have already started calling other DVMs to assist with work. Soon, we will have humans in the loop monitoring DVM activity, or completing tasks themselves. The activity trace of which DVM is being called as part of a sub-task from another DVM will become complicated, especially because these decisions will be made at run-time and are not known ahead of time. Building a tool to help users and developers understand where a DVM is in this activity trace, whether it’s gotten stuck or is just taking a long time, will be invaluable. For now, the website only shows 1 step of a dvm chain from a user's request.

One of the main designs for the site is that it is highly clickable, meaning whenever you see a DVM, Kind, User, or Event ID, you can click it and open that up in a new page to inspect it.

Another aspect of this website is that it should be fast. If you submit a DVM request, you should see it in DVMDash within seconds, as well as events from DVMs interacting with your request. I have attempted to obtain DVM events from relays as quickly as possible and compute metrics over them within seconds.

This project makes use of a nosql database and graph database, currently set to use mongo db and neo4j, for which there are free, community versions that can be run locally.

Finally, I’m grateful to nostr:npub10pensatlcfwktnvjjw2dtem38n6rvw8g6fv73h84cuacxn4c28eqyfn34f for supporting this project.

Features in v0.1:

Global Network Metrics:

This page shows the following metrics: - DVM Requests: Number of unencrypted DVM requests (kind 5000-5999) - DVM Results: Number of unencrypted DVM results (kind 6000-6999) - DVM Request Kinds Seen: Number of unique kinds in the Kind range 5000-5999 (except for known non-DVM kinds 5666 and 5969) - DVM Result Kinds Seen: Number of unique kinds in the Kind range 6000-6999 (except for known non-DVM kinds 6666 and 6969) - DVM Pub Keys Seen: Number of unique pub keys that have written a kind 6000-6999 (except for known non-DVM kinds) or have published a kind 31990 event that specifies a ‘k’ tag value between 5000-5999 - DVM Profiles (NIP-89) Seen: Number of 31990 that have a ‘k’ tag value for kind 5000-5999 - Most Popular DVM: The DVM that has produced the most result events (kind 6000-6999) - Most Popular Kind: The Kind in range 5000-5999 that has the most requests by users. - 24 hr DVM Requests: Number of kind 5000-5999 events created in the last 24 hrs - 24 hr DVM Results: Number of kind 6000-6999 events created in the last 24 hours - 1 week DVM Requests: Number of kind 5000-5999 events created in the last week - 1 week DVM Results: Number of kind 6000-6999 events created in the last week - Unique Users of DVMs: Number of unique pubkeys of kind 5000-5999 events - Total Sats Paid to DVMs: - This is an estimate. - This value is likely a lower bound as it does not take into consideration subscriptions paid to DVMs - This is calculated by counting the values of all invoices where: - A DVM published a kind 7000 event requesting payment and containing an invoice - The DVM later provided a DVM Result for the same job for which it requested payment. - The assumption is that the invoice was paid, otherwise the DVM would not have done the work - Note that because there are multiple ways to pay a DVM such as lightning invoices, ecash, and subscriptions, there is no guaranteed way to know whether a DVM has been paid. Additionally, there is no way to know that a DVM completed the job because some DVMs may not publish a final result event and instead send the user a DM or take some other kind of action.

Recent Requests:

This page shows the most recent 3 events per kind, sorted by created date. You should always be able to find the last 3 events here of all DVM kinds.

DVM Browser:

This page will either show a profile of a specific DVM, or when no DVM is given in the url, it will show a table of all DVMs with some high level stats. Users can click on a DVM in the table to load the DVM specific page.

Kind Browser:

This page will either show data on a specific kind including all DVMs that have performed jobs of that kind, or when no kind is given, it will show a table summarizing activity across all Kinds.

Debug:

This page shows the graph based visualization of all events, users, and DVMs involved in a single job as well as a table of all events in order from oldest to newest. When no event is given, this page shows the 200 most recent events where the user can click on an event in order to debug that job. The graph-based visualization allows the user to zoom in and out and move around the graph, as well as double click on any node in the graph (except invoices) to open up that event, user, or dvm in a new page.

Playground:

This page is currently under development and may not work at the moment. If it does work, in the current state you can login with NIP-07 extension and broadcast a 5050 event with some text and then the page will show you events from DVMs. This page will be used to interact with DVMs live. A current good alternative to this feature, for some but not all kinds, is https://vendata.io/.

Looking to the Future

I originally built DVMDash out of Fear-of-Missing-Out (FOMO); I wanted to make AI systems that were comprised of DVMs but my day job was taking up a lot of my time. I needed to know when someone was performing a new task or launching a new AI or Nostr tool!

I have a long list of DVMs and Agents I hope to build and I needed DVMDash to help me do it; I hope it helps you achieve your goals with Nostr, DVMs, and even AI. To this end, I wish for this tool to be useful to others, so if you would like a feature, please submit a git issue here or note me on Nostr!

Immediate Next Steps:

• Refactoring code and removing code that is no longer used
• Improve documentation to run the project locally
• Adding a metric for number of encrypted requests
• Adding a metric for number of encrypted results

Long Term Goals:

• Add more metrics based on community feedback
• Add plots showing metrics over time
• Add support for showing a multi-dvm chain in the graph based visualizer
• Add a real-time mode where the pages will auto update (currently the user must refresh the page)
• ... Add support for user requested features!

Acknowledgements

There are some fantastic people working in the DVM space right now. Thank you to nostr:npub1drvpzev3syqt0kjrls50050uzf25gehpz9vgdw08hvex7e0vgfeq0eseet for making python bindings for nostr_sdk and for the recent asyncio upgrades! Thank you to nostr:npub1nxa4tywfz9nqp7z9zp7nr7d4nchhclsf58lcqt5y782rmf2hefjquaa6q8 for answering lots of questions about DVMs and for making the nostrdvm library. Thank you to nostr:npub1l2vyh47mk2p0qlsku7hg0vn29faehy9hy34ygaclpn66ukqp3afqutajft for making the original DVM NIP and vendata.io which I use all the time for testing!

P.S. I rushed to get this out in time for Nostriga 2024; code refactoring will be coming :)

@ 52adc2ef:9f4bc0ba

สวัสดีครับ

ผมว่าจะลองเขียนบทความหรืออะไรที่มีประโยชน์ ในสิ่งที่ตัวเองได้รู้และมาเเชร์ หลังจากได้ฟัง

'Stoic' ปรัชญาเปลี่ยนชีวิตและพัฒนาการทำงานของ 'ทอย DataRockie' มีช่วงนึงพูดไว้ว่า

คนไทย consume กับ social media ลำดับต้นๆ ซึ่งหลายคน consume อย่างเดียว จะเป็นได้แค่ effect ของส่วนที่เรา content ที่เราเสพ แต่ถ้าเราสร้าง content ที่มี value เราก็จะเป็น เหตุ ที่มี effect กับคนอื่น สร้างเเรงกระเพื่อมส่งต่อไป

รู้สึกว่าน่าสนใจ เพราะก็เป็นหนึ่งในคนที่รับสารมาตลอด ไม่เคยลองที่จะ create ขึ้นมา เพราะเขิน ไม่ค่อยได้โพสอะไรอยู่เเล้ว บวกกับ คิดว่ารู้ไม่พอ เเต่คนเราก็น่าจะมีความรู้อะไรที่รู้ดีกว่าคนอื่นเค้าบ้าง

คิดว่าลองเริ่มดู ก็คงไม่เสียหายอะไร หวังว่าน่าจะเป็นประโยชน์กับใครก็คนใดคนหนึ่งครับ

siamstr

nostr

@ eac63075:b4988b48

Nos últimos anos, as Organizações Autônomas Descentralizadas (DAOs) emergiram como uma das inovações mais significativas no ecossistema das criptomoedas e da tecnologia blockchain. Elas prometem ser uma evolução dos sistemas tradicionais de governança, oferecendo um modelo em que as decisões são tomadas coletivamente por meio de tokens, sem a necessidade de intermediários. No entanto, à medida que esse conceito se populariza, problemas relacionados à manipulação de votos e à corrupção dentro das DAOs tornaram-se cada vez mais evidentes.

Recentemente, um novo desenvolvimento criptográfico foi proposto para combater essas fraudes: a Prova de Conhecimento Completo (Complete Knowledge Proof). Este avanço, com a colaboração de Vitalik Buterin, criador do Ethereum, e pesquisadores da Universidade de Cornell, traz uma abordagem inovadora para resolver um dos maiores desafios de governança descentralizada: a segurança e integridade dos votos. Neste artigo, vamos explorar detalhadamente como funciona essa tecnologia e o impacto que ela pode ter no futuro das DAOs.

O Problema das DAOs: Manipulação de Votos e Fraudes

O conceito de DAOs é fascinante, pois permite que qualquer pessoa com tokens tenha voz ativa nas decisões de uma organização descentralizada. A governança é realizada através da votação, onde os detentores de tokens participam para aprovar ou rejeitar propostas. No entanto, a prática tem revelado alguns problemas críticos, principalmente a manipulação de votos e o aluguel de tokens.

Em muitos casos, indivíduos ou grupos podem "alugar" tokens de outros participantes para ganhar mais poder nas votações. Isso corrompe o processo de governança, pois aqueles que deveriam votar com seus próprios tokens acabam utilizando tokens de terceiros, prejudicando a descentralização genuína. Em algumas situações, esse processo leva a decisões que beneficiam poucos, enquanto os interesses da maioria são ignorados. Um dos exemplos mais críticos desse problema ocorreu quando tokens foram delegados ou alugados para manipular decisões em uma DAO, permitindo que certos atores controlassem resultados vitais.

A Solução: Prova de Conhecimento Completo (Complete Knowledge Proof)

A Prova de Conhecimento Completo surge como uma solução promissora para mitigar esses problemas de governança. O objetivo dessa tecnologia é garantir que o processo de votação seja legítimo e que somente os verdadeiros detentores dos tokens possam participar de forma válida, sem delegar ou vender seus direitos de voto.

O que é Prova de Conhecimento Completo?

A Prova de Conhecimento Completo é um conceito criptográfico que permite a alguém provar que tem conhecimento de uma informação (como uma chave criptográfica) sem precisar revelar essa informação. Ou seja, você pode provar que tem os direitos para votar com seus tokens sem precisar divulgar suas chaves privadas ou delegar os tokens para outra pessoa.

Essa solução utiliza uma combinação de Zero-Knowledge Proof (Prova de Conhecimento Nulo) e Proof of Work (Prova de Trabalho) para garantir que os votos sejam realizados apenas por aqueles que realmente detêm os tokens e que estão participando de forma legítima, sem manipulação ou fraude. A Zero-Knowledge Proof permite que alguém prove que possui a chave privada associada aos tokens, sem revelar a chave em si, e a Proof of Work adiciona uma camada adicional de validação, exigindo que um trabalho computacional seja realizado para confirmar a autenticidade do voto.

Como Funciona a Prova de Conhecimento Completo?

A ideia central da Prova de Conhecimento Completo é simples, mas poderosa. Imagine que você possui tokens de uma DAO e deseja participar de uma votação. Para garantir que o voto seja válido, a Prova de Conhecimento Completo exige que você utilize um dispositivo específico ou um ambiente de execução confiável, que possa validar que você realmente é o dono dos tokens e que não os compartilhou com outra pessoa.

Este processo pode ser feito através de um hardware dedicado, como um dispositivo ASIC (circuito integrado de aplicação específica), que é programado para validar os votos de maneira segura. Os votos são computados diretamente a partir desse hardware, que usa algoritmos criptográficos complexos para provar que você tem os tokens e está votando de forma legítima. Isso evita que os votos sejam manipulados ou alugados, pois só o verdadeiro detentor dos tokens pode usá-los para votar.

Uso de Zero-Knowledge Proof e Proof of Work

A combinação de Zero-Knowledge Proof e Proof of Work é o que torna esse processo especialmente robusto. A Zero-Knowledge Proof garante que a sua identidade como votante seja preservada, ou seja, você pode provar que tem os tokens sem revelar publicamente quem você é ou quantos tokens possui. Já o Proof of Work adiciona um nível extra de segurança, exigindo que o hardware dedicado realize um certo número de cálculos antes que o voto seja validado. Isso impede que pessoas usem múltiplas contas falsas ou tokens alugados, já que seria computacionalmente inviável manipular o sistema.

O Impacto na Governança Descentralizada

A implementação da Prova de Conhecimento Completo pode transformar completamente a forma como as DAOs operam, eliminando os problemas de manipulação de votos e garantindo uma governança mais transparente e justa. Além de aumentar a segurança, essa solução também promove uma maior confiança nas DAOs, já que os participantes podem ter certeza de que as decisões estão sendo tomadas por aqueles que realmente possuem os tokens, sem interferências de atores externos.

Aplicações Além das DAOs

Embora o foco inicial da Prova de Conhecimento Completo seja a governança descentralizada, essa tecnologia tem um potencial muito maior. Ela pode ser utilizada em várias outras áreas, como votação eletrônica, identidade digital, autenticação de usuários, entre outros. Em sistemas de votação eletrônica, por exemplo, a Prova de Conhecimento Completo poderia garantir que cada voto é legítimo sem comprometer a privacidade dos eleitores, o que seria uma revolução na forma como conduzimos eleições em todo o mundo.

No campo da identidade digital, essa solução poderia permitir que usuários provem que possuem determinadas credenciais (como uma identidade ou uma carteira de motorista), sem a necessidade de expor essas informações a terceiros. Isso poderia ser extremamente útil em situações que exigem alto nível de privacidade e segurança, como em contratos eletrônicos e autenticação de serviços.

Conclusão

A Prova de Conhecimento Completo é uma inovação significativa no campo da criptografia e da governança descentralizada. Ao combinar as vantagens da Zero-Knowledge Proof e da Proof of Work, ela oferece uma solução eficaz para prevenir fraudes e manipulações nas DAOs, garantindo que os votos sejam realizados de forma segura e legítima.

Com a participação de nomes de peso como Vitalik Buterin e pesquisadores da Cornell, essa tecnologia tem o potencial de se tornar um pilar fundamental na governança descentralizada e em várias outras aplicações no mundo digital. À medida que as DAOs continuam a ganhar espaço no ecossistema blockchain, soluções como essa serão essenciais para assegurar sua integridade e transparência.

O futuro das DAOs pode estar mais seguro com a Prova de Conhecimento Completo, e este é apenas o começo de um novo capítulo na governança descentralizada.

---

Assista ao vídeo:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7SAVXV1MvrE

@ 76c71aae:3e29cafa

On social media and in the Nostr space in particular, there’s been a lot of debate about the idea of supporting deletion and editing of notes.

Some people think they’re vital features to have, others believe that more honest and healthy social media will come from getting rid of these features. The discussion about these features quickly turns to the feasibility of completely deleting something on a decentralized protocol. We quickly get to the “We can’t really delete anything from the internet, or a decentralized network.” argument. This crowds out how Delete and Edit can mimic elements of offline interactions, how they can be used as social signals.

When it comes to issues of deletion and editing content, what matters more is if the creator can communicate their intentions around their content. Sure, on the internet, with decentralized protocols, there’s no way to be sure something’s deleted. It’s not like taking a piece of paper and burning it. Computers make copies of things all the time, computers don’t like deleting things. In particular, distributed systems tend to use a Kafka architecture with immutable logs, it’s just easier to keep everything around, as deleting and reindexing is hard. Even if the software could be made to delete something, there’s always screenshots, or even pictures of screens. We can’t provably make something disappear.

What we need to do in our software is clearly express intention. A delete is actually a kind of retraction. “I no longer want to associate myself with this content, please stop showing it to people as part of what I’ve published, stop highlighting it, stop sharing it.” Even if a relay or other server keeps a copy, and keeps sharing it, being able to clearly state “hello world, this thing I said, was a mistake, please get rid of it.” Just giving users the chance to say “I deleted this” is a way of showing intention. It’s also a way of signaling that feedback has been heard. Perhaps the post was factually incorrect or perhaps it was mean and the person wants to remove what they said. In an IRL conversation, for either of these scenarios there is some dialogue where the creator of the content is learning something and taking action based on what they’ve learned.

Without delete or edit, there is no option to signal to the rest of the community that you have learned something because of how the content is structured today. On most platforms a reply or response stating one’s learning will be lost often in a deluge of replies on the original post and subsequent posts are often not seen especially when the original goes viral. By providing tools like delete and edit we give people a chance to signal that they have heard the feedback and taken action.

The Nostr Protocol supports delete and expiring notes. It was one of the reasons we switched from secure scuttlebutt to build on Nostr. Our nos.social app offers delete and while we know that not all relays will honor this, we believe it’s important to provide social signaling tools as a means of making the internet more humane.

We believe that the power to learn from each other is more important than the need to police through moral outrage which is how the current platforms and even some Nostr clients work today.

It’s important that we don’t say Nostr doesn’t support delete. Not all apps need to support requesting a delete, some might want to call it a retraction. It is important that users know there is no way to enforce a delete and not all relays may honor their request.

Edit is similar, although not as widely supported as delete. It’s a creator making a clear statement that they’ve created a new version of their content. Maybe it’s a spelling error, or a new version of the content, or maybe they’re changing it altogether. Freedom online means freedom to retract a statement, freedom to update a statement, freedom to edit your own content. By building on these freedoms, we’ll make Nostr a space where people feel empowered and in control of their own media.

@ 005bc4de:ef11e1a2

Recently, I wrote this: https://stacker.news/items/684558?commentId=684701 and asked whether three emails were "legit"...did Satoshi write them. Still wondering, I thought a wider explanation might be worthwhile.

Somehow, I'm finding myself lost in a techno labyrinth and then mired in a quandary of muck. Here's why...

Image source: generated at leonardo.ai

The background

In 2019, I edited a book called "Kicking the Hornet’s Nest: The Complete Writings, Emails, and Forum Posts of Satoshi Nakamoto, the Founder and Creator of Bitcoin" with the goal of logging all of Satoshi Nakamoto's public writings in chronological order (links here). There were other similar resources out there, and a somewhat similar but incomplete book, yet none were arranged strictly by chronology or without heavy editorial commentary added as a layer on top of Satoshi's writings.

I wanted Satoshi's words, alone, in order, all of them.

A second edition of "Kicking" came out when three "Satoshi emails" were released in 2020. Since the goal was to include all of Satoshi's writings, a new edition was needed.

Then, with the "COPA trial" in early 2023 a new slew of never-before-seen emails were released by Adam Back and Martii Malmi as evidence in the case. This was a couple of hundred more emails, half from Satoshi and the other half to Satoshi. So, a third edition of "Kicking" was needed.

The start

My current quandary started when I got a ping via X saying I'd missed Wei Dai's emails with Satoshi.

https://files.peakd.com/file/peakd-hive/crrdlx/23wMyix4neRki9BgsjZGYV7qpaHvmiwXUVMtm8XP8MQEpCNApb8BVQcY8qdAxa3kenpdw.png

Wei Dai's work is the first citation in the bitcoin whitepaper (page 9) and Dai is a cypherpunk legend, of course. This omission was a rather egregious error on my part, "How did I miss that?" I wondered. Like finding an overlooked golden nugget, I eagerly wrote back to thank BITCOINALLCAPS: "This is defitely [sic] something to include. I'll investigate, and thanks for the heads up!"

That feeling

Since I'm currently still tweaking out the third edition, this Wei Dai email discovery came at an opportune time to make adjustments. However, I had, and have, a funny feeling.

The link that BITCOINALLCAPS gave was to what I thought was a semi-sketchy looking video. (See the YouTube video linked on the X post above: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hkcwUortfWE) The vid was interesting in that it talked about Satoshi reaching out to Wei Dei pre-whitepaper. Then it analyzed nuanced differences between the drafted whitepaper title and summary when compared to the final title and summary of the whitepaper.

A little searching pointed the "source" for this missing Wei Dai email as bitcoin.com. That site has a list of Satoshi emails, forum posts, etc. I noticed two correspondences that I'd missed: Wei Dei's two emails and Jon Matonis's one. However, the likely more-respected Nakamoto Institute at https://satoshi.nakamotoinstitute.org did not include those three emails. That feeling came back to me, with the question, "Are these emails for real?"

If you're unfamiliar with bitcoin.com, then you may not realize why I got a funny feeling and why I began to wonder about the emails at all. It's a long, sordid story, but I'll try to briefly summarize.

At first there was bitcoin. Then, around 2017 as bitcoin grew and struggled to scale in size, the "block size wars" went down. Some wanted to increase the block size to unclog the chain, others wanted to retain the small block size that Satoshi had coded. The big blockers eventually forked Bitcoin (BTC) to start Bitcoin Cash (aka, "B-cash") and took the symbol BCH.

There was much animosity, and frankly, there still is. Bitcoin "maxis" today consider BTC the only bitcoin. Maxis even say there is bitcoin and no other...that there actually are no other cryptocurrencies...that all others are merely scam-coins. These folks consider themselves purists by retaining Satoshi's original small block size. The B-cashers consider themselves purists, retaining Satoshi's "electronic cash" ethos so that someone could buy-a-cup-of-coffee with a transaction on the main chain.

If you're keeping score:

|coin/chain:|Bitcoin|Bitcoin Cash| |-|-|-| |symbol/nickname:|BTC|BCH or B-cash| |block size:|small blocks like Satoshi coded|big blocks so electronic cash can exist like Satoshi wrote| |website:|bitcoin.org|bitcoin.com| |site founder/owner:|started by Satoshi|owned by Roger Ver| |Satoshi's writings logged at:|nakamotoinstitute.org|nakamotostudies.org|

And, to really throw gas onto the fire, and I hate to even bring this up, but there is Craig Steven Wright. His "Bitcoin SV" (BSV) coin spun-off from Bitcoin Cash. BSV claimed to be the even more pure purist coin as "Satoshi's Vision," hence the "SV." If you're reading this, you know about Wright...and the COPA trial...and his debunking as Satoshi...and all that. I'll return to this topic in a moment.

Like I said, this is a long and sordid story.

So, why dig up this muck here?

Back to the emails

My question was/is, "Did Satoshi write the emails to Wei Dai and Jon Matonis?" And this is where I entered the techno-labyrinth.

The video source I mentioned above aroused skepticism. The narrator focused on certain items, namely the emphasis on "electronic cash" or "ecash" or the "b" in "b-money." He didn't mention "b-cash" that I caught, but the I wondered if that was the allusion projected. In other words, I wondered if there was/is an agenda, as if to say, "b-money is b-cash which is the real and original bitcoin."

And, back to Craig Wright. I was unfamiliar with Jon Matonis, so I searched, and this article came up: https://jonmatonis.medium.com/how-i-met-satoshi-96e85727dc5a. The upshot is that in 2016 Matonis believed Craig Wright was Satoshi Nakamoto. (I'm curious as to his opinion now.) Suddenly, the reason for excluding the Jon Matonis email from the Bitcoin (BTC)-friendly NakamotoInstitute.org was apparent. This was high blasphemy.

The labyrinth got more convoluted. The website NakamotoStudies.org is Bitcoin Cash (BCH)-friendly. (See the left-leaning green "B" symbol? It's the same as on the BCH symbol instead of the familiar, right-lighting and orange BTC symbol.)

For some reason, the NakamotoStudies.org (BCH-friendly) site does not currently show the Matonis email, see this link. Actually, all "Emails" are "forbidden."

Though not live now, the Internet Archive Wayback Machine has captured the emails here.

At this point, the tecno-labyrinth is confusing and the muck is deep.

It seemed simple. I just wondered if Satoshi wrote the emails, but now I'm mired in website inclusion/exclusion censorship and gamesmanship, B-cash talk, and Craig Wright-is-Satoshi nonsense. Labyrinth and muck.

Canon or canon not?

In Christianity, there is the idea of Biblical canon. Canon is what should be included in the Bible, non-canon is everything else. Christians believe canonical works are inspired scripture, where the Holy Spirit guided the authors of the books of the Bible. As man used his own words and writing styles to literally write, the Holy Spirit actually guided each word perfectly so that the finished work was not just man's words, but "God-breathed" words.

The early Christian church, then, had to figure, "Which works are God-breathed canon and which are not?" Or, practically speaking, what goes into the Bible and what does not?

This gets into the weeds a bit, but there was no official meeting to decide what gets into the Bible and what did not. The "Early Church," that is, the body of Christian believers in the first couple of centuries A.D., essentially agreed as a collective on certain books as being in line with Christian thought and agreed that others were not. As a group, they nodded and said, "Yep, this is in," to the 66 books we recognize in the Bible today, and they said, "Nope, not this" to everything else.

I say this gets into the weeds, and it does. The Catholic Church may bring up the books of the Apocrypha. And, even then, the church might distinguish the Old Testament Apocryphal books versus New Testament Apocryphal books. It gets complicated.

What's more, some may argue that official church councils or positions officially codify or accept certain books as doctrine, or not. That is, the official church officially deems canon, or as deems non-canon. Yet, others may argue, as I do, that it is not an official church that is the gatekeeper of canon, but rather that it is instead the decentralized body of believers as a group, guided by the Holy Spirit, which accept canon and reject non-canon. If canon is God-breathed, it is not a council of church men who decide canon or not. Rather, it is the church, the believers, guided by the Holy Spirit that decides.

This is now deeply in the weeds, but the point remains...some works get in, some does not.

Bitcoin is not a religion

To be clear, I'm very much not a fan of throwing religion onto bitcoin. We do it at times, maybe in a solely fun way, such as with the "Genesis block" or in other ways. Bitcoin is a lot of things: economics, computer science, physical science, mathematics, philosophy, game theory, and more. But, it's not religion.

The reason I even included the religious discussion here is to illustrate the point of including or excluding text. Recall my question, "Should the Wei Dai and Jon Matonis emails be included in Satoshi's writings?"

And, I mentioned two ways above what made Biblical canon or non-canon: (1) official decree or (2) unofficial acceptance by the people. In the first case, I wouldn't want an official bitcoin meeting of people to decide yes or no as to what is Satoshi's writings and what is not (of course, being decentralized, there can be no official bitcoin meeting!). And, to the second, I don't want the bitcoin community to collectively agree yes or no, "This is in, this is not," as the early Christian Church did with Biblical canon. My desire is this:

If Satoshi wrote it, I want it included in "Kicking."

Yet, the question still nags, are these emails Satoshi's words? Are they bitcoin canon or not?

My hope

To include or not to include is my question? My reason for writing this is to hopefully get unstuck from the muck and mire. My options at the moment, as I see them, are:

1. Don't include those emails in "Kicking the Hornet's Nest."
2. Include them alongside all the others in the chronological place they would go.
3. Include the emails, but add an editor's comment effectively as an asterisk saying: *here is the email, but take itwith a grain of salt.

Currently, I'm really not sure which option I'll go with. If I had to choose today, I'd choose option 3. I've already done this with the "I am not Dorian" post, as below.

This is odd in a way. I'm a Christian, by faith. Faith, by definition, is believing in what cannot be proven. And yet, I love bitcoin, who's #1 mantra may be, "Don't trust (believe), verify." So, my hope is to find an answer to whether these emails are Satoshi's or not. Perhaps there is a telling clue or clues in the source or metadata of those emails that proves or disproves them. My hope is to verify yes or no, legit or not. Maybe someone who reads this, more adroit than I, can enlighten me on a telling point that reveals whether Satoshi wrote the Wei Dai and Jon Matonis emails, or not.

I'm curious and listening.

@ 3c984938:2ec11289

Bienvenide a Nostr!

Introduccíon

Es tu primera vez aqui en Nostr? Bienvenides! Nostr es un acrónimo raro para "Notes and Other Stuff Transmitted by Relays" on un solo objetivo; resistirse a la censura. Una alternativa a las redes sociales tradicionales, comunicaciónes, blogging, streaming, podcasting, y feventualmente el correo electronico (en fase de desarrollo) con características descentralizadas que te capacita, usario. Jamas seras molestado por un anuncio, capturado por una entidad centralizada o algoritmo que te monetiza.

Permítame ser su anfitrión! Soy Onigiri! Yo estoy explorando el mundo de Nostr, un protocolo de comunicacíon decentralizada. Yo escribo sobre las herramientas y los desarolladores increíbles de Nostr que dan vida a esta reino.

Bienvenides a Nostr Wonderland

Estas a punto de entrar a un otro mundo digtal que te hará explotar tu mente de todas las aplicaciones descentralizadas, clientes, sitios que puedes utilizar. Nunca volverás a ver a las comunicaciones ni a las redes sociales de la mesma manera. Todo gracias al carácter criptográfico de nostr, inpirado por la tecnología "blockchain". Cada usario, cuando crean una cuenta en Nostr, recibe un par de llaves: una privada y una publico. Estos son las llaves de tu propio reino. Lo que escribes, cantes, grabes, lo que creas - todo te pertenece.

Unos llaves de Oro y Plata

Mi amigo y yo llamamos a esto "identidad mediante cifrado" porque tu identidad es cifrado. Tu puedes compartir tu llave de plata "npub" a otros usarios para conectar y seguir. Utiliza tu llave de oro "nsec" para accedar a tu cuenta y exponerte a muchas aplicaciones. Mantenga la llave a buen recaudo en todo momento. Ya no hay razor para estar enjaulado por los terminos de plataformas sociales nunca más.

Onigirl npub18jvyjwpmm65g8v9azmlvu8knd5m7xlxau08y8vt75n53jtkpz2ys6mqqu3

Todavia No tienes un cliente? Seleccione la mejor opción.

Encuentra la aplicación adecuada para ti! Utilice su clave de oro "nsec" para acceder a estas herramientas maravillosas. También puedes visit a esta pagina a ver a todas las aplicaciones. Antes de pegar tu llave de oro en muchas aplicaciones, considera un "signer" (firmante) para los sitios web 3. Por favor, mire la siguiente imagen para más detalles. Consulte también la leyenda.

Get a Signer extension via chrome webstore

Un firmante (o "signer" en inglés) es una extensión del navegador web. Nos2x and NostrConnect son extensiónes ampliamente aceptado para aceder a Nostr. Esto simplifica el proceso de aceder a sitios "web 3". En lugar de copiar y pegar la clave oro "nsec" cada vez, la mantienes guardado en la extensión y le des permiso para aceder a Nostr.

👉⚡⚡Obtén una billetera Bitcoin lightning para enviar/recibir Zaps⚡⚡ (Esto es opcional)

Aqui en Nostr, utilizamos la red Lightning de Bitcoin (L2). Nesitaras una cartera lightning para enviar y recibir Satoshis, la denominacion mas chiquita de un Bitcoin. (0.000000001 BTC) Los "zaps" son un tipo de micropago en Nostr. Si te gusta el contenido de un usario, es norma dejarle una propina en la forma de un ¨zap". Por ejemplo, si te gusta este contenido, tu me puedes hacer "zap" con Satoshis para recompensar mi trabajo. Pero apenas llegaste, as que todavia no tienes una cartera. No se preocupe, puedo ayudar en eso!

"Stacker.News" es una plataforma donde los usarios pueden ganar SATS por publicar articulos y interactuar con otros.

Stacker.News es el lugar mas facil para recibir una direccion de cartera Bitcoin Lightning.

1. Acedese con su extensión firmante "signer" - Nos2x or NostrConnect - hace click en tu perfil, un codigo de letras y numeros en la mano superior derecha. Veás algo como esto
2. Haga clic en "edit" y elija un nombre que te guste. Se puede cambiar si deseas en el futuro.
3. Haga clic en "save"
4. Crea una biografía y la comunidad SN son muy acogedora. Te mandarán satoshi para darte la bienvenida.
5. Tu nueva direccion de cartera Bitcoin Lightning aparecerá asi ^^No le mandas "zaps" a esta direccion; es puramente con fines educativos.
6. Con tu Nueva dirección de monedero Bitcoin Lightning puedes ponerla en cualquier cliente o app de tu elección. Para ello, ve a tu página de perfil y bajo la dirección de tu monedero en "Dirección Lightning", introduce tu nueva dirección y pulsa "guardar " y ya está. Enhorabuena.

👉✨Con el tiempo, es posible que desee pasar a las opciones de auto-custodia y tal vez incluso considerar la posibilidad de auto-alojar su propio nodo LN para una mejor privacidad. La buena noticia es que stacker.news tambien está dejando de ser una cartera custodio.

⭐NIP-05-identidad DNS⭐ Al igual que en Twitter, una marca de verificación es para mostrar que eres del mismo jardín "como un humano", y no un atípico como una mala hierba o, "bot". Pero no de la forma nefasta en que lo hacen las grandes tecnológicas. En el país de las maravillas de Nostr, esto te permite asignar tu llave de plata, "npub", a un identificador DNS. Una vez verificado, puedes gritar para anunciar tu nueva residencia Nostr para compartir.

✨Hay un montón de opciones, pero si has seguido los pasos, esto se vuelve extremadamente fácil.

👉✅¡Haz clic en tu "Perfil ", luego en "Configuración ", desplázate hasta la parte inferior y pega tu clave Silver, "npub!" y haz clic en "Guardar " y ¡listo! Utiliza tu monedero relámpago de Stacker.news como tu NIP-05. ¡¡¡Enhorabuena!!! ¡Ya estás verificado! Dale unas horas y cuando uses tu cliente "principal " deberías ver una marca de verificación.

Nostr, el infonformista de los servidores.

En lugar de utilizar una única instancia o un servidor centralizado, Nostr está construido para que varias bases de datos intercambien mensajes mediante "relés". Los relés, que son neutrales y no discriminatorios, almacenan y difunden mensajes públicos en la red Nostr. Transmiten mensajes a todos los demás clientes conectados a ellos, asegurando las comunicaciones en la red descentralizada.

¡Mis amigos en Nostr te dan la bienvenida!

Bienvenida a la fiesta. ¿Le apetece un té?🍵

¡Hay mucho mas!

Esto es la punta del iceberg. Síguenme mientras continúo explorando nuevas tierras y a los desarolladores, los caballeres que potencioan este ecosistema. Encuéntrame aquí para mas contenido como este y comparten con otros usarios de nostr. Conozca a los caballeres que luchan por freedomTech (la tecnología de libertad) en Nostr y a los proyectos a los que contribuyen para hacerla realidad.💋

Onigirl @npub18jvyjwpmm65g8v9azmlvu8knd5m7xlxau08y8vt75n53jtkpz2ys6mqqu3

---

🧡😻Esta guía ha sido cuidadosamente traducida por miggymofongo

Puede seguirla aquí. @npub1ajt9gp0prf4xrp4j07j9rghlcyukahncs0fw5ywr977jccued9nqrcc0cs

sitio web

@ 6871d8df:4a9396c1

Embracing AI: A Case for AI Accelerationism

In an era where artificial intelligence (AI) development is at the forefront of technological innovation, a counter-narrative championed by a group I refer to as the 'AI Decels'—those advocating for the deceleration of AI advancements— seems to be gaining significant traction. After tuning into a recent episode of the Joe Rogan Podcast, I realized that the prevailing narrative around AI was heading in a dangerous direction. Rogan had Aza Raskin and Tristan Harris, technology safety advocates, who released a talk called 'The AI Dilemma,' on for a discussion. You may know them from the popular documentary 'The Social Dilemma' on the dangers of social media. It became increasingly clear that the cautionary stance dominating this discourse might be tipping the scales too far, veering towards an over-regulated future that stifles innovation rather than fostering it.

Are we moving too fast?

While acknowledging AI's benefits, Aza and Tristan fear it could be dangerous if not guided by ethical standards and safeguards. They believe AI development is moving too quickly and that the right incentives for its growth are not in place. They are concerned about the possibility of "civilizational overwhelm," where advanced AI technology far outpaces 21st-century governance. They fear a scenario where society and its institutions cannot manage or adapt to the rapid changes and challenges introduced by AI.

They argue for regulating and slowing down AI development due to rapid, uncontrolled advancement driven by competition among companies like Google, OpenAI, and Microsoft. They claim this race can lead to unsafe releases of new technologies, with AI systems exhibiting unpredictable, emergent behaviors, posing significant societal risks. For instance, AI can inadvertently learn tasks like sentiment analysis or human emotion understanding, creating potential for misuse in areas like biological weapons or cybersecurity vulnerabilities.

Moreover, AI companies' profit-driven incentives often conflict with the public good, prioritizing market dominance over safety and ethics. This misalignment can lead to technologies that maximize engagement or profits at societal expense, similar to the negative impacts seen with social media. To address these issues, they suggest government regulation to realign AI companies' incentives with safety, ethical considerations, and public welfare. Implementing responsible development frameworks focused on long-term societal impacts is essential for mitigating potential harm.

This isn't new

Though the premise of their concerns seems reasonable, it's dangerous and an all too common occurrence with the emergence of new technologies. For example, in their example in the podcast, they refer to the technological breakthrough of oil. Oil as energy was a technological marvel and changed the course of human civilization. The embrace of oil — now the cornerstone of industry in our age — revolutionized how societies operated, fueled economies, and connected the world in unprecedented ways. Yet recently, as ideas of its environmental and geopolitical ramifications propagated, the narrative around oil has shifted.

Tristan and Aza detail this shift and claim that though the period was great for humanity, we didn't have another technology to go to once the technological consequences became apparent. The problem with that argument is that we did innovate to a better alternative: nuclear. However, at its technological breakthrough, it was met with severe suspicions, from safety concerns to ethical debates over its use. This overregulation due to these concerns caused a decades-long stagnation in nuclear innovation, where even today, we are still stuck with heavy reliance on coal and oil. The scare tactics and fear-mongering had consequences, and, interestingly, they don't see the parallels with their current deceleration stance on AI.

These examples underscore a critical insight: the initial anxiety surrounding new technologies is a natural response to the unknowns they introduce. Yet, history shows that too much anxiety can stifle the innovation needed to address the problems posed by current technologies. The cycle of discovery, fear, adaptation, and eventual acceptance reveals an essential truth—progress requires not just the courage to innovate but also the resilience to navigate the uncertainties these innovations bring.

Moreover, believing we can predict and plan for all AI-related unknowns reflects overconfidence in our understanding and foresight. History shows that technological progress, marked by unexpected outcomes and discoveries, defies such predictions. The evolution from the printing press to the internet underscores progress's unpredictability. Hence, facing AI's future requires caution, curiosity, and humility. Acknowledging our limitations and embracing continuous learning and adaptation will allow us to harness AI's potential responsibly, illustrating that embracing our uncertainties, rather than pretending to foresee them, is vital to innovation.

The journey of technological advancement is fraught with both promise and trepidation. Historically, each significant leap forward, from the dawn of the industrial age to the digital revolution, has been met with a mix of enthusiasm and apprehension. Aza Raskin and Tristan Harris's thesis in the 'AI Dilemma' embodies the latter.

Who defines "safe?"

When slowing down technologies for safety or ethical reasons, the issue arises of who gets to define what "safe" or “ethical” mean? This inquiry is not merely technical but deeply ideological, touching the very core of societal values and power dynamics. For example, the push for Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) initiatives shows how specific ideological underpinnings can shape definitions of safety and decency.

Take the case of the initial release of Google's AI chatbot, Gemini, which chose the ideology of its creators over truth. Luckily, the answers were so ridiculous that the pushback was sudden and immediate. My worry, however, is if, in correcting this, they become experts in making the ideological capture much more subtle. Large bureaucratic institutions' top-down safety enforcement creates a fertile ground for ideological capture of safety standards.

I claim that the issue is not the technology itself but the lens through which we view and regulate it. Suppose the gatekeepers of 'safety' are aligned with a singular ideology. In that case, AI development would skew to serve specific ends, sidelining diverse perspectives and potentially stifling innovative thought and progress.

In the podcast, Tristan and Aza suggest such manipulation as a solution. They propose using AI for consensus-building and creating "shared realities" to address societal challenges. In practice, this means that when individuals' viewpoints seem to be far apart, we can leverage AI to "bridge the gap." How they bridge the gap and what we would bridge it toward is left to the imagination, but to me, it is clear. Regulators will inevitably influence it from the top down, which, in my opinion, would be the opposite of progress.

In navigating this terrain, we must advocate for a pluralistic approach to defining safety, encompassing various perspectives and values achieved through market forces rather than a governing entity choosing winners. The more players that can play the game, the more wide-ranging perspectives will catalyze innovation to flourish.

Ownership & Identity

Just because we should accelerate AI forward does not mean I do not have my concerns. When I think about what could be the most devastating for society, I don't believe we have to worry about a Matrix-level dystopia; I worry about freedom. As I explored in "Whose data is it anyway?," my concern gravitates toward the issues of data ownership and the implications of relinquishing control over our digital identities. This relinquishment threatens our privacy and the integrity of the content we generate, leaving it susceptible to the inclinations and profit of a few dominant tech entities.

To counteract these concerns, a paradigm shift towards decentralized models of data ownership is imperative. Such standards would empower individuals with control over their digital footprints, ensuring that we develop AI systems with diverse, honest, and truthful perspectives rather than the massaged, narrow viewpoints of their creators. This shift safeguards individual privacy and promotes an ethical framework for AI development that upholds the principles of fairness and impartiality.

As we stand at the crossroads of technological innovation and ethical consideration, it is crucial to advocate for systems that place data ownership firmly in the hands of users. By doing so, we can ensure that the future of AI remains truthful, non-ideological, and aligned with the broader interests of society.

But what about the Matrix?

I know I am in the minority on this, but I feel that the concerns of AGI (Artificial General Intelligence) are generally overblown. I am not scared of reaching the point of AGI, and I think the idea that AI will become so intelligent that we will lose control of it is unfounded and silly. Reaching AGI is not reaching consciousness; being worried about it spontaneously gaining consciousness is a misplaced fear. It is a tool created by humans for humans to enhance productivity and achieve specific outcomes.

At a technical level, large language models (LLMs) are trained on extensive datasets and learning patterns from language and data through a technique called "unsupervised learning" (meaning the data is untagged). They predict the next word in sentences, refining their predictions through feedback to improve coherence and relevance. When queried, LLMs generate responses based on learned patterns, simulating an understanding of language to provide contextually appropriate answers. They will only answer based on the datasets that were inputted and scanned.

AI will never be "alive," meaning that AI lacks inherent agency, consciousness, and the characteristics of life, not capable of independent thought or action. AI cannot act independently of human control. Concerns about AI gaining autonomy and posing a threat to humanity are based on a misunderstanding of the nature of AI and the fundamental differences between living beings and machines. AI spontaneously developing a will or consciousness is more similar to thinking a hammer will start walking than us being able to create consciousness through programming. Right now, there is only one way to create consciousness, and I'm skeptical that is ever something we will be able to harness and create as humans. Irrespective of its complexity — and yes, our tools will continue to become evermore complex — machines, specifically AI, cannot transcend their nature as non-living, inanimate objects programmed and controlled by humans.
The advancement of AI should be seen as enhancing human capabilities, not as a path toward creating autonomous entities with their own wills. So, while AI will continue to evolve, improve, and become more powerful, I believe it will remain under human direction and control without the existential threats often sensationalized in discussions about AI's future.

With this framing, we should not view the race toward AGI as something to avoid. This will only make the tools we use more powerful, making us more productive. With all this being said, AGI is still much farther away than many believe.

Today's AI excels in specific, narrow tasks, known as narrow or weak AI. These systems operate within tightly defined parameters, achieving remarkable efficiency and accuracy that can sometimes surpass human performance in those specific tasks. Yet, this is far from the versatile and adaptable functionality that AGI represents.

Moreover, the exponential growth of computational power observed in the past decades does not directly translate to an equivalent acceleration in achieving AGI. AI's impressive feats are often the result of massive data inputs and computing resources tailored to specific tasks. These successes do not inherently bring us closer to understanding or replicating the general problem-solving capabilities of the human mind, which again would only make the tools more potent in our hands.

While AI will undeniably introduce challenges and change the aspects of conflict and power dynamics, these challenges will primarily stem from humans wielding this powerful tool rather than the technology itself. AI is a mirror reflecting our own biases, values, and intentions. The crux of future AI-related issues lies not in the technology's inherent capabilities but in how it is used by those wielding it. This reality is at odds with the idea that we should slow down development as our biggest threat will come from those who are not friendly to us.

AI Beget's AI

While the unknowns of AI development and its pitfalls indeed stir apprehension, it's essential to recognize the power of market forces and human ingenuity in leveraging AI to address these challenges. History is replete with examples of new technologies raising concerns, only for those very technologies to provide solutions to the problems they initially seemed to exacerbate. It looks silly and unfair to think of fighting a war with a country that never embraced oil and was still primarily getting its energy from burning wood. The evolution of AI is no exception to this pattern. As we venture into uncharted territories, the potential issues that arise with AI—be it ethical concerns, use by malicious actors, biases in decision-making, or privacy intrusions—are not merely obstacles but opportunities for innovation. It is within the realm of possibility, and indeed, probability, that AI will play a crucial role in solving the problems it creates. The idea that there would be no incentive to address and solve these problems is to underestimate the fundamental drivers of technological progress.

Market forces, fueled by the demand for better, safer, and more efficient solutions, are powerful catalysts for positive change. When a problem is worth fixing, it invariably attracts the attention of innovators, researchers, and entrepreneurs eager to solve it. This dynamic has driven progress throughout history, and AI is poised to benefit from this problem-solving cycle.

Thus, rather than viewing AI's unknowns as sources of fear, we should see them as sparks of opportunity. By tackling the challenges posed by AI, we will harness its full potential to benefit humanity. By fostering an ecosystem that encourages exploration, innovation, and problem-solving, we can ensure that AI serves as a force for good, solving problems as profound as those it might create. This is the optimism we must hold onto—a belief in our collective ability to shape AI into a tool that addresses its own challenges and elevates our capacity to solve some of society's most pressing issues.

An AI Future

The reality is that it isn't whether AI will lead to unforeseen challenges—it undoubtedly will, as has every major technological leap in history. The real issue is whether we let fear dictate our path and confine us to a standstill or embrace AI's potential to address current and future challenges.

The approach to solving potential AI-related problems with stringent regulations and a slowdown in innovation is akin to cutting off the nose to spite the face. It's a strategy that risks stagnating the U.S. in a global race where other nations will undoubtedly continue their AI advancements. This perspective dangerously ignores that AI, much like the printing press of the past, has the power to democratize information, empower individuals, and dismantle outdated power structures.

The way forward is not less AI but more of it, more innovation, optimism, and curiosity for the remarkable technological breakthroughs that will come. We must recognize that the solution to AI-induced challenges lies not in retreating but in advancing our capabilities to innovate and adapt.

AI represents a frontier of limitless possibilities. If wielded with foresight and responsibility, it's a tool that can help solve some of the most pressing issues we face today. There are certainly challenges ahead, but I trust that with problems come solutions. Let's keep the AI Decels from steering us away from this path with their doomsday predictions. Instead, let's embrace AI with the cautious optimism it deserves, forging a future where technology and humanity advance to heights we can't imagine.

@ 599f67f7:21fb3ea9

¿Qué es una dirección Lightning o Lightning address?

Una dirección Lightning es una dirección que visualmente se asemeja a una dirección de correo electrónico legible para los humanos, por ejemplo usuario@dominio.com pero que en realidad te permite recibir pagos en bitcoin instantáneos y económicos, sin la necesidad de tener un nodo en linea en tu dispositivo ni tener que generar facturas de forma manual cada vez que alguien te quiere hacer un pago.

¿Suena bien no?

¿Y cómo funciona?

Funciona utilizando el protocolo de pago LNURL.

Aquí se muestra un sencillo esquema de lo que ocurre en segundo plano.

En resumen, cuando otro usuario quiere pagarte usando tu dirección Lightning, tu billetera convierte la dirección Lightning en una solicitud de pago LNURL. Luego se utiliza esa solicitud de pago LNURL exitosa para obtener una factura BOLT11.

💡 Dirección Lightning > LNURLp > Factura BOLT 11.

Suena bien, pero ¿cuál es el problema?

Por el momento, muchas de las implementaciones de Lightning Address son de custodia, porque se necesita un dominio para que Lightning Address funcione y un nodo que esté siempre en línea para recibir los pagos. Debido a que es de custodia, el custodio puede atacarte en cualquier momento y monitorear tus transacciones.

Tienes que confiar en el propietario del dominio para no cambiar el registro de tu dirección Lightning. Y no funciona si el servidor LNURL no está en línea.

Bitcoin Txoko ofrece una sencilla solución de Lightning Address respaldada por LNbits. Esto también es de custodia, así que por favor mantén solo una pequeña cantidad en tu billetera Bitcoin Txoko y ve retirando a tu billetera de autocustodia a medida que recibas más sats.

Estoy listo, ¿qué necesito para empezar?

¡Todo lo que necesitas es un teléfono móvil o un ordenador y una conexión a Internet!

1. Creando tu billetera

Si aún no lo has hecho, navega a https://bitcointxoko.com y crea una nueva billetera. Puedes elegir el nombre que quieras.

2. Activar extensiones

Hace falta la extensión Pay Links para que las direcciones Lightning funcionen.

Abre Extensiones en la barra de herramientas y activa Pay Links.

3. Creando tu enlace de pago

• En a la extensión Pay Links, haz clic en New Pay Link.

• Elige la billetera que has creado.

• Para la descripción del artículo, puedes escribir lo que quieras.

• Elige un nombre de usuario de tu dirección Lightning. Tu dirección Lightning se verá como username@bitcointxoko.com.

• Desmarque Fixed amount y cambia el valor mínimo a 1 y el valor máximo a 500000.

⚠️ También puedes cambiar el valor máximo a algo más alto, pero es más probable que los pagos más grandes fallen debido a la limitada capacidad de entrada del nodo Lightning de Bitcoin Txoko. Así que recomendamos mantenerlo en 500000 sats.

• Ahora abre Advanced options y cambia Comment maximum characters a 799. Este paso no es necesario pero permite más funcionalidades más adelante.

• Marca Enable nostr zaps en la parte inferior, para que puedas utilizar tu dirección Lightning para recibir zaps.

• Las demás opciones avanzadas son opcionales, puedes configurarlas si quieres o dejarlas en blanco.

Al final debería verse algo así.

• Cuando hayas comprobado que todo es correcto, sigue adelante y haz clic en Create Pay Link.

Probando

Puedes probar si tu nueva dirección Lightning funciona yendo a otra cartera, pulsando en Enviar y escribiendo tu dirección Lightning como destino, y luego enviándote una pequeña cantidad de sats.

Vuelve a tu billetera Bitcoin Txoko y comprueba si has recibido tu propio pago. Es posible que tengas que actualizar la página.

Si todo funcionó correctamente, ¡enhorabuena! 🥳

Si no es así, háznoslo saber. Siempre estamos aquí para ayudar.

Próximos pasos

Nostr zaps

Puedes añadir tu dirección Bitcoin Txoko Lightning a tu perfil de nostr y usarla para recibir zaps. Normalmente, esto se hace yendo a Perfil > Editar > Dirección Lightning y cambiando la dirección Lightning.

LNDhub

Puedes importar tu billetera LNbits como un LNDhub en tu teléfono utilizando una aplicación como Zeus o BlueWallet, en lugar de visitar la billetera en el navegador cada vez que desees comprobar tu saldo o realizar un pago. Echa un vistazo a nostr:naddr1qvzqqqr4gupzqkvlvlma7a55ccp6d5rrdc27h3ssmdmael286mjaq5uxmqslk04fqqxnzd3exuerqdfkxccnyv3cs0uvul sobre cómo hacer esto.

Código QR

También puedes compartir o imprimir tu código QR LNURLp para que la gente pueda escanearlo fácilmente con sus teléfonos. ¡Muy útil si estás introduciendo bitcoin a tu comerciante local favorito para que pueda recibir propinas Lightning!

Simplemente comparte el enlace a tu página compartida, o imprime el código QR como PDF yendo a View Link > Print.

@ 3c984938:2ec11289

I'm having some pain in my heart about the U.S. elections.

Ever since Obama campaigned for office, an increase of young voters have come out of the woodwork. Things have not improved. They've actively told you that "your vote matters." I believe this to be a lie unless any citizen can demand at the gate, at the White House to be allowed to hold and point a gun to the president's head. (Relax, this is a hyperbole)

Why so dramatic? Well, what does the president do? Sign bills, commands the military, nominates new Fed chairman, ambassadors, supreme judges and senior officials all while traveling in luxury planes and living in a white palace for four years.

They promised Every TIME to protect citizen rights when they take the oath and office.

...They've broken this several times, with so-called "emergency-crisis"

The purpose of a president, today, it seems is to basically hire armed thugs to keep the citizens in check and make sure you "voluntarily continue to be a slave," to the system, hence the IRS. The corruption extends from the cop to the judge and even to politicians. The politicians get paid from lobbyists to create bills in congress for the president to sign. There's no right answer when money is involved with politicians. It is the same if you vote Obama, Biden, Trump, or Haley. They will wield the pen to serve themselves to say it will benefit the country.

In the first 100 years of presidency, the government wasn't even a big deal. They didn't even interfere with your life as much as they do today.

^^ You hold the power in your hands, don't let them take it. Don't believe me? Try to get a loan from a bank without a signature. Your signature is as good as gold (if not better) and is an original trademark.

Just Don't Vote. End the Fed. Opt out.

^^ I choose to form my own path, even if it means leaving everything I knew prior. It doesn't have to be a spiritual thing. Some, have called me religious because of this. We're all capable of greatness and having humanity.

✨Don't have a machine heart with a machine mind. Instead, choose to have a heart like the cowardly lion from the "Wizard Of Oz."

There's no such thing as a good president or politicians.

If there was, they would have issued non-interest Federal Reserve Notes. Lincoln and Kennedy tried to do this, they got shot.

There's still a banner of America there, but it's so far gone that I cannot even recognize it. However, I only see a bunch of 🏳‍🌈 pride flags.

✨Patrick Henry got it wrong, when he delivered his speech, "Give me liberty or give me death." Liberty and freedom are two completely different things.

Straightforward from Merriam-Webster Choose Right or left? No control, to be 100% without restrictions- free.

✨I disagree with the example sentence given. Because you cannot advocate for human freedom and own slaves, it's contradicting it. Which was common in the founding days.

I can understand many may disagree with me, and you might be thinking, "This time will be different." I, respectfully, disagree, and the proxy wars are proof. Learn the importance of Bitcoin, every Satoshi is a step away from corruption.

✨What does it look like to pull the curtains from the "Wizard of Oz?"

Have you watched the video below, what 30 Trillion dollars in debt looks like visually? Even I was blown away. https://video.nostr.build/d58c5e1afba6d7a905a39407f5e695a4eb4a88ae692817a36ecfa6ca1b62ea15.mp4

I say this with love. Hear my plea?

Normally, I don't write about anything political. It just feels like a losing game. My energy feels it's in better use to learn new things, write and to create. Even a simple blog post as simple as this. Stack SATs, and stay humble.

<3 Onigirl

@ da2683b9:54eedc2c

In modern society, technology is everywhere, especially the popularity of wireless signals, which makes our lives extremely convenient. However, with the widespread use of wireless communications, the mysterious technology gadget of signal jammer has gradually surfaced. Today, let's unveil it together!

Signal jammer, the name sounds a bit mysterious and complicated, but in fact its principle is very simple. It interferes with the transmission of other wireless signals by emitting signals of a specific frequency, thereby causing communication interruption. Although this sounds a bit shady, signal jammers do play an important role in some cases.

Imagine that you are immersed in a wonderful TV series, and suddenly, the network signal disappears, and the video freezes and makes people crazy. At this time, some places may actually be quietly using wifi disruptor. It covers or interferes with the original WiFi network by emitting powerful signals, causing a situation where it is impossible to connect to the Internet.

In some environments, WiFi jammers are also valuable. For example, in some sensitive occasions, such as prisons, military bases or important meetings, in order to protect the security of information, WiFi jammers become "bodyguards". It keeps information private by blocking unnecessary external communications.

Next, let's talk about UHF jammer. UHF signals are widely used in television broadcasting, mobile communications, wireless microphones, etc. UHF jammers are also a signal jammer that can block or interfere with these wireless signals. At concerts or large events, using UHF jammers can prevent interference with wireless microphones and ensure the smooth progress of the event.

Interestingly, UHF jammers can also be used to disrupt the communications of criminals in some cases. For example, when the police are chasing suspects, they may use UHF jammers to interfere with their communications, thereby reducing the suspect's chance of escape.

When it comes to signal jamming, military jammers are definitely the best. In modern warfare, the security of information and communications is directly related to the victory or defeat of the battle. Military signal jammer effectively weaken the enemy's combat capabilities by interfering with the enemy's wireless communications, radars, and missile guidance systems. Its powerful transmitters can block the enemy's signals, making it impossible for the enemy to obtain intelligence or command troops in time.

In addition to being used for attack, military jammers can also counter the interception of one's own telecommunications signals by the enemy. In some cases, the military will also use signal jammers to protect their secret communications from being eavesdropped by the enemy.

https://thetheblocker723-47197065.hubspotpagebuilder.com/how-to-pursue-a-higher-quality-of-life

Signal jammers, seemingly mysterious and powerful, are actually an important product of the development of modern science and technology. In certain situations, they can protect information security, maintain system stability, and even support the maintenance of law and order in some cases.

@ dc652bee:6154e7d0

Unleash the fun with our Cat Earn Coins Bot! 🐱💰 Watch your feline friend collect coins while they play! Join the adventure and let the purring profits roll in! #CatCoins https://n9.cl/cat_bot

@ a012dc82:6458a70d

Table Of Content

• The Psychology of Scarcity

• Trust in Decentralization

• The Power of Network Effects

• The Role of Intrinsic Motivation

• Anchoring and Adjustment Heuristics

• Conclusion

• FAQ

Bitcoin has been the talk of the town since its inception in 2009. While most people primarily view it as a digital currency, it offers much more than that. In this article, we will examine the various aspects of Bitcoin that set it apart from traditional currencies, focusing on behavioral economics. By understanding these unique features, we can better appreciate the true value and potential of Bitcoin in the world's financial landscape.

The Psychology of Scarcity

The limited supply of Bitcoin, capped at 21 million coins, contributes to the perceived value of the cryptocurrency. This scarcity can drive increased demand, as people are generally drawn to scarce resources. This phenomenon is well documented in behavioral economics, and it can lead to irrational decision-making, fear of missing out (FOMO), and even price manipulation.

Trust in Decentralization

Bitcoin operates on a decentralized network, meaning no central authority or government can control its supply or value. This aspect appeals to many users who have lost faith in traditional financial institutions due to corruption, mismanagement, or economic instability. From a behavioral economics perspective, the trust in decentralization can lead to a preference for Bitcoin over conventional currencies.

The Power of Network Effects

The value of Bitcoin is further enhanced by its growing network of users, developers, and investors. As more people adopt and use the cryptocurrency, its utility and demand increase, further driving up its value. This positive feedback loop is a classic example of network effects in behavioral economics, and it helps explain the rapid growth and adoption of Bitcoin.

The Role of Intrinsic Motivation

Bitcoin's open-source nature and the pseudonymous identity of its creator, Satoshi Nakamoto, have fostered a sense of community and intrinsic motivation among its supporters. This shared sense of ownership and the desire to contribute to the success of the project can drive innovation, development, and adoption of the cryptocurrency. Intrinsic motivation is a powerful force in behavioral economics, often leading to better outcomes than extrinsic rewards.

Anchoring and Adjustment Heuristics

Bitcoin's highly volatile nature can be attributed, in part, to cognitive biases like anchoring and adjustment. People often anchor their expectations of Bitcoin's value to a previous reference point, such as an all-time high or low. As new information emerges, they adjust their valuation, sometimes leading to overreactions and significant price swings. Understanding these heuristics can help explain the often unpredictable behavior of Bitcoin's price.

Conclusion

Bitcoin is more than just a digital currency; it is a complex financial ecosystem that can be better understood through the lens of behavioral economics. By analyzing the psychological factors that drive its value and adoption, we can gain valuable insights into the cryptocurrency's potential and the unique role it plays in our global economy. As the world continues to evolve, so too will Bitcoin and the fascinating interplay between human behavior and digital finance.

FAQ

How does scarcity influence Bitcoin's value? Bitcoin's limited supply creates a sense of scarcity, driving demand and leading to increased value and potential irrational decision-making.

Why is decentralization important for Bitcoin? Decentralization eliminates central authority control, appealing to users who distrust traditional financial institutions and prefer a more trustless system.

How does the psychology of FOMO influence Bitcoin adoption? Fear of missing out (FOMO) drives people to invest in Bitcoin to avoid feeling left out, potentially resulting in impulsive decision-making and increased demand.

How do cognitive biases affect our perception of Bitcoin's value? Cognitive biases like confirmation bias and herd mentality can lead to irrational beliefs and expectations about Bitcoin's value, influencing investment decisions.

Can behavioral economics explain the appeal of Bitcoin for speculative investors? Yes, factors like scarcity, network effects, and cognitive biases can make Bitcoin an attractive option for speculative investors seeking high returns.

That's all for today

If you want more, be sure to follow us on:

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DISCLAIMER: None of this is financial advice. This newsletter is strictly educational and is not investment advice or a solicitation to buy or sell any assets or to make any financial decisions. Please be careful and do your own research.

@ 3bf0c63f:aefa459d

Bitcoin transactions explained

A transaction is a piece of data that takes inputs and produces outputs. Forget about the blockchain thing, Bitcoin is actually just a big tree of transactions. The blockchain is just a way to keep transactions ordered.

Imagine you have 10 satoshis. That means you have them in an unspent transaction output (UTXO). You want to spend them, so you create a transaction. The transaction should reference unspent outputs as its inputs. Every transaction has an immutable id, so you use that id plus the index of the output (because transactions can have multiple outputs). Then you specify a script that unlocks that transaction and related signatures, then you specify outputs along with a script that locks these outputs.

As you can see, there's this lock/unlocking thing and there are inputs and outputs. Inputs must be unlocked by fulfilling the conditions specified by the person who created the transaction they're in. And outputs must be locked so anyone wanting to spend those outputs will need to unlock them.

For most of the cases locking and unlocking means specifying a public key whose controller (the person who has the corresponding private key) will be able to spend. Other fancy things are possible too, but we can ignore them for now.

Back to the 10 satoshis you want to spend. Since you've successfully referenced 10 satoshis and unlocked them, now you can specify the outputs (this is all done in a single step). You can specify one output of 10 satoshis, two of 5, one of 3 and one of 7, three of 3 and so on. The sum of outputs can't be more than 10. And if the sum of outputs is less than 10 the difference goes to fees. In the first days of Bitcoin you didn't need any fees, but now you do, otherwise your transaction won't be included in any block.

If you're still interested in transactions maybe you could take a look at this small chapter of that Andreas Antonopoulos book.

If you hate Andreas Antonopoulos because he is a communist shitcoiner or don't want to read more than half a page, go here: https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Coin_analogy

@ a03b38f8:2c7ce1f0

You are Giving Away a Lot of Data with those Pictures

You post pictures on nostr and other social media. You send pictures to friends and sometimes sorta friends. I hate to tell you this but you are giving away a lot more personal data than just what's on the image of the picture.

It all comes down to the metadata. The term Metadata refers to descriptive information about a picture, image, or file. This set of information is so vital as it reveals everything about a picture.

Metadata is key as it explains the privacy and security dangers that you are exposing yourself to everytime you share that file. And not just pictures, but text documents, PDFs and Videos.

What data is in Pictures?

EXIF Data (Exchangeable Image File Format): This is a standard that specifies the formats for sound, images and ancillary tags used by scanners, smartphones and other smart devices.

EXIF contains so much more personal information than you can imagine.

It tells the geolocation of where the picture was taken and it gives the timestamp of when it was taken.

So that creepy guy who follows your accounts knows all your favorite lunch spots because you like to post pictures of your food.

Additionally the metadata contains a description or title of the image. Any tags or keywords associated with the image, author information, and any custom metadata from any image editing software that might have been used including more timestamps, system information, and log of any edits.

So yes your Bumble date knows you are trying to catfish them with that 5 year old picture you doctored up with AI.

Uses in Open Source Intelligence

Open Source Intelligence or OSINT is a fancy term for cyber stalking someone. It is using nothing more than specialized knowledge and freely available information on the internet to find out all kinds of stuff about someone.

Using the GPS metadata and reverse image search of that picture posted online you figure out where that person is from and maybe a first name. Using that to narrow down your search criteria you find their Facebook and Instagram. Now you have their last name, how they spend their time, friends, and maybe where they work. Searching free data brokers you find their address and phone number. Public records tell you how much they paid for their house and Google street view gives you a view of the house from the street.

So other than being a creep, what else is metadata used for?

Analysis of metadata helps to trace the origin and history of digital files. Digital Forensics will know when those files were created, accessed, or modified. Forensics then uses this for additional context about files and other data stored on a computer or network, this information is useful because it provides information that may not be immediately clear from the file itself. Remember your OPSEC rules and be a Nemo when necessary.

There is some good news. (And bad)

Luckily the more popular services out there such as Facebook and Instagram do not display the metadata of the users. You cannot check the metadata of pictures as it does not allow you to download pictures or copy the image link. Although that doesn't mean the companies themselves do not have access to that data.

This is not the case with services like Tumbler and most image hosting or storage services. When pictures are uploaded to cloud services like dropbox or google drive anyone with access to these images can also access the metadata.

Okay I am terrified, how do I remove metadata from pictures?

Thankfully there are several options to take care of this. Most operating systems have methods built in. (see below for instructions for Windows and MacOS). Tails and QubesOS has Metadata Cleaner software preinstalled. There are several online tools that also scrub metadata from pictures. (Shout out to nostr.build)

Windows

• Right Click the image file and select properties

• Click the details tab

• Click Remove Properties and Personal Information

• Choose the level of metadata removal desired

MacOS

• Open the image in the preview

• Go to Tools

• Click EXIF tab

• Select Remove EXIF file

How to remove EXIF data after capture on phones

Let's be honest that most of your photos are taken and reside on your phone now of days.

On iPhone you have to open the Photos app, select the image, tap on 3 dots and select Adjust Date & Time and Adjust Location. You can also get the adjust setting by clicking the little i at the bottom of the picture.

On android it is much the same way. Open Gallery, select image, tap 3 dots, choose details, then the pencil to remove location and timestamp, save.

On Graphene OS no worries, remove EXIF data after capture is an existing setting in the camera and is enabled by default.

It is a total pain that you have to do this each and every time to every picture. But I hope you now realize how important that metadata can be and why you shouldn't just be sharing it with the world.

@ 8d34bd24:414be32b

Nobody alive has a high enough view of God. Our God, the true God, the God who spoke into existence time and space, matter and energy, things seen and unseen, is more awesome than our earthly minds can comprehend.

This is a very good thing. A God who is omnipotent, omniscient, omnipresent, and holy is a God we can trust. A God who is unfathomably complex and able to do things we can’t comprehend is a God worth worshipping.

Wrong View of God

When I first became a Christian, some of the verses about honoring and worshipping God seemed proud and self-absorbed, but I was judging God as a man. He is so far above us in every way and we owe Him our very existence. Of course He should be honored and worshipped. I judged Him as having human motives instead of omniscient, holy motives. I judged Him as just being an above average man instead of being the Creator who spoke everything, even time and space, into existence. I judged Him wrongly because I didn’t fully know Him and who He truly was. The more I learn about Him the more amazed I am at who He is and the more I realize how little I truly comprehend His awesomeness.

I serve a God that is so magnificent that we can’t fully understand who He is or the various traits He has revealed to us. Other religions worship a god that is no more than a superhero. Their gods are understandable because they are made up by people. A god that is fully understandable isn’t a god worth worshipping.

Wrong View of the Law

God has given us a law to follow. He has given us explicit laws like the ten commandments. He has given us things we must do and He has given us things we must not do. Too often we are offended by these commands. We look at every command to do something as a burden and every command to refrain from doing something as a limitation on our freedom and happiness. We only feel this way because our view of God is wrong.

We have an awesome God who loves us so much that he condescends to tell us how to live the best life we can live. He tells us not to do things that are bad for us and will harm our relationships with Him and others. He tells us to do things that will help us grow and help us build relationships with Him and others. He lets us join Him in His amazing plan for humanity. He doesn’t need us, but like a good Father, He includes us in His work and empowers us to do what we could not do on our own.

Instead of resenting God for His commands, we should be grateful that He cares enough to give them. We should be grateful that He cares enough to send Jesus to earth to show us what a perfect life looks like. We should be grateful that He has given us the laws necessary to make family and society work properly. When we obey His commands, we will be glad we did.

Wrong View of Sin

We all view our sin as less bad than it really is. We excuse that “little white lie.” We discount the harm from stealing that pencil from work. We make light of our social actions because we are conforming to the culture around us and because everyone is doing it. We talk about all of the “good” people around us and wonder why God lets “bad” things happen to these “good” people. Does anyone truly see the true horror of their sin?

We have a wrong view of sin for several reasons. First of all, we judge sin by the actions of other people. We judge one person to be a better person than another. We judge some sins, like murder, to be worse than other sins, like a lie of flattery. We don’t judge sins by their rightful measure, the word of God and the life of Jesus.

Beyond that we look at things based on whether the sin seemed to hurt someone. Of course we are only able to look at the external effects, not the effects on the heart. Truth is loving even when it hurts. That definitely doesn’t mean we should tell the truth in a hurtful way to make a person feel bad or to win, but we should tell the truth because the truth always benefits in the long run. A lie, even if it makes the person feel better today and seems to help a relationship, causes harm in the long run. It breaks trust. It leads the person on the wrong path. It hardens the liar’s heart.

Ultimately all sin is about one thing. All sin says, “my way is better than God’s way.” All sin says, “I know better than God.” All sin says, “my opinion is more important than God’s opinion.” Worst of all, all sin says, “I am god of my life and I don’t want God to rule over my life.” Sin is a denial of God and His authority.

If we have a higher view of God then we realize the gravity of our sin. This won’t mean we will never sin, but it should mean we sin much less. It should also mean we repent more because sin is idolatry. We are our own idol.

Wrong View of Hardship

So often when things go wrong in our lives, we question God. We say, “Why me? Why did you let this happen to me?”

We need to remember that God is in control. We need to remember that God loves us. We need to remember that God knows everything that is, that was, and that will be and that He looks at events differently than we do because He has an eternal perspective.

Why do bad things happen to people, especially believers? God told us

Remember the word that I said to you, ‘A slave is not greater than his master.’ If they persecuted Me, they will also persecute you; if they kept My word, they will keep yours also. (John 15:20)

God is transforming us to be more like Jesus, so some hardship is given to us to mold us to be more like Jesus. Almost all growth in faith and holiness comes from hardship, not easy times. God knows this and gives us what is for our eternal good instead of what gives us momentary happiness. Looking back with a godly attitude, you will be able to see the good God has done through hardship and be grateful even if it was very difficult in the heat of the trials.

Sometimes God allows hardship as a punishment for sin.

For those whom the Lord loves He disciplines, and He scourges every son whom He receives.” (Hebrews 12:6)

Sinning unbelievers are often allowed to continue sinning and may not seem to get their punishment here on earth. Christian sinners are more likely to be punished here on earth as a correction, to lead us back to Him and a godly life. If you are going through a hard time, ask yourself, “Is there an unconfessed sin in my life for which I am paying the consequences?” If the hardship is due to sin, usually repenting and turning from that sin will help, but even repentance and turning fully to God does not guarantee that the consequences of sin go away. It does mean that the hardship will become more bearable because everything is better and easier when you have God on your side.

Frequently hardship is preparing you for something. He may be preparing you for additional hardship. He may be preparing you for ministry. He may be preparing you for leadership. You can look at the story of Joseph. He was sold by his brothers, made a slave, tempted and then jailed when he resisted temptation, and then abandoned in jail by those he had helped. I’m sure there were moments when Joseph doubted God. Joseph stayed faithful, but he went through severe hardships for decades. God, however, knew what He was doing. He was preparing Joseph to save the people of the Middle East and beyond. God was moving Joseph from a place far from the seat of power to a place where he could speak God’s word to Pharaoh, the most powerful man in the world at that time. Joseph didn’t know what God was doing, but he stayed faithful and God blessed him immensely.

You may not be made second in charge of the most powerful country in the world, but God has a plan for your life. You have been blessed by the Creator God to be used for His purpose. He will put you through what you need to go through to prepare you for His earthly plans and to prepare you for Heaven. Trust me, it will be so worth it.

Knowing who God is and that He loves us can enable us to go through these hard, desperate times. When we trust God, we don’t just barely make it through, we can thrive and go through horrible circumstances with joy because:

And we know that God causes all things to work together for good to those who love God, to those who are called according to His purpose. (Romans 8:28)

When we start to get a right view of God, everything is better. We can understand the truth in God’s word and in the world more correctly. We know that our loving God controls everything throughout history with ultimate wisdom. We know that everything happens for a very good reason.

When we start to get a right view of God, it is like the sun coming out from behind a cloud. Everything is clear and bright and joyful.

Trust Jesus.\ \ your sister in Christ,

Christy

Bible verses are NASB (New American Standard Bible) 1995 edition unless otherwise stated

@ 3c9712ff:14fecbc4

Pristine beaches, stunning landscapes, cricket on Christmas, and ever-appreciating house prices. These have long been cornerstones of Australian culture, now considered almost unquestionable.

House prices rise because, well, they always have, and since the 1970's the formula for Australian success has been straightforward:

1. Get any job.
2. Buy a house with leverage.
3. Pay off the loan, sell the house for a profit.
4. Repeat steps 2 and 3.

This wealth creation scheme hasn’t just been a strategy for the past 50 years—it’s been a birthright.

What’s shocking is how many people take this as gospel. The idea that house-price-go-up is so deeply ingrained in our psyche and culture most people don’t even question it. But if you ask them why housing has become so unaffordable, especially since 2020, you’ll likely hear one of the following explanations:

1. Property Investors
2. Immigration
3. Building costs
4. Negative Gearing/Tax Concessions

I’m not denying these factors play a role, but they’re secondary to the real culprit. The crisis in Australian housing starts with our flawed monetary policy.

Every year, the amount of Australian dollars in circulation increases by an average of 7%. When savings are diluted and purchases power decreases, we’re incentivised to store our wealth in assets that can’t be easily replicated—like gold, real estate, and equities.

Real estate, in particular, is used more so as a store of value in Australia compared to other Western nations for the following reasons:

1. Our equities market isn’t as deep or liquid as others (ASX at $1.5T vs. the U.S. at $50T).
2. Construction costs are higher.
3. Zoning regulations are stricter, often driven by NIMBY (Not In My Backyard) sentiment.

Given that its hard to build new dwellings, housing has the perfect combination of scarcity and undeniable utility.

The key takeaway is this: House prices didn't soar because they became investment assets; they became investment assets once people saw them as a superior store of value to our dollar. This incentivised shift in attitude opened the door to financialisation.

In response to COVID, stimulus checks and corporate bailouts increased our money supply by around 40%. Predictably, the housing market followed suit, going ballistic. Our median house prices surged by 40% since the pandemic, illustrating that cheap Australian money will always flow into scarce Australian real estate.

To combat inflation, the 13 rate hikes imposed by the RBA are by design making life tougher for Australians. A generation of new homeowners, burdened with large debt balances, now find themselves hanging on for dear life, hit hardest by the interest rate policy. Yet, the market remains irrationally composed. Many who are drowning in mortgage payments choose not to sell and rent for one simple reason: they all believe house prices will always rise in value. If they can just weather the storm and make it over the hill, their house will appreciate and they're in the market for good – it’s an ingrained mindset.

Where do we go from here?

Since housing has been declared a national crisis by the Albanese government, let’s examine the role they play in this.

Supply – The government is entirely subservient to NIMBYs (Not In My Backyard advocates). We lack genuine private property rights in Australia, and as a result, we cannot build enough dwellings (specifically apartments) to meet demand.

Demand – Hand out taxpayer money to first homebuyers trying to enter the housing market. What a brilliant idea! So sustainable, right? What could possibly go wrong?

These two strategies highlight just how inept the Australian government is at addressing the housing crisis. They're also incentivised by the following: * The fastest way to a single term in office is through stagnant house price growth. * A decrease in house prices is a decrease in revenue (land tax, stamp duty, council rates etc)

This Isn’t Looking Pretty

The younger you are, the more likely you are being completely priced out of the housing market, relegating Gen Z to Gen Renters.

Australian home ownership decrease

The traditional Australian model of paying off your home and relying on a pension or superannuation to fund your retirement is now fundamentally broken. If you’re still paying a mortgage past 65, your superannuation alone won’t provide for a comfortable retirement. This is yet another example of the fiat treadmill speeding up, leaving everyday Australians scrambling to keep pace.

The Sound Money Alternative

In an ideal world of sound money, housing doesn't become an investment. No homebuyer would be competing with private equity firms and a slew of housing investors. Even negative gearing wouldn't exist. This simple move relegates housing to it's intended purpose, a dwelling. In my mind this sounds great, but I wonder if this sound money already exists? #bitcoin

Colin Gifford

@ c7eadcf0:7821e562

https://image.nostr.build/c7e3732889827ab0a8e2064de5fa6992e37e035347b0c91d249cb8f312b47087.jpg I love Bitcoin. Let me get that out there first of all. I sincerely believe that Bitcoin has the power to change the way the world functions if we can grow adoption to a global scale. This obviously will take time as the gears of economic change grinds slowly. As of right now, people in the western countries don't really see the need for a sovereign politically neutral money that can't be inflated away. They simply don't have to deal with inflation on a regular basis like the rest of the world.

Citizens in western countries got a small taste of what real inflation looks like and guess what? They didn't like it one bit. Overall the last three and a half years you saw countless news stories about how bad inflation and how its making life for the average American or European more difficult.

Yes inflation does suck but look at countries like Argentina, Turkey, Zimbabwe or Venezuela. The people in these countries are suffering from excessive inflation on a regular basis! According to recent economic data Turkey experienced a decline in inflation from 61 percent to 51 percent in August. This is seen as a win in their book! Can you imagine this level of inflation in America? There would be riots in the streets!

Argentina's inflation rate is an astounding 236 percent over the last 12 months! As Bitcoiners we understand that the problem is the money itself. As long as governments have the ability to manipulate the money supply, they will. This is human nature at its finest. When you give a select few that kind of power it becomes irresistible and becomes a tool to control the masses. This shouldn't be a surprise to anyone to be honest.

What I find shocking is with all of this inflation globally no one is really looking around asking questions to why this is happening and looking for a way to escape this system. Are people really this lazy? Not to be mean but cmon. It seems to me that most people are perfectly fine bitching online about how hard it is to make ends meet or supporting their favored political party and wanting them to fix the problem they created. Newsflash to all the normies out there, its the GD political parties that caused inflation in the first place.

We literally have a solution that is staring them in the face, ready to go to replace the current debt based system that we are currently suffering through and no one wants to take the time to research it? Am I black pilled? No, am I realist, very much so. If 236 percent inflation in Argentina can't get them on a Bitcoin Standard immediately, we as a community have a long road ahead of us. Hyperbitcoinization isn't coming in 5 years. It isn't coming in 10 years. Hell it might not even happen in our lifetimes and we have to be ok with that.

So what is the best way to get more Bitcoin into the hands of the people, so they can see the true value of the digital monetary revolution that is Bitcoin. We need a trojan horse and that trojan horse is nostr.

Enter The Nostr Trojan Horse

https://image.nostr.build/5ffee418133ac80ba14b30abf0d5390b878f676cbf6332d67639f9384764da4c.jpg

It should be plain to see by now that the inflation or the number go up narrative alone isn't going to drive Bitcoin adoption. The reason for that is because people don't see the utility of Bitcoin. They see it as some esoteric digital funny money that drug dealers and terrorist use to do bad things.

The average Joe doesn't see how Bitcoin is helping dissidents on foreign countries fund their activism, escape oppressive regimes or simply earn a living. These stories are never told in the mainstream media because they don't want to highlight the fact that a non-state money can circumvent the status quo.

The best way to highlight these stories is to share it on social media, which again is controlled by mainstream gatekeeper such as Meta, Google and X. It is in their best interest to censor these stories or memory hole them out of existence which I suspect happens quite a bit without us even knowing. But the thing about censorship is that it slowly impacts everyone one by one until no one is allowed to say anything without the fear of being put in jail.

Think this can't happen in western democracies? It's happening already my friend! Take a look at the UK or Australia. Citizens their are being arrested over post made to social media. I sincerely believe that these two countries should be a proving ground for showing the value of nostr and Bitcoin.

Introducing the concept of a censorship resistant messaging protocol to them will go over well and once it is understood will grow like a wildfire because people innately understand that censorship is bad and will see the utility value of having the ability to speak freely again.

It is only a matter of time until they realize that they can monetize their speech and build a life using zaps aka Bitcoin.

Until people see the utility in the tools that lie before them, they will never pick them up and use them. It is really that simple. At the end of the day we are still kind of like cavemen. We only use tools when it makes life easier. Man made the wheel. We use it everyday because it has utility.

Bitcoin in the end will be the same way. Utility first, then mass adoption. Nostr is what will help people see the utility Bitcoin and from there sky is the limit. The best thing we can do as Bitcoiners is to encourage people to learn about nostr and show them how easy it is to use and to switch clients that suit their needs instead of being shoved into a one-size fits all solution on centralized platforms.

People like choices, and nostr is all about choice. The interoperability and thelack of need to give personal information to create an account are HUGE selling points that can be touched on. Go out and spread the good word about nostr!

Bitcoin #Nostr

@ 266815e0:6cd408a5

Not much new this update, mostly just bug fixes

The update is available at nostrudel.ninja and hopefully Start9 and umbrel shortly

New Features

• Add option to wipe wasm relay database
• Add support for showing embedded HLS videos
• Support pinning articles
• Add relay discovery map
• Add option to disable keyboard shortcuts
• Hide avatars of muted users
• Add bookmark button to articles
• Improve notifications timeline rendering performance

Bug Fixes

• Fix search results not being cached
• Fix amber signer missing pubkey
• Fix some tidal embeds not playing
• Fix bookmark view not showing latest bookmarks
• Fix client sending filters with empty #a tags
• Fix client tag breaking POW on notes
• Fix relay notes showing notes from other relays from cache
• Fix keyboard shortcuts activating when replying to notification

@ e477586c:63d94e3f

"The transition from permaculture self-reliance and small business to large organisational roles mentioned previously presents similar structural dilemmas and pitfalls. Creative, ethically driven people in large organisations tend to be co-opted and corrupted by the large-system forces within which they must work." --David Holmgren

Long before I had even heard of #permaculture, I held this view. It goes all the way back to high school. I remember most of my friends working at fast food chains, or as pizza delivery drivers, or the giant regional grocery. Those who were planning on going to college were going for engineering, accounting or business and already had aspirations for working in a fortune500 company.

I on the other hand, mowed lawns, life-guarded at the high-school pool, and worked for the Texas Trampoline Company; a guy building trampolines in his garage with a full-time staff of about 2 and about 5 of us part-time high schoolers. I never worked fast-food, but when I was in restaurants, all except one were one-offs or had fewer than 3 locations. The largest chain I worked at had 30, and only 20 within the contiguous United States.

As I continue to apply for jobs; with each application I'm driven more and more to hoping the TaskRabbit gig-economy self-employment starts producing fast and well before I get desperate and have to say yes to working for my very bleu county government. I was hoping to get this post finished before my Tasker Success Manager call, but got interrupted by cats needing attention and then the call came. It was useful. My TSM said going from zero to one is always the hardest step and sent me a heat-map to compare to my opportunity map. There's evidently a difference.

The opportunity map is more general. It covers Taskr availability vs task requests across the app and under "all skills." Areas more likely to have task requests show up a darker green. The heat map narrows things down a bit. It is filtered by specific skills which the Taskr has listed in his/her profile. It shows hot spots of hits within those categories within the past 15 days. You have to get this app from your TSM, it isn't available through your Taskr app or web portal.

As I wrote and did some things around the house today, I managed to MP3-ify 3 albums for portability. Just the next 3 in line of my record collection: The Graduate soundtrack, Journey; Greatest Hits sides 3 and 4, and The Smiths: The Queen is Dead

@ 3c984938:2ec11289

It's been a journey from the Publishing Forest of Nostr to the open sea of web3. I've come across a beautiful chain of islands and thought. Why not take a break and explore this place? If I'm searching for devs and FOSS, I should search every nook and cranny inside the realm of Nostr. It is quite vast for little old me. I'm just a little hamster and I don't speak in code or binary numbers zeros and ones.

After being in sea for awhile, my heart raced for excitement for what I could find. It seems I wasn't alone, there were others here like me! Let's help spread the message to others about this uncharted realm. See, look at the other sailboats, aren't they pretty? Thanks to some generous donation of SATs, I was able to afford the docking fee.

Ever feel like everyone was going to a party, and you were supposed to dress up, but you missed the memo? Or a comic-con? well, I felt completely underdressed and that's an understatement. Well, turns out there is a some knights around here. Take a peek!

A black cat with a knight passed by very quickly. He was moving too fast for me to track. Where was he going? Then I spotted a group of knights heading in the same direction, so I tagged along. The vibes from these guys was impossible to resist. They were just happy-go-lucky. 🥰They were heading to a tavern on a cliff off the island.

Ehh? a Tavern? Slightly confused, whatever could these knights be doing here? I guess when they're done with their rounds they would here to blow off steam. Things are looking curiouser and curiouser. But the black cat from earlier was here with its rider, whom was dismounting. So you can only guess, where I'm going.

The atmosphere in this pub, was lively and energetic. So many knights spoke among themselves. A group here, another there, but there was one that caught my eye. I went up to a group at a table, whose height towed well above me even when seated. Taking a deep breath, I asked, "Who manages this place?" They unanimous pointed to one waiting for ale at the bar. What was he doing? Watching others talk? How peculiar.

So I went up to him! And introduced myself.

"Hello I'm Onigirl"

"Hello Onigirl, Welcome to Gossip"

"Gossip, what is Gossip?" scratching my head and whiskers.

What is Gossip? Gossip is FOSS and a great client for privacy-centric minded nostriches. It avoids browser tech which by-passes several scripting languages such as JavaScript☕, HTML parsing, rendering, and CSS(Except HTTP GET and Websockets). Using OpenGL-style rendering. For Nostriches that wish to remain anonymous can use Gossip over TOR. Mike recommends using QubesOS, Whonix and or Tails. [FYI-Gossip does not natively support tor SOCKS5 proxy] Most helpful to spill the beans if you're a journalist.

On top of using your nsec or your encryption key, Gossip adds another layer of security over your account with a password login. There's nothing wrong with using the browser extensions (such as nos2x or Flamingo) which makes it super easy to log in to Nostr enable websites, apps, but it does expose you to browser vulnerabilities.

Mike Points out

"people have already had their private key stolen from other nostr clients,"

so it a concern if you value your account. I most certainly care for mine.

Gossip UI has a simple, and clean interface revolving around NIP-65 also called the “Outbox model." As posted from GitHub,

"This NIP allows Clients to connect directly with the most up-to-date relay set from each individual user, eliminating the need of broadcasting events to popular relays."

This eliminates clients that track only a specific set of relays which can congest those relays when you publish your note. Also this can be censored, by using Gossip you can publish notes to alternative relays that have not censored you to reach the same followers.

👉The easiest way to translate that is reducing redundancy to publish to popular relays or centralized relays for content reach to your followers.

Cool! What an awesome client, I mean Tavern! What else does this knight do? He reaches for something in his pocket. what is it? A Pocket is a database for storing and retrieving nostr events but mike's written it in Rust with a few extra kinks inspired by Will's nostrdb. Still in development, but it'll be another tool for you dear user! 💖💕💚

Onigirl is proud to present this knights to the community and honor them with kisu. 💋💋💋 Show some 💖💘💓🧡💙💚

👉💋💋Will - jb55 Lord of apples 💋 @npub1xtscya34g58tk0z605fvr788k263gsu6cy9x0mhnm87echrgufzsevkk5s

👉💋💋 Mike Knight - Lord of Security 💋 @npub1acg6thl5psv62405rljzkj8spesceyfz2c32udakc2ak0dmvfeyse9p35c

Knights spend a lot of time behind the screen coding for the better of humanity. It is a tough job! Let's appreciate these knights, relay operators, that support this amazing realm of Nostr! FOSS for all!

This article was prompted for the need for privacy and security of your data. They're different, not to be confused.

Recently, Edward Snowden warns Bitcoin devs about the need for privacy, Quote:

“I've been warning Bitcoin developers for ten years that privacy needs to be provided for at the protocol level. This is the final warning. The clock is ticking.”

Snowden’s comments come after heavy actions of enforcement from Samarai Wallet, Roger Ver, Binance’s CZ, and now the closure of Wasabi Wallet. Additionally, according to CryptoBriefing, Trezor is ending it’s CoinJoin integration as well. Many are concerned over the new definition of a money transmitter, which includes even those who don’t touch the funds.

Help your favorite the hamster

^^Me drowning in notes on your feed. I can only eat so many notes to find you.

👉If there are any XMPP fans on here. I'm open to the idea of opening a public channel, so you could follow me on that as a forum-like style. My server of choice would likely be a German server.😀You would be receiving my articles as njump.me style or website-like. GrapeneOS users, you can download Cheogram app from the F-Driod store for free to access. Apple and Andriod users are subjected to pay to download this app, an alternative is ntalk or conversations. If it interests the community, just FYI. Please comment or DM.

👉If you enjoyed this content, please consider reposting/sharing as my content is easily drowned by notes on your feed. You could also join my community under Children_Zone where I post my content.

An alternative is by following #onigirl Just FYI this feature is currently a little buggy.

Follow as I search for tools and awesome devs to help you dear user live a decentralized life as I explore the realm of Nostr.

Thank you Fren

@ 266815e0:6cd408a5

NOTE: this is just a quick technical guide. sorry for the lack of details

Install NodeJS

Download it from the official website https://nodejs.org/en/download

Or use nvm https://github.com/nvm-sh/nvm?tab=readme-ov-file#install--update-script

bash wget -qO- https://raw.githubusercontent.com/nvm-sh/nvm/v0.39.7/install.sh | bash nvm install 20

Clone example config.yml

bash wget https://raw.githubusercontent.com/hzrd149/blossom-server/master/config.example.yml -O config.yml

Modify config.yml

```bash nano config.yml

or if your that type of person

vim config.yml ```

Run blossom-server

```bash npx blossom-server-ts

or install it locally and run using npm

npm install blossom-server-ts ./node_modules/.bin/blossom-server-ts ```

Now you can open http://localhost:3000 and see your blossom server

And if you set the dashboard.enabled option in the config.yml you can open http://localhost:3000/admin to see the admin dashboard

@ 266815e0:6cd408a5

While I was in Mediera with all the other awesome people at the first SEC cohort there where a lot of discussions around data storage on nostr and if it could be made censorship-resistent

I remember lots of discussions about torrents, hypercore, nostr relays, and of course IPFS

There were a few things I learned from all these conversations:

1. All the existing solutions have one thing in common. A universal ID of some kind for files
2. HTTP is still good. we don't have to throw the baby out with the bath water
3. nostr could fix this... somehow

Some of the existing solutions work well for large files, and all of them are decentralization in some way. However none of them seem capable of serving up cat pictures for social media clients. they all have something missing...

An Identity system

An identity system would allow files to be "owned" by users. and once files have owners servers could start grouping files into a single thing instead of a 1000+ loose files

This can also greatly simplify the question of "what is spam" for a server hosting (or seeding) these files. since it could simply have a whitelist of owners (and maybe their friends)

What is blossom?

Blossom is a set of HTTP endpoints that allow nostr users to store and retrieve binary data on public servers using the sha256 hash as a universal id

What are Blobs?

blobs are chunks of binary data. they are similar to files but with one key difference, they don't have names

Instead blobs have a sha256 hash (like b1674191a88ec5cdd733e4240a81803105dc412d6c6708d53ab94fc248f4f553) as an ID

These IDs are universal since they can be computed from the file itself using the sha256 hashing algorithm ( you can get a files sha256 hash on linux using: sha256sum bitcoin.pdf )

How do the servers work?

Blossom servers expose four endpoints to let clients and users upload and manage blobs

• GET /<sha256> (optional file .ext)
• PUT /upload
• Authentication: Signed nostr event
• Returns a blob descriptor
• GET /list/<pubkey>
• Returns an array of blob descriptors
• Authentication (optional): Signed nostr event
• DELETE /<sha256>
• Authentication: Signed nostr event

What is Blossom Drive?

Blossom Drive is a nostr app built on top of blossom servers and allows users to create and manage folders of blobs

What are Drives

Drives are just nostr events (kind 30563) that store a map of blobs and what filename they should have along with some extra metadata

An example drive event would be json { "pubkey": "266815e0c9210dfa324c6cba3573b14bee49da4209a9456f9484e5106cd408a5", "created_at": 1710773987, "content": "", "kind": 30563, "tags": [ [ "name", "Emojis" ], [ "description", "nostr emojis" ], [ "d", "emojis" ], [ "r", "https://cdn.hzrd149.com/" ], [ "x", "303f018e613f29e3e43264529903b7c8c84debbd475f89368cb293ec23938981", "/noStrudel.png", "15161", "image/png" ], [ "x", "a0e2b39975c8da1702374b3eed6f4c6c7333e6ae0008dadafe93bd34bfb2ca78", "/satellite.png", "6853", "image/png" ], [ "x", "e8f3fae0f4a43a88eae235a8b79794d72e8f14b0e103a0fed1e073d8fb53d51f", "/amethyst.png", "20487", "image/png" ], [ "x", "70bd5836807b916d79e9c4e67e8b07e3e3b53f4acbb95c7521b11039a3c975c6", "/nos.png", "36521", "image/png" ], [ "x", "0fc304630279e0c5ab2da9c2769e3a3178c47b8609b447a30916244e89abbc52", "/primal.png", "29343", "image/png" ], [ "x", "9a03824a73d4af192d893329bbc04cd3798542ee87af15051aaf9376b74b25d4", "/coracle.png", "18300", "image/png" ], [ "x", "accdc0cdc048f4719bb5e1da4ff4c6ffc1a4dbb7cf3afbd19b86940c01111568", "/iris.png", "24070", "image/png" ], [ "x", "2e740f2514d6188e350d95cf4756bbf455d2f95e6a09bc64e94f5031bc4bba8f", "/damus.png", "32758", "image/png" ], [ "x", "2e019f08da0c75fb9c40d81947e511c8f0554763bffb6d23a7b9b8c9e8c84abb", "/old emojis/astral.png", "29365", "image/png" ], [ "x", "d97f842f2511ce0491fe0de208c6135b762f494a48da59926ce15acfdb6ac17e", "/other/rabbit.png", "19803", "image/png" ], [ "x", "72cb99b689b4cfe1a9fb6937f779f3f9c65094bf0e6ac72a8f8261efa96653f5", "/blossom.png", "4393", "image/png" ] ] }

There is a lot going on but the main thing is the list of "x" tags and the path that describes the folder and filename the blob should live at

If your interested, the full event definition is at github.com/hzrd149/blossom-drive

Getting started

Like every good nostr client it takes a small instruction manual in order to use it properly. so here are the steps for getting started

1. Open the app

Open https://blossom.hzrd149.com

2. Login using extension

You can also login using any of the following methods using the input - NIP-46 with your https://nsec.app or https://flare.pub account - a NIP-46 connection string - an ncryptsec password protected private key - a nsec unprotected private key (please don't) - bunker:// URI from nsecbunker

3. Add a blossom server

Right now https://cdn.satellite.earth is the only public server that is compatible with blossom drive. If you want to host your own I've written a basic implementation in TypeScript github.com/hzrd149/blossom-server

4. Start uploading your files

NOTE: All files upload to blossom drive are public by default. DO NOT upload private files

5. Manage files

Encrypted drives

There is also the option to encrypt drives using NIP-49 password encryption. although its not tested at all so don't trust it, verify

Whats next?

I don't know, but Im excited to see what everyone else on nostr builds with this. I'm only one developer at the end of the day and I can't think of everything

also all the images in this article are stored in one of my blossom drives here

nostr:naddr1qvzqqqrhvvpzqfngzhsvjggdlgeycm96x4emzjlwf8dyyzdfg4hefp89zpkdgz99qq8xzun5d93kcefdd9kkzem9wvr46jka

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@ 3c984938:2ec11289

Hello (N)osytrs!

Yes! I'm calling you an (N)oystr!

Why is that? Because you shine, and I'm not just saying that to get more SATs. Ordinary Oysters and mussels can produce these beauties! Nothing seriously unique about them, however, with a little time and love each oyster is capable of creating something truly beautiful. I like believing so, at least, given the fact that you're even reading this article; makes you an (N)oystr! This isn't published this on X (formerly known as Twitter), Facebook, Discord, Telegram, or Instagram, which makes you the rare breed! A pearl indeed! I do have access to those platforms, but why create content on a terrible platform knowing I too could be shut down! Unfortunately, many people still use these platforms. This forces individuals to give up their privacy every day. Meta is leading the charge by forcing users to provide a photo ID for verification in order to use their crappy, obsolete site. If that was not bad enough, imagine if you're having a type of disagreement or opinion. Then, Bigtech can easily deplatform you. Umm. So no open debate? Just instantly shut-off users. Whatever, happened to right to a fair trial? Nope, just burning you at the stake as if you're a witch or warlock!

How heinous are the perpetrators and financiers of this? Well, that's opening another can of worms for you.

Imagine your voice being taken away, like the little mermaid. Ariel was lucky to have a prince, but the majority of us? The likelihood that I would be carried away by the current of the sea during a sunset with a prince on a sailboat is zero. And I live on an island, so I'm just missing the prince, sailboat(though I know where I could go to steal one), and red hair. Oh my gosh, now I feel sad.

I do not have the prince, Bob is better! I do not have mermaid fins, or a shell bra. Use coconut shells, it offers more support! But, I still have my voice and a killer sunset to die for!

All of that is possible thanks to the work of developers. These knights fight for Freedom Tech by utilizing FOSS, which help provides us with a vibrant ecosystem. Unfortunately, I recently learned that they are not all funded. Knights must eat, drink, and have a work space. This space is where they spend most of their sweat equity on an app or software that may and may not pan out. That brilliance is susceptible to fading, as these individuals are not seen but rather stay behind closed doors. What's worse, if these developers lose faith in their project and decide to join forces with Meta! 😖 Does WhatsApp ring a bell?

Without them, I probably wouldn't be able to create this long form article. Let's cheer them on like cheerleaders.. 👉Unfortunately, there's no cheerleader emoji so you'll just have to settle for a dancing lady, n guy. 💃🕺

Semisol said it beautifully, npub12262qa4uhw7u8gdwlgmntqtv7aye8vdcmvszkqwgs0zchel6mz7s6cgrkj

If we want freedom tech to succeed, the tools that make it possible need to be funded: relays like https://nostr.land, media hosts like https://nostr.build, clients like https://damus.io, etc.

With that thought, Onigirl is pleased to announce the launch of a new series. With a sole focus on free market devs/projects.

Knights of Nostr!

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Oppa Fishcake :Lord of Media Hosting

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Oppa Fishcake with his noble steed!

Think of this as an introduction to learn and further your experience on Nostr! New developments and applications are constantly happening on Nostr. It's enough to make one's head spin. I may also cover FOSS projects(outside of Nostr) as they need some love as well! Plus, you can think of it as another tool to add to your decentralized life. I will not be doing how-to-Nostr guides. I personally feel there are plenty of great guides already available! Which I'm happy to add to curation collection via easily searchable on Yakihonne.

For email updates you can subscribe to my [[https://paragraph.xyz/@onigirl]]

If you like it, send me some 🧡💛💚 hearts💜💗💖 otherwise zap dat⚡⚡🍑🍑peach⚡⚡🍑 ~If not me, then at least to our dearest knight!

Thank you from the bottom of my heart for your time and support (N)oystr! Shine bright like a diamond! Share if you care! FOSS power!

Follow on your favorite Nostr Client for the best viewing experience!

[!NOTE]

I'm using Obsidian + Nostr Writer Plugin; a new way to publish Markdown directly to Nostr. I was a little nervous using this because I was used doing them in RStudio; R Markdown.
Since this is my first article, I sent it to my account as a draft to test it. It's pretty neat.

@ 361d3e1e:50bc10a8

https://forex-strategy.com/2024/09/18/did-kamala-harris-know-the-trump-debate-questions-in-advance/

Did Kamala Harris Know the Trump Debate Questions in Advance?

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@ 6871d8df:4a9396c1

In an era where data seems to be as valuable as currency, the prevailing trend in AI starkly contrasts with the concept of personal data ownership. The explosion of AI and the ensuing race have made it easy to overlook where the data is coming from. The current model, dominated by big tech players, involves collecting vast amounts of user data and selling it to AI companies for training LLMs. Reddit recently penned a 60 million dollar deal, Google guards and mines Youtube, and more are going this direction. But is that their data to sell? Yes, it's on their platforms, but without the users to generate it, what would they monetize? To me, this practice raises significant ethical questions, as it assumes that user data is a commodity that companies can exploit at will.

The heart of the issue lies in the ownership of data. Why, in today's digital age, do we not retain ownership of our data? Why can't our data follow us, under our control, to wherever we want to go? These questions echo the broader sentiment that while some in the tech industry — such as the blockchain-first crypto bros — recognize the importance of data ownership, their "blockchain for everything solutions," to me, fall significantly short in execution.

Reddit further complicates this with its current move to IPO, which, on the heels of the large data deal, might reinforce the mistaken belief that user-generated data is a corporate asset. Others, no doubt, will follow suit. This underscores the urgent need for a paradigm shift towards recognizing and respecting user data as personal property.

In my perfect world, the digital landscape would undergo a revolutionary transformation centered around the empowerment and sovereignty of individual data ownership. Platforms like Twitter, Reddit, Yelp, YouTube, and Stack Overflow, integral to our digital lives, would operate on a fundamentally different premise: user-owned data.

In this envisioned future, data ownership would not just be a concept but a practice, with public and private keys ensuring the authenticity and privacy of individual identities. This model would eliminate the private data silos that currently dominate, where companies profit from selling user data without consent. Instead, data would traverse a decentralized protocol akin to the internet, prioritizing user control and transparency.

The cornerstone of this world would be a meritocratic digital ecosystem. Success for companies would hinge on their ability to leverage user-owned data to deliver unparalleled value rather than their capacity to gatekeep and monetize information. If a company breaks my trust, I can move to a competitor, and my data, connections, and followers will come with me. This shift would herald an era where consent, privacy, and utility define the digital experience, ensuring that the benefits of technology are equitably distributed and aligned with the users' interests and rights.

The conversation needs to shift fundamentally. We must challenge this trajectory and advocate for a future where data ownership and privacy are not just ideals but realities. If we continue on our current path without prioritizing individual data rights, the future of digital privacy and autonomy is bleak. Big tech's dominance allows them to treat user data as a commodity, potentially selling and exploiting it without consent. This imbalance has already led to users being cut off from their digital identities and connections when platforms terminate accounts, underscoring the need for a digital ecosystem that empowers user control over data. Without changing direction, we risk a future where our content — and our freedoms by consequence — are controlled by a few powerful entities, threatening our rights and the democratic essence of the digital realm. We must advocate for a shift towards data ownership by individuals to preserve our digital freedoms and democracy.

@ dc652bee:6154e7d0

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@ 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

---

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!

@ 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

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.

@ b7338786:fdb5bff3

Doug Brown Electronics repair , Microcontrollers , Reverse engineering 2024-09-15

This post has a little bit of everything. Hardware diagnostics, some suspiciously similar datasheets from two separate Taiwan chip manufacturers, and firmware reverse engineering. Read on if that sounds like fun!

Lately, I’ve been enjoying watching random electronics repair channels on YouTube. There’s something oddly satisfying about watching someone take a broken device from totally nonfunctional to perfectly working, all by replacing a $0.05 capacitor that has failed shorted or maybe a blown $0.75 IC. Two of my favorite channels about this topic are Buy it Fix it and StezStix Fix? .

The videos inspired me. I thought, “I should totally try this!” So I went on eBay and looked for broken devices. I have a pretty decent understanding of how video encoders and decoders work, so I thought it would be a fun project to try to fix an HDMI capture card. I found a broken Elgato Game Capture HD60 S USB 3.0 device. The listing said that nothing happened when you plugged it in.

When it arrived, I was able to verify exactly what the listing said. Nothing showed up on my computer when I plugged it in. I cracked it open and had a look at what was happening internally when it powered up. I started by poking around at voltages on the board with it plugged in, and it was pretty obvious that something was dragging the power rails down. Little did I know at that point what I was getting myself into.

Honestly I could tell what was getting hot just by feeling around with my finger, but this was a good excuse to use my thermal camera to take some fun pictures.

In this one, the red cursor indicating the hottest point in the image is pointing to a small chip in the upper-left corner of the board marked “fiVJVE”.

This was pretty clearly some kind of a switching regulator, which I concluded due to its proximity to the “2R2” inductor (meaning 2.2 uH). Measuring the pins, I could see 5V going in, but obviously something was wrong because the voltage at the inductor (the output) was far too low.

There was also another fiVJVE chip on the board, with a pretty much identical circuit next to another 2.2 uH inductor. The circuit was missing a component, but I was pretty sure it was normal because the solder blobs looked like they came that way from the factory. It wasn’t getting hot, but it was also putting out a low voltage so I suspected something was wrong with it too:

In the heat image above you can see another area on the board (near the bottom) that was also getting hot. It turns out it was actually originating from the other side:

Yeah, that’s my finger in the picture. It helped adjust the levels in the image so the chip that’s getting hot is easier to pinpoint. This chip was labeled PFNI:

OK, so what could I do with this information? I found two chips that were getting hot, and another chip that likely wasn’t putting out its correct voltage. I started out by trying to identify what they were. Small chips with markings like this can be quite difficult to figure out. Luckily, there are a few SMD marking code search engines out there. Searching smd.yooneed.one for fiVJ didn’t result in any exact matches, but it did point out that the code “fi” went with the Fitipower FP6121-IS9P. This led me to Fitipower’s website , where I saw they had a bunch of different chips. Using Google’s help I was eventually able to narrow it down to being the FP6373A.

The pinout made sense on the board, and the fiV marking also matched. Yay! Now I had an idea what I was looking for. The PFNI chip ended up being even easier to identify. Google led me straight to the TI TPS60403DBV voltage inverter :

One thing in common with all of these chips is they were all taking in 5V for their input and I was measuring that their outputs all had a pretty low resistance to ground. I started wondering if maybe someone fried this device by somehow putting more than 5V into it. How they did that, I have no idea.

I wasn’t sure why the other FP6373A regulator wasn’t getting hot. It wasn’t putting out much voltage and nothing else was getting hot on the board, so I decided to try injecting voltage on its output power rail instead to see where the low resistance was coming from. I could deduce its correct output voltage because it was going to a Winbond W25Q32JVSSIQ SPI flash chip rated for 2.7 to 3.6V. I was pretty sure it was on a 3.3V rail. I soldered wires to the regulator’s output and ground and used my bench power supply to inject 2.7V into the circuit with a small controlled current that I could slowly turn up. The idea was that I could find what was getting hot on the board and determine what to blame for this power rail being bad.

This process pretty quickly revealed the FP6373A itself as the root problem.

I think maybe during normal operation when it was being supplied with 5V, it was putting itself into some kind of safety shutdown mode and killing its output power rail. The datasheet does mention overcurrent and overtemperature shutdown capability. When I injected voltage directly, the regulator couldn’t shut off the power rail so it had no choice but to get hot and announce “hey, I’m the problem!” through my thermal camera.

This was actually great. I wasn’t totally confident about whether the TI chip was to blame rather than something downstream of it, but since two other chips on the 5V rail were also fried, I thought a good first step would be to replace all three of them and see what would happen. Unfortunately the FP6373A isn’t available at the usual US distributors, but I was able to find it for sale on LCSC at $0.17 a pop, and the TI chip was conveniently also available there for $0.58. Would it really be this easy? Just replace three chips totaling less than a dollar in value, even in quantities of 1? The shipping and handling was orders of magnitude more expensive than just the parts themselves!

After the parts arrived from China, I was able to successfully replace them. I’m always paranoid about upsetting nearby resistors and capacitors when I’m using hot air, so I like to use Kapton tape to shield everything else.

The process of soldering in the new chips was mostly easy, but the ground pins did soak up quite a bit of heat. I think this PCB design doesn’t have great thermal relief on the grounds. I did accidentally lift a pad for one of the regulators, but it wasn’t connected to anything (the “PG” signal) so there was no harm done. The fact that it wasn’t connected to anything was exactly why it was so easy to lift it. Also, the heat that the ground pin was eating up misled me into thinking I could use the same heat on the other pins.

In addition to my lifted pad (middle pin on the right), you can see here how much trouble I had soldering the ground pin (middle pin on the left). It really didn’t want to heat up. I probably could have heated the whole board to help my soldering iron out, but hey, it’s connected.

Anyway, after replacing all three chips, it worked! None of the new chips were getting hot, the HD60 S showed up as a USB device when plugged in, and it worked perfectly for capturing and passing through an HDMI signal. I was pretty excited to successfully fix it, but there was still a problem: none of the indicator lights worked. There are seven white LEDs and seven red LEDs, and they are supposed to do various things to tell you what’s going on . The white lights are supposed to blink twice when you first plug it in, for example.

This was a little deflating. I had kind of fixed it, but not really. Now what?

Back to the drawing board. I looked closer at the PCB to understand how the LEDs work. The relevant chip is the IT1504, made by Innochip . Looking further at its datasheet , it is a 16-channel LED driver chip. You talk to it with a serial data interface that appears to be very similar to SPI. It turns out a lot of LED driver chips from many manufacturers such as Toshiba and ST also use this same communication scheme. At first I though it was odd, but it seems pretty standard. It’s a variant of SPI where you send a particular number of clock pulses to choose which command you want to perform.

I monitored the relevant data input pins on the IT1504 using my oscilloscope, and I could definitely see some traffic being sent to it. By the way, I followed the traces and discovered that the IT1504 is being controlled by a Nuvoton M031LD2AE microcontroller, which is an ARM Cortex-M0.

The presence of SPI traffic here proved it was at least trying to do something, so I assumed that the LED driver chip was probably fried. That presented a pretty big problem though: how could I find a replacement for the IT1504? It wasn’t stocked anywhere. LCSC didn’t have it, and of course none of the US distributors had it either. I couldn’t even find any sellers on AliExpress or utsource.

I reached out to Innotech, who surprisingly wrote back the next day and kindly offered to send me a few free samples for the price of shipping, but then realized they only have full reels in stock so they couldn’t send me any samples. That was nice of them to check, but I definitely wasn’t going to buy a full reel of IT1504 chips just to fix this one problem.

This pushed me toward a huge search all over the internet for LED drivers to try to find a suitable equivalent replacement. The IT1504 datasheet I had access to didn’t include the full command info, so I wasn’t sure exactly what I was looking for. There were several discontinued parts from other well-known manufacturers that looked similar, but I wasn’t finding any exact matches. That’s when I discovered something really strange.

I somehow stumbled upon Macroblock ‘s product offerings. Specifically, the MBI5040. The datasheet seemed to match up pretty well with the IT1504. In fact, a little too well. Here is an example of what I mean (click if you want it larger so you can read it):

Here are a few more side-by-side comparisons to really hit the point home:

They’re almost exactly the same! Everything is laid out in precisely the same order. The current output specs differ slightly, but aside from that, they’re the exact same product, right down to having identical block diagrams. The wording has been tweaked here and there, but both of these datasheets are clearly from the same source. These companies are both based in Taiwan. Maybe one of them licensed the design from the other? Or perhaps there is some industrial espionage going on? There is definitely some funky stuff going on with the fonts on the Innochip datasheet’s general description page. It randomly switches around between serif and sans-serif. It’s the kind of thing you notice when you’re reading an email that somebody sent and you can tell they’ve obviously been copying and pasting while writing it. That doesn’t necessarily mean anything, but I thought it was weird.

Heck, even the part numbers are pretty much the same. If you pretend that the capital letter “I” in MBI5040 is really the number 1, you have MB15040 and IT1504.

I have no idea which product is the original here, but either way, this was really good news for me. I had successfully discovered another chip that would likely be suitable as a replacement for my assumed-to-be-fried IT1504. Additionally, the MBI5040 datasheet actually had command info, so if it came down to it, I could dive deeper and really try to understand what the SPI traffic was doing. I was able to find the MBI5040GF available for purchase on both AliExpress and utsource, so I bought a few.

Replacing the LED driver chip was a pretty simple job. Once again I used Kapton tape to protect me from myself.

I was feeling pretty good about my situation at this point. I cleaned up all the flux residue and anxiously plugged in the HD60 S to my computer.

Video capture worked fine, so I didn’t make it any worse, but the lights were still not working! What in the world? Next I started wondering if perhaps the LEDs themselves were broken. I rigged up my bench power supply and a resistor so that I could pass current through them (without the whole device powered on, of course), and the LEDs all tested out fine physically. I was able to light each one up.

I was totally out of ideas at this point. A brand new chip didn’t fix it, and the LEDs were known good. That’s when I started searching on Google and found something shocking: apparently the LEDs going out on these Elgato HD60 S capture cards is a known problem that multiple people have experienced. In particular I found two different Reddit posts with four unique users complaining about running into this same problem:

• https://www.reddit.com/r/elgato/comments/pcvtqj/why_doesnt_my_elgato_hd60s_light_up/

• https://www.reddit.com/r/Twitch/comments/qfdxuu/elgato_hd60_s_can_anyone_help_me_with_this_issue/hhzsvez/

Not only that, but sometime during this whole saga I also bought another “dead” HD60 S on eBay that turned out to work fine but had the exact same LED fault. It was starting to look like this indicator light failure was actually quite common!

So yeah. It’s very likely that the LEDs on this one weren’t working even before the voltage regulators originally got fried. This led me to a new bonus challenge: Could I figure out why the LEDs didn’t work and fix them? After all, I now had two different units both experiencing this failure and I knew of at least four other people with the same problem. If you go to the parent post at the second link above, there’s a video that shows how the white LEDs are expected to flash white twice when you first plug it in.

My first idea was to verify that the actual LED circuitry on the board was functional. To perform this test, I lifted the relevant SPI input pins on my replacement MBI5040 LED driver and soldered wires to them, as well as ground:

This allowed me to rig something up with a Raspberry Pi Pico to manually control the LEDs by sending the appropriate commands as documented in the MBI5040 datasheet. I’ll let this picture speak for itself:

It was at this point that I became very confident there was nothing physically wrong with my repaired HD60 S at all. I could perfectly control the lights with my Pi Pico, so the circuit was fine. The Nuvoton Cortex-M0 microcontroller was simply never deciding to turn them on.

This whole MBI5040 replacement story was all for nothing! I was so proud of myself for finding a suitable substitute IC, but it was all mostly just a big waste of time. The original chip was probably fine all along. I decided to confirm that theory just to be sure. I put the original IT1504 chip back onto the board. In order to avoid having to bend pins, I covered the 3 pads that I wanted to avoid soldering to the chip with Kapton tape. This kept them insulated, and then I just soldered all of the other pins normally.

Then I resoldered the wires and repeated the experiment with the Pi Pico. No surprises here — the original chip was totally fine too. After I was done tinkering, I simply pulled the Kapton tape out and then was able to solder the remaining 3 pins normally. I thought this solution was pretty clever and saved me some time! Here’s a view after I pulled out the tape, but before I soldered them down.

And yes, I know pin 1 looks messy. Once again, it’s a ground pin and I guess they didn’t add thermals on the ground pins on this board. It was a pain to solder. I fixed it up afterward though.

So yeah. The original IT1504 chip worked fine. I was a little annoyed, but this side quest wasn’t entirely a waste of time. Getting ahold of the MBI5040 datasheet importantly gave me a perfect reference for how the LEDs are controlled by software. It was looking more and more like this was a software problem as opposed to a hardware problem. I was invested in this problem at this point. I couldn’t give up now!

I began the next phase of this project with a simple idea: ask Elgato if there is some kind of known issue with the status lights. Maybe there was a setting I was missing that allowed you to disable them. Essentially, they politely told me to take a hike:

That’s okay. I felt like solving it on my own anyway. I decided to focus on understanding what was going on in the firmware running in the Nuvoton M031LD2AE microcontroller. By a stroke of pure luck, I had gained some experience last year with Nuvoton MCUs when working on my Mac ROM SIMM programmer . I already had a Nu-Link2-Me that was bundled with the dev board I bought for that project. The next step was to figure out how to access the programming pins on the microcontroller. It turns out that there are a couple of small JST connectors on the board: a 4-pin one and a 6-pin one. Tracing out the pins one by one, it quickly became apparent that the 4-pin JST connector was for programming the MCU! I hooked it up using the only 4-pin JST cable I had on hand, which had grabbers on the other end.

I didn’t check, but I think it’s a pretty good educated guess that the 6-pin JST connector next to it is for programming the Altera MAX II CPLD that is also on this board. It just makes sense.

I didn’t care about the CPLD though. I tried to read the firmware out of the Nuvoton chip using NuMicro ICP Programming Tool, but of course Elgato protected the contents:

Never fear, though. It turns out that Elgato includes the latest firmware with their 4K Capture Utility:

Reading the included ElgatoDeviceCapabilities.json file in the same folder also provided some insight. This firmware is specifically for the version of the device with USB product ID 118 (0x0076), which definitely matches mine. Elgato refers to this device as the “Game Capture HD60 S Rev.4”:

The firmware was already up to date when I checked in the 4K Capture Utility. You can also control-click the settings icon to enable an Update Firmware button, but it did nothing because the newest firmware was already installed on it:

This was great though! The FW_HD60_S_MCU.bin file looked very much like a normal Cortex-M0 firmware binary. You can tell by looking at the start of it in a hex editor. The very first 4-byte word should be the initial stack pointer, so something in RAM. Then following that is a bunch of interrupt vectors including the reset vector.

This all checked out. 0x20000E70 looks like a valid stack pointer, and each 4-byte word following that looks like a valid flash address. It looks exactly like a Cortex-M0 vector table. I loaded it into Ghidra and also used SVD-Loader to try to map out some of the registers. I had to modify the SVD file (M031AE_v1.svd), which I got from the NuMicro_DFP pack on keil.arm.com , to get it to load with the plugin. Apparently it doesn’t like if you have multiple addressBlocks per peripheral, so I modified the first one in each peripheral to contain the full range of addresses.

And thus began the humongous effort of trying to figure out what this little MCU was actually doing.

The SVD file helped me identify the various peripherals being used: mostly GPIO, a timer, and I2C. Nuvoton’s M031BSP project was very valuable for identifying a ton of functions. I did it by hand, which was probably slightly insane, but I wasn’t sure what compiler had been used. Since I knew which pins were hooked up to the LED controller chip, I was fairly quickly able to identify functions that control the LEDs. It was hard to understand their purpose in the grand scheme of things though. Sometimes they were buried deep inside multiple layers of function calls.

Knowing that I2C was being used was very helpful, because I saw there were other chips onboard that would communicate through it: the ITE IT6802E and IT66121FN. The IT6802E is an HDMI receiver. I don’t have any detailed documentation for it, but I’m pretty sure it converts an incoming HDMI signal into a parallel data stream suitable for the capture portion of the device to read in. The IT66121FN is the opposite. It takes a parallel data stream and sends it out as HDMI. This would be necessary for the passthrough functionality, providing an HDMI output signal to go through to your TV or monitor.

Anyway, I found some ITE driver code in some random GitHub projects such as this one , which quickly helped me identify a bunch of functions and variables as belonging to ITE’s drivers. This helped me gain a better understanding of what was happening in the firmware. I actually spent way too much time on this, but I think it was useful in the long run. Plus, it was good practice with Ghidra.

Once I had a good idea of the overall structure of the firmware, I decided to try figuring out how I could debug the code. The chip was protected, but I figured that I should be able to erase it and reflash the firmware. To be safe, I desoldered the original M031LD2AE chip and put a new empty one onto my board instead. They only cost $1.14 on Digi-Key in quantities of 1. Why not?

When I flashed FW_HD60_S_MCU.bin onto my brand-new blank chip, it definitely worked fine, but it re-protected itself so I couldn’t do any debugging! The offending code was pretty easy to find in Ghidra. There’s a function that is called to update the config registers with the proper locked state as well as the number of 512-byte data flash pages to reserve from the application ROM.

I simply had to hack this function to always leave the chip unlocked. Then I reflashed the chip and I was finally able to debug the code! I inserted some breakpoints and stepped through the initialization code with OpenOCD and GDB to figure out why the LEDs weren’t being controlled. I found some places in the code where LED control would happen, but they were being skipped. I decided to force the code to run by filling in register values and RAM in GDB, and sure enough, I was able to at least force the lights to turn on. So clearly the code was there to control the lights, but it wasn’t running for whatever reason.

This chip unlocking mess led me down another rabbit hole. I assumed that the original Nuvoton MCU I removed had some other protected contents like a bootloader, so I decided to see if I could extract it by installing my new unlocked firmware file as an update through Elgato’s software. The idea was that after my new unlocked firmware was installed, the protection would be disabled and then I could read out the entire contents with my Nu-Link2-Me. Why would I want to do this? Well, it would just be nice to have as a backup in case I screwed up one of the chips, plus the bootloader might contain other clues.

I tried it out on my other HD60 S with broken LEDs which still had its stock Nuvoton MCU fitted. This required modifying ElgatoDeviceCapabilities.json to point to my unlocked firmware. I also had to change the version listed in this same file so that it would think it was out of date. After making these changes, the 4K Capture Utility allowed to install my new firmware through the normal firmware update mechanism. The utility did tell me the firmware update failed after it finished (more on that later).

This totally freaked me out because it appeared to brick the device. It didn’t work as a capture card anymore. But luckily, but I was left with an unlocked chip, just as I had hoped! This allowed me to read out the rest of the content of the flash that had previously been protected, including the LDROM (containing Elgato’s first-stage bootloader), data flash contents, and the correct original config register contents. This was really exciting because it meant I now had everything I would need in order to completely program a brand new Nuvoton MCU to contain Elgato’s stock firmware, including their bootloader. I rewrote the original Elgato firmware back to this second HD60 S’s APROM (application ROM) using Nuvoton’s tools, and re-locked the chip. Thankfully, this fully restored it to working order — except for the LEDs of course.

I also disassembled their small LDROM bootloader that I was able to read out of the chip, but it wasn’t really anything exciting. It receives commands and data over I2C and is capable of reflashing the APROM. Interestingly I discovered that if the chip is set for unprotected mode, the bootloader actually waits around for update commands instead of booting the application firmware. So Elgato is using the locked/unlocked bit as a way of signifying whether it should stay in the bootloader or not, which I find to be a little bit weird. That completely explained why my second HD60 S stopped working after I installed my unlocked firmware — it was stuck in the bootloader waiting forever because the chip was unprotected.

Anyway, I’ve really started to ramble on about things unrelated to the LED problem. Let’s get back on track. The point I’m trying to make here is that I was able to read out all of the stock microcontroller contents, which gave me the confidence I desperately needed in order to start tinkering even further to figure out the LED problem. I was kind of stuck at this point though. Why was the Nuvoton chip not controlling the LEDs? Some of the LED control happened over I2C from something else, so I was beginning to worry that the actual problem was once again at a different level.

Fortunately though, I was gaining a better understanding of the architecture of the entire product at this point. Here’s a broad overview of how it works:

• The main Cypress/Infineon CYUSB3014 USB 3.0 peripheral chip, which I haven’t mentioned until now, is an ARM926EJ-S. It sends commands to the Nuvoton MCU over I2C. This is the chip that actually communicates with the host PC through the USB 3.0 port.
• The Nuvoton ARM Cortex-M0 microcontroller sets up and monitors the ITE video receiver and transmitter chips through a separate I2C bus.
• The Nuvoton MCU also controls the LEDs.
• The Nuvoton MCU communicates status information back to the CYUSB3014 through I2C.
• The CYUSB3014 receives the video data stream from the IT6802E (likely through the MAX II CPLD, putting it in a format suitable for the CYUSB3014 to grab) and sends it to the computer over USB.

I thought I would take a break from the Nuvoton chip for a while and start trying to understand the main Cypress processor instead. Yes, as I just mentioned above, there are two different ARM processors working together to implement the video capture functionality. Fortunately, Cypress/Infineon also provides a free SDK for these USB chips. The firmware is stored unprotected in the Winbond W25Q32JVSSIQ flash chip that I talked about very early on when I thought this was purely going to be a hardware repair project.

I desoldered the SPI flash chip and read it back using a programmer. It’s a 4 MB (32-megabit) chip. I also tried to do it in-circuit without removing the chip first, but I didn’t have any luck. I even accidentally knocked a small 0402 0.1 uF decoupling capacitor (seen above on the right) off the PCB while I was trying to clip onto it. Luckily the capacitor wasn’t damaged and I was able to put it right back on.

After dumping the chip contents, I used it to start trying to work my way through understanding what the CYUSB3014 was doing. I was able to use Cypress’s existing SDK binaries to help identify a lot of the functions in the dump. It turns out that the Cypress SDK uses the ThreadX RTOS under the hood.

I really didn’t want to dive deep into this firmware to the same level that I did for the Nuvoton chip though. I was already worn out from that disassembly. At the very least, I was able to see that the Cypress chip sends commands over I2C to the Nuvoton chip.

Looking through the rest of the SPI flash dump, I could see that starting at offset 0x300000, there were a bunch of small data chunks that looked like little pictures. Here’s an example:

I couldn’t figure out why there would be little pictures in the flash chip here. What would the purpose be? It made me wonder if maybe it was some kind of small icon, since I’ve seen similar data for icons while analyzing old Mac ROM dumps. Given the context of this blog post, you might be screaming at me right now telling me what this data obviously is, but at the time I was totally oblivious.

I ended up solving this mystery as soon as I started looking into what was going on with five unknown GPIO pins in the firmware on the Nuvoton chip. There were a bunch of functions that controlled these pins, but I wasn’t sure what they did. I traced them out on the PCB and discovered they were going to a Diodes Incorporated PI5C3257 quad 2:1 mux/demux bus switch .

This was the magic discovery that finally unblocked me. This bus switch is being used to decide whether the CYUSB3014 chip or the Nuvoton microcontroller should be wired up to the SPI flash chip. Prior to this moment, I thought that the SPI flash was entirely dedicated to the CYUSB3014. In reality, the Nuvoton microcontroller takes over control of the SPI flash after the CYUSB3014 has finished booting. This enabled me to disassemble a bunch of new functions which were all related to bit-banging SPI transactions, as well as higher-level functions for SPI flash chip erasing/reading/writing.

A light bulb went off in my head. Yes, these chunks of data in the flash chip were pictures! But not in the conventional sense. They were describing the various LED animations. Each set of 16 bytes is an animation frame written to the 14 LEDs. In the example above, a single red LED turns on and six of the seven white LEDs do stuff. The last two bytes in each row are a delay time before moving onto the next frame. The first 16 bytes looked kind of weird though. They looked like they possibly contained some header data for the animation or something.

I also found some code that was reading data from the start of the 0x300000 section, but in my SPI flash dump that section was pretty much completely empty:

Everything was starting to make sense. There was a check in the Nuvoton MCU firmware to see if the first two bytes contained the 16-bit word value 0xAA55:

In my dumps of the SPI flash chip contents from my units with nonfunctional LEDs, that section of the chip was empty. It was programmed as all 0x00. The firmware was bypassing all of the LED control code because expected data wasn’t stored starting at 0x300000 in the flash chip! I confirmed this data was missing on both of the HD60 S devices I was testing with.

Unless I wanted to go overboard trying to figure out how to artificially populate all this data from scratch, I had no choice but to buy a third HD60 S that was confirmed to be fully functional. That’s what I ended up doing. Unfortunately it was an older revision and had a completely different PCB, but it was still based on the CYUSB3014. It also used a Nuvoton microcontroller, but it was a different model. It still had an IT1504 for LED control though, as well as a Winbond SPI flash chip, so that was promising.

I confirmed that its LEDs worked fine, and then I dumped the SPI flash. By this point, I had figured out how to dump the flash contents without any soldering by forcing the CYUSB3014 to boot over USB (removing a jumper on the board) and then uploading a Cypress-provided RAM bootloader capable of dumping the SPI flash (cyfxflashprog.img), but I don’t want to stray too far from the LED issue at this point. Here’s the start of the good data at 0x300000:

Okay, that data makes way more sense. The first 16-bit word (little-endian) is 0xAA55 just like the firmware was looking for. It also has a bunch of other header data, indicating there are 26 different LED animations, and including info about whether they are even animations at all. To be honest, I haven’t figured out what every piece of this data actually means, but each animation has a 16-byte summary. They start at 0x300008. I think the last 4 bytes for each animation are probably a CRC-32 of something.

Also, if you noticed in the original chip dump, there was a section starting at 0x3000B8 with a bunch of 0xE5 bytes. This is the dot correction data that gets loaded into the IT1504. Based on the decompilation above, it’s actually supposed to be at 0x3007F8, which is exactly where it is in the good dump:

The 0x521114A7 that follows is a CRC-32 of the preceding 16 bytes of data.

Further inspection revealed that the data in the SPI flash of the broken devices differed quite a bit. In fact, they were different from each other as well. This led me to believe that the animation data was probably corrupted in them. For example, here’s what the animation at 0x31E000 looks like in the good HD60 S’s dump:

Notice how there is no weird header at the top like the original “picture” I was inspecting from one of the other dumps? It just immediately starts with animation data that is consistent with the rest of the nearby data. It’s also longer. This data makes a lot more sense. On the other hand, it was corrupted in two completely different ways in my two HD60 S devices with nonfunctional LEDs.

Several (but not all) of the animations in my nonworking devices started with a weird “AB 03 12 39” header. I don’t think the header is supposed to be there. Maybe there was a bug in an update procedure or something? The Nuvoton firmware indeed has functions capable of erasing and rewriting data to the SPI flash chip. I’m wondering if that code ended up running and somehow destroying the original contents.

You may be able to guess what I did with this new knowledge. I took the original SPI flash contents from the two devices with nonfunctional status lights, and simply replaced all the LED data starting at 0x300000 with the data from the working one. Then I flashed this new “hybrid” image to the non-working devices. Oh, I should point out that each device has its own unique flash dump. The USB serial number is embedded in there somewhere. So I preferred to preserve the data from 0 to 0x2FFFFF for each individual device.

I wasn’t entirely sure what to expect by trying this. The good SPI flash data came from an older revision of the product with a different Nuvoton microcontroller, but it sure looked like it matched what the newer firmware was looking for.

Here’s a picture of what I saw as soon as I powered one of the problematic devices after I reflashed its SPI flash chip:

It freaking worked. The white lights flashed twice, and then the red lights briefly flashed once.

I think the red flash just means the signal was lost, because it also does it every single time I unplug an HDMI source from it. The older model doesn’t do this red flash on every powerup, but maybe it’s just a firmware difference about whether it should say “signal lost” immediately at startup with nothing plugged in. I’ve seen some mention online of red lights meaning that the signal is HDCP-protected, but I think that’s a different longer red blink which I’ve also seen when I first plug in my iPhone as an HDMI source.

I’ve also noticed that some of the animations that Elgato says it should do, like when I start or stop recording, don’t play on this newer model, even though they work fine with the older model. I haven’t been able to figure out if this is just a known difference with how the newer model works. I may try to get a good SPI flash dump of the correct LED animations from a newer matching model to confirm it for sure, but I have a feeling the animation data will be identical.

I also recently realized that the raw data for each animation is sitting around in C:\Program Files\Elgato\GameCapture\Animations if you have the older Game Capture utility installed, or /Applications/Game Capture HD.app/Contents/Resources/Animations on Mac.

Looking through each file (01.ani, 02.ani, etc.), it looks like the animation data perfectly matches my dump of the older working device. The bytes for each LED are out of order, but if I reorder them correctly, I can create an identical copy of all of the animation data that I extracted from the good flash chip.

Since those animations live inside the Game Capture app (or next to it), it seems as though the software has the capability to load them into the flash chip. I wonder if that explains how the stored animation data ended up corrupted in the first place. A botched update perhaps? That would make sense to me. Maybe they disabled the ability for their software to upload them after they discovered it was screwing up people’s devices? It might be interesting to disassemble the Windows and/or Mac software and try to figure out how to convince it to directly upload the animations, but I’m honestly out of motivation to do that at this point. It looks like LedCtrlDll.dll might be an interesting file to look at if anyone else is hooked enough to continue diving deeper. It contains classes with interesting names like Ub530LedSpiRom and I2cIO_Ub530. Some quick disassembly in Ghidra indeed shows it creating a 0x80C-byte array for the header data that would go into the flash chip at 0x300000, and populating the contents with the dot correction data.

One last thing I noticed is if I do a firmware update of the HD60 S inside of Elgato’s 4K Capture Utility in Windows, it doesn’t wait long enough. It seems to work fine on Mac, but Windows has some issues. The firmware update is still in progress when it tells me that it failed. If I sit there and wait, eventually the lights flash on the unit and it successfully reboots into the new firmware. If instead I unplug it quickly after Elgato’s software tells me the update failed, I end up with an incomplete flash. I wonder if this has fooled people into bricking their devices? Especially if the status LEDs don’t work at all. I was able to successfully fix this problem by increasing the updateDurationSec in ElgatoDeviceCapabilities.json from 40 to 80. I get the feeling Elgato’s firmware update functionality is a little flaky, at least on Windows. In Elgato’s defense, they specifically recommend not to update firmware on the HD60 S unless their tech support tells you to . And they hide the functionality behind a special key combination when entering the settings screen.

I would like to figure out a way to share how to easily fix the LEDs for anyone else who runs into this problem, but the process is admittedly quite convoluted. It requires you to begin a firmware update (modifying ElgatoDeviceCapabilities.json to even allow you to install an update in the first place) and immediately unplug the device — otherwise the Nuvoton MCU takes control of the SPI flash, and you really need the Cypress chip to be in control in order to reflash its contents. Then, you remove the jumper on the PCB (instructing the Cypress chip to boot from USB), upload cyfxflashprog.img to RAM using download_fx3, and use a modified version of fx3_spitest to download the entire SPI flash contents and replace it with your patched LED section. Those are tools from the CYUSB3014 SDK. Finally, you unplug it, put the jumper back in, plug it back in, and perform a normal firmware update in 4K Capture Utility to restore the firmware back to the Nuvoton chip. You ignore the update failure message and wait another minute or so, and eventually it boots back up with working LEDs. If there ends up being enough interest in recovering these things, it might be possible for me to throw something together to automate the process, or at least provide binaries for everything. It would also be nice to figure out how to use Elgato’s software to directly reprogram the LED animations. For now though, I’m just going to sit back, relax, and celebrate my victory on this!

So in conclusion, yes, it really was that simple. All I needed to do was replace three chips for a total of less than $1 to bring this thing back to life. Every bit of extra time and money I spent on this project after that was all about figuring out a well-known indicator LED problem that really had nothing to do with my actual repair. I put way more effort into this than I should have, and yes I am probably a tiny bit crazy for actually doing this, but at least I now have an answer and fix for why the LEDs don’t work on some of these capture cards. It’s some sort of software/programming/update bug. I’m not sure which. Way to go Elgato!

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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.

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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.

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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.

@ b7338786:fdb5bff3

Knocking out one key gene leads to autistic traits

Purkinje cells in the cerebellum, stained and magnified 63 times, revealing fine details of the dendritic spines. (Hatten Lab)

More than 70 genes have been linked to autism spectrum disorder (ASD), a developmental condition in which differences in the brain lead to a host of altered behaviors, including issues with language, social communication, hyperactivity, and repetitive movements. Scientists are attempting to tease out those specific associations gene by gene, neuron by neuron.

One such gene is Astrotactin 2 (ASTN2). In 2018, researchers from the Laboratory of Developmental Neurobiology at Rockefeller University discovered how defects in the protein produced by the gene disrupted circuitry in the cerebellum in children with neurodevelopmental conditions.

Now the same lab has found that knocking out the gene entirely leads to several hallmark behaviors of autism. As they describe in a new paper in PNAS, mice that lacked ASTN2 showed distinctly different behaviors from their wild-type nestmates in four key ways: they vocalized and socialized less but were more hyperactive and repetitive in their behavior.

“All of these traits have parallels in people with ASD,” says Michalina Hanzel, first author of the paper and a postdoc in the lab. “Alongside these behaviors, we also found structural and physiological changes in the cerebellum.”

“It’s a big finding in the field of neuroscience,” says lab lead Mary E. Hatten , whose work has focused on this brain region for decades. “It also underscores this emerging story that the cerebellum has cognitive functions that are quite independent of its motor functions.”

An unexpected role

In 2010, Hatten’s lab discovered that proteins produced by the ASTN2 gene help guide neurons as they migrate during the development of cerebellum and form its structure. In the 2018 study, they examined a family in which three children had both neurodevelopmental disorders and ASTN2 mutations. They found that in a developed brain, the proteins have a similar guiding role: they keep the chemical conversation between neurons going by ushering receptors off the neural surfaces to make room for new receptors to rotate in. In a mutated gene, the proteins fail to act and the receptors pile up, resulting in a traffic jam that hinders neuronal connections and communication. This impact could be seen in the children’s afflictions, which included intellectual disability, language delays, ADHD, and autism.

The find was part of a growing body of evidence that the cerebellum—the oldest cortical structure in the brain—is important not just for motor control but also for language, cognition, and social behavior.

For the current study, Hanzel wanted to see what effects a total absence of the ASTN2 gene might have on cerebellar structure and on behavior. Collaborating with study co-authors Zachi Horn, a former postdoc in the Hatten lab, and with assistance from Shiaoching Gong, of Weill Cornell Medicine, Hanzel spent two years creating a knockout mouse that lacked ASTN2, and then studied the brains and activity of both infant and adult mice.

Behavioral parallels

The knockout mice participated in several noninvasive behavioral experiments to see how they compared to their wild-type nestmates. The knockout mice showed distinctly different characteristics in all of them.

In one study, the researchers briefly isolated baby mice, then measured how frequently they called out for their mothers using ultrasonic vocalizations. These sounds are a key part of a mouse’s social behavior and communication, and they’re one of the best proxies researchers have for assessing parallels to human language skills.

The wild-type pups were quick to call for their mothers using complex, pitch-shifting sounds, while the knockout pups gave fewer, shorter calls within a limited pitch range.

Similar communication issues are common in people with ASD, Hanzel says. “It’s one of the most telling characteristics, but it exists along a spectrum,” she says. “Some autistic people don’t understand metaphor, while others echo language they’ve overheard, and still others do not speak at all.”

In another experiment, the researchers tested how ASTN2 mice interacted with both familiar and unfamiliar mice. They preferred to interact with a mouse they knew rather than one they didn’t. In contrast, wild-type mice always choose the social novelty of a new face.

This, too, has parallels in human ASD behavior, with a reluctance towards unfamiliar environments and people being common, Hanzel adds. “That’s a very important result, because it shows that mice with the knockout mutation do not like social novelty and prefer to spend time with mice they know, which corresponds to people with ASD, who tend to like new social interactions less than familiar ones.”

In a third experiment, both types of mice were given free rein to explore an open space for an hour. The ASTN2 mice traveled a significantly longer distance than the other mice, and engaged in repetitive behaviors, such as circling in place, 40% more. Both hyperactivity and repetitive behaviors are well-known hallmarks of ASD.

Miscommunication between brain regions

When they analyzed the brains of the ASTN2 mice, they found a few small but apparently potent structural and physiological changes in the cerebellum. One was that large neurons called Purkinje cells had a higher density of dendritic spines, structures that are spotted with the synapses that send neural signals. But they only detected this change in distinct areas of the cerebellum. “For example, we found the biggest difference in the posterior vermis region, where repetitive and inflexible behaviors are controlled,” Hanzel says.

The scientists also found a decrease in the number of immature dendritic spines known as filopodia and the volume of Bergmann glial fibers, which help with cell migration.

“The differences are quite subtle, but they are clearly affecting how the mice are behaving,” Hatten says. “The changes are probably altering the communication between the cerebellum and the rest of the brain.”

In the future, the researchers plan to study human cerebellar cells, which they’ve been developing for a half-dozen years from stem cells, as well as cells with ASTN2 mutations that were donated by the family in the 2018 study.

“We’d like to see if we can find parallel differences to what we found in mice in human cells,” Hatten says.

She continues, “We also want to look at the detailed biology of other genes that are associated with autism. There are dozens of them, but there’s no agreed-upon commonality that binds them together. We’re very excited that we’ve been able to show in detail what ASTN2 does, but there are a lot more genes to investigate.”

---

Explore:

All latest news

Mary E. Hatten

Frederick P. Rose Professor
Laboratory of Developmental Neurobiology

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Related publication

PNAS

Mice lacking Astn2 have ASD-like behaviors and altered cerebellar circuit properties

Michalina Hanzel, Kayla Fernando, Susan E. Maloney, Zachi Horn, Shiaoching Gong, Kärt Mätlik, Jiajia Zhao, H. Amalia Pasolli, Søren Heissel, Joseph D. Dougherty, Court Hull, and Mary E. Hatten

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Media contact

Katherine Fenz
Media Relations Manager

• 212-327-7913

• kfenz@rockefeller.edu

• More information for reporters

• @RockfellerUniv

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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

@ b7338786:fdb5bff3

Scramble - Open-Source Grammarly Alternative

Scramble is an open-source Chrome extension that leverages AI to enhance your writing directly in your browser. It's designed to be a more customizable and privacy-respecting alternative to Grammarly.

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AI Workout Generator

@ 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

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

@ b7338786:fdb5bff3

Every hype cycle in the technology industry continues a steady march towards a shitty future that nobody wants.

CMYKat

The Road to Hell

Once upon a time, everyone was all hot and bothered about Big Data : Having lots of information–far too much to process with commodity software–was supposed to magically transform business.

How do you build technology that can process that much information at scale? Well, obviously, you just need to invest in The Cloud! (If you’re using the Cloud to Butt Plus Chrome extension, this entire blog post may be confusing to you.)

But don’t scrutinize the Cloud too long, you might miss your chance to invest in blockchain .

meme via Tony Arcieri

Blockchainiacs practically invented an entire constructed language of buzzwords. Things like “DeFi”, “Web3”, and so on. To anyone not accustomed to their in-signaling, it’s potent enough cringe to repel even the weirdest of furries.

CMYKat

But the only thing to know about blockchain is its proponents they like it when the line goes up, and every “innovation” in that sector was in service of the line going up.

Blockchain, of course, refers to cryptocurrency . The security of these digital currencies is based on expensive consensus mechanisms (e.g., Proof of Work). The incentives baked into the design of these consensus mechanisms led users to buy lots of GPUs in order to compete to solve numeric puzzles (a.k.a. “mining”).

For a while, many technologists observed that whenever the line actually goes down or a popular cryptocurrency decides to adopt a less wasteful consensus mechanism, the secondhand market gets flooded with used GPUs.

That all changed with the release of ChatGPT and other Large Language Models.

Now GPUs are a hot commodity even when the price of Bitcoin goes down because tech company leaders are either malicious or stupid, and are always trying to appease investors that have more money than sense. It’s not just tech companies either.

“Our vision of [quick-service restaurants] is that an AI-first mentality works every step of the way.”

Joe Park , CEO of Yum Brands (Taco Bell, Pizza Hut, KFC)

Of all these hype cycles, I suspect that the “AI” hype has more staying power than the rest, if for no other reason than it provides a hedge against the downside of previous hype cycles.

• Not sure to do with the exabytes of Big Data you’re sitting on? Have LLMs parse it all then convincingly lie to you about what it means.
• Expensive cloud bill? Attract more investor dollars by selling them on trying to build an Artificial General Intelligence out of hallucinating chatbots.
• Got a bunch of GPUs lying around from a failed crypto-mining idea? Use it to flagrantly violate intellectual property law to steal from artists with legal impunity!

This “AI” trend is the Human Centipede of technology.

Art: CMYKat

So you can imagine how I felt when I went to add an image to a blog post draft one day and saw this:

Generate with AI? Fuck you.

There is no way to opt out of, or disable, this feature.

WordPress is not alone in its overt participation in this consumption of binary excrement.

Tech Industry Idiocy is Ubiquitous

Behold, Oracle’s AI innovation

EA’s CEO called generative AI the “very core of our business” , which an astute listener will find reminiscent of the time they claimed NFTs and blockchain were the future of the games industry at an earnings call .

Nevermind the fact that they’re actually in the business of publishing video games!

Mozilla Firefox 128.0 released a feature (enabled by default of course ) to help advertisers collect data on you.

Per 404 Media, Snapchat reserves the right to use AI-generated images of your face in ads (also on by default) .

At this point, even Rip Van fucking Winkle can spot the pattern.

CMYKat

Investors (read: fools with more money than sense) are dead set on a generative AI future, blockchain bullshit in everything, etc. Furthermore, there are a lot of gullible idiots that drank the Kool-Aid and feel like they’re part of the build-up to the next World Wide Web, so there’s no shortage of willing new CS grads to throw at these problems to keep the money flowing.

So we’re clearly well past the point that ridiculing the people involved will have any significant deterrence. The enshittification has spread too far to quarantine, and there are too many True Believers in the mix. Throw in a little bit of Roko’s Basilisk (read: Pascal’s wager for arrogant so-called “rationalists” who think they’re too smart to be Christian) and you’ve got a full-blown cargo cult on your hands.

What can we do about it? Beats me.

CMYKat

Sanity Check

I’m going to set aside the (extremely cathartic) attempts at shame and ridicule as a solution. Fun as they are, they fail to penetrate filter bubbles and reach the people they need to.

What’s your Bullshit Tech Score?

One way we could push back against this steady march towards a future where everything is enshittified, and the devices you paid for (with your hard-earned money) don’t respect your consent at all , is to turn the first of the buzz words we examined (Big Data) against these companies.

I’m proposing we could gather data about companies’ actual practices and build score-cards and leaderboards based on the following metrics:

1. Does the company strategy involve generative AI?
2. Does the company strategy involve selling NFTs?
3. Does the company strategy involve stitching other unnecessary blockchain bullshit where it doesn’t belong?
4. Does the company make questionable claims about quantum computers?
5. Does the company choose default settings that hurt the user in the interest of increasing revenue (i.e., assuming consent without explicitly receiving it)?
6. Does the company own any software patents?

   • This includes purely “defensive” patents, in industries where their competitors abuse intellectual property law to stifle competition.

     While these circumstances are understandable, we should be objective in our measurements. 7. Is the company completely bankrupt on innovation tokens ? 8. Does the company suffer from premature optimization (e.g., choosing MongoDB because they fear a relational database isn’t web-scale, rather than because it’s the right tool for the job)? 9. Have any of the company’s leaders been credibly accused of sexual misconduct or violence? * Sorry not sorry, Blizzard! 10. Does the company routinely have crunch time (i.e., more than one week per quarter where employees are expected to work more than 40 hours)? 11. Does the company enforce draconian return-to-office policies ? 12. Has the company threatened a security researcher with lawsuits in the past 10 years? 13. Does the company roll its own cryptography without having at least one cryptographer on the payroll?

A passing score is “No” to each of the above questions.

This proposal is basically the opposite of SSO Tax . Rather than shaming the losers (which there will assuredly be many), the goal would be to highlight companies that are reasonably sane to work for.

I’m aware that there are already companies like Forrester that try to do this, but with a much wider scope than the avoidance of bullshit.

Furthermore, they’re incentivized to not piss off wealthy businessmen, so that they can keep their research business alive, whereas I don’t particularly care if tech CEOs get mad at being called a hypocritical hype-huffer.

I mean, what are they gonna do? Downvote me on Hacker News? I don’t work for them anyway.

In Over Our Heads

There may be other solutions available that will improve things somewhat . I’m not immune to failures of imagination.

Some solutions are incredibly contentious, though, and I don’t really want the headache.

For example: I’m sure that, if this blog post ever gets posted on a message board, someone in the peanut gallery will bring up unions as a mechanism, and others will fiercely shoot that idea down.

It’s possible that we, as an industry, are completely in over our heads. There’s too much bullshit, and too many perverse incentives creating ever-increasing amounts of bullshit, that escape is simply impossible.

Perhaps we’ve already crossed the excrement horizon.

Maybe Kurzweil was right about a Singularity after all?

CMYKat

Closing Thoughts

The main thing I wanted to convey today was, “No, you’re not alone, things are getting stupider,” to anyone who wondered if there was a spark of sanity left in the tech sector.

Art: AJ

It’s not just the smarmy tech CEOs that are the problem. The rot has spread all the way to the foundations of many organizations. Hacker News, Lobsters, etc. are full of clueless AI maximalists that cannot see the harms they are inflicting.

It is difficult to get a [person] to understand something, when [their] salary depends on [their] not understanding it.

Original quote by Upton Sinclair.

Though I am at a loss for how to tackle this problem as a community, acknowledging it exists is still important to me.

On WordPress and Generative AI

Years ago, I wrote on Medium, but got tired of the constant pressure to monetize my blog , so I decided to pay for a WordPress.com account. I write for myself , after all, and don’t expect any compensation for it.

Many of you will notice the “adblocker not detected ” popup. That sums up how I feel about the adtech industry.

It’s disheartening that WordPress is pushing Generative AI bullshit to paying customers with no way to opt out of the feature. (Nevermind that it should be off-by-default and opted into .)

For now, I just refuse to use the feature and hope a lower adoption rate causes a project manager somewhere in Automattic to sweat. They’re somewhat notorious for being led by stubborn assholes who don’t listen to critics (even on security matters).

I’ll also continue to credit the artists that made the furry art I include in my blog posts, because supporting artists is the exact opposite of supporting generative AI.

If you’re looking for a furry artist to commission, first read this , and then maybe consider the artists whose work I’ve featured over the years.

New Avenues of Bullshit

If I may be so bold as to make a predication: In the distant future, I expect to see more Quantum Computing related bullshit.

Though currently constrained to the realm of grifters , NIST’s recent standardization of post-quantum cryptography is likely to ignite a lot of questionable technology companies.

Whether any of this quantum bullshit catches on at the same scale as tech industry hype remains to be seen.

If any does, I promise to handle each instance with the same derision as the bullshit I discovered in DFECON’s Quantum Village .

• Tags Cryptocurrency , Society , Technology

By Soatok

Security engineer with a fursona. Ask me about dholes or Diffie-Hellman!

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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.

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How to do curation and businesses on Nostr

Suppose you want to start a Nostr business.

You might be tempted to make a closed platform that reuses Nostr identities and grabs (some) content from the external Nostr network, only to imprison it inside your thing -- and then you're going to run an amazing AI-powered algorithm on that content and "surface" only the best stuff and people will flock to your app.

This will be specially good if you're going after one of the many unexplored niches of Nostr in which reading immediately from people you know doesn't work as you generally want to discover new things from the outer world, such as:

• food recipe sharing;
• sharing of long articles about varying topics;
• markets for used goods;
• freelancer work and job offers;
• specific in-game lobbies and matchmaking;
• directories of accredited professionals;
• sharing of original music, drawings and other artistic creations;
• restaurant recommendations
• and so on.

But that is not the correct approach and damages the freedom and interoperability of Nostr, posing a centralization threat to the protocol. Even if it "works" and your business is incredibly successful it will just enshrine you as the head of a platform that controls users and thus is prone to all the bad things that happen to all these platforms. Your company will start to display ads and shape the public discourse, you'll need a big legal team, the FBI will talk to you, advertisers will play a big role and so on.

If you are interested in Nostr today that must be because you appreciate the fact that it is not owned by any companies, so it's safe to assume you don't want to be that company that owns it. So what should you do instead? Here's an idea in two steps:

1. Write a Nostr client tailored to the niche you want to cover

If it's a music sharing thing, then the client will have a way to play the audio and so on; if it's a restaurant sharing it will have maps with the locations of the restaurants or whatever, you get the idea. Hopefully there will be a NIP or a NUD specifying how to create and interact with events relating to this niche, or you will write or contribute with the creation of one, because without interoperability this can't be Nostr.

The client should work independently of any special backend requirements and ideally be open-source. It should have a way for users to configure to which relays they want to connect to see "global" content -- i.e., they might want to connect to wss://nostr.chrysalisrecords.com/ to see only the latest music releases accredited by that label or to wss://nostr.indiemusic.com/ to get music from independent producers from that community.

1. Run a relay that does all the magic

This is where your value-adding capabilities come into play: if you have that magic sauce you should be able to apply it here. Your service -- let's call it wss://magicsaucemusic.com/ -- will charge people or do some KYM (know your music) validation or use some very advanced AI sorcery to filter out the spam and the garbage and display the best content to your users who will request the global feed from it (["REQ", "_", {}]), and this will cause people to want to publish to your relay while others will want to read from it.

You set your relay as the default option in the client and let things happen. Your relay is like your "website" and people are free to connect to it or not. You don't own the network, you're just competing against other websites on a leveled playing field, so you're not responsible for it. Users get seamless browsing across multiple websites, unified identities, a unified interface (that could be different in a different client) and social interaction capabilities that work in the same way for all, and they do not depend on you, therefore they're more likely to trust you.

---

Does this centralize the network still? But this a simple and easy way to go about the matter and scales well in all aspects.

Besides allowing users to connect to specific relays for getting a feed of curated content, such clients should also do all kinds of "social" (i.e. following, commenting etc) activities (if they choose to do that) using the outbox model -- i.e. if I find a musician I like under wss://magicsaucemusic.com and I decide to follow them I should keep getting updates from them even if they get banned from that relay and start publishing on wss://nos.lol or wss://relay.damus.io or whatever relay that doesn't even know anything about music.

The hardcoded defaults and manual typing of relay URLs can be annoying. But I think it works well at the current stage of Nostr development. Soon, though, we can create events that recommend other relays or share relay lists specific to each kind of activity so users can get in-app suggestions of relays their friends are using to get their music from and so on. That kind of stuff can go a long way.

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O Bitcoin como um sistema social humano

Afinal de contas, o que é o Bitcoin? Não vou responder a essa pergunta explicando o que é uma "blockchain" ou coisa que o valha, como todos fazem muito pessimamente. A melhor explicação em português que eu já vi está aqui, mas mesmo assim qualquer explicação jamais será definitiva.

A explicação apenas do protocolo, do que faz um programa bitcoind sendo executado em um computador e como ele se comunica com outros em outros computadores, e os incentivos que estão em jogo para garantir com razoável probabilidade que se chegará a um consenso sobre quem é dono de qual parte de qual transação, apesar de não ser complicada demais, exigirá do iniciante que seja compreendida muitas vezes antes que ele se possa se sentir confortável para dizer que entende um pouco.

E essa parte técnica, apesar de ter sido o insight fundamental que gerou o evento miraculoso chamado Bitcoin, não é a parte mais importante, hoje. Se fosse, várias dessas outras moedas seriam concorrentes do Bitcoin, mas não são, e jamais poderão ser, porque elas não estão nem próximas de ter os outros elementos que compõem o Bitcoin. São eles:

1. A estrutura

O Bitcoin é um sistema composto de partes independentes.

Existem programadores que trabalham no protocolo e aplicações, e dia após dia novos programadores chegam e outros saem, e eles trabalham às vezes em conjunto, às vezes sem que um se dê conta do outro, às vezes por conta própria, às vezes pagos por empresas interessadas.

Existem os usuários que realizam validação completa, isto é, estão rodando algum programa do Bitcoin e contribuindo para a difusão dos blocos, das transações, rejeitando usuários malignos e evitando ataques de mineradores mal-intencionados.

Existem os poupadores, acumuladores ou os proprietários de bitcoins, que conhecem as possibilidades que o mundo reserva para o Bitcoin, esperam o dia em que o padrão-Bitcoin será uma realidade mundial e por isso mesmo atributem aos seus bitcoins valores muito mais altos do que os preços atuais de mercado, agarrando-se a eles.

Especuladores de "criptomoedas" não fazem parte desse sistema, nem tampouco empresas que aceitam pagamento em bitcoins para imediatamente venderem tudo em troca de dinheiro estatal, e menos ainda gente que usa bitcoins e a própria marca Bitcoin para aplicar seus golpes e coisas parecidas.

1. A cultura

Mencionei que há empresas que pagam programadores para trabalharem no código aberto do BitcoinCore ou de outros programas relacionados à rede Bitcoin -- ou mesmo em aplicações não necessariamente ligadas à camada fundamental do protocolo. Nenhuma dessas empresas interessadas, porém, controla o Bitcoin, e isso é o elemento principal da cultura do Bitcoin.

O propósito do Bitcoin sempre foi ser uma rede aberta, sem chefes, sem política envolvida, sem necessidade de pedir autorização para participar. O fato do próprio Satoshi Nakamoto ter voluntariamente desaparecido das discussões foi fundamental para que o Bitcoin não fosse visto como um sistema dependente dele ou que ele fosse entendido como o chefe. Em outras "criptomoedas" nada disso aconteceu. O chefe supremo do Ethereum continua por aí mandando e desmandando e inventando novos elementos para o protocolo que são automaticamente aceitos por toda a comunidade, o mesmo vale para o Zcash, EOS, Ripple, Litecoin e até mesmo para o Bitcoin Cash. Pior ainda: Satoshi Nakamoto saiu sem nenhum dinheiro, nunca mexeu nos milhares de bitcoins que ele gerou nos primeiros blocos -- enquanto os líderes dessas porcarias supramencionadas cobraram uma fortuna pelo direito de uso dos seus primeiros usuários ou estão aí a até hoje receber dividendos.

Tudo isso e mais outras coisas -- a mentalidade anti-estatal e entusiasta de sistemas p2p abertos dos membros mais proeminentes da comunidade, por exemplo -- faz com que um ar de liberdade e suspeito de tentativas de centralização da moeda sejam percebidos e execrados.

1. A história

A noção de que o Bitcoin não pode ser controlado por ninguém passou em 2017 por dois testes e saiu deles muito reforçada: o primeiro foi a divisão entre Bitcoin (BTC) e Bitcoin Cash (BCH), uma obra de engenharia social que teve um sucesso mediano em roubar parte da marca e dos usuários do verdadeiro Bitcoin e depois a tentativa de tomada por completo do Bitcoin promovida por mais ou menos as mesmas partes interessadas chamada SegWit2x, que fracassou por completo, mas não sem antes atrapalhar e difundir mentiras para todos os lados. Esses dois fracassos provaram que o Bitcoin, mesmo sendo uma comunidade desorganizada, sem líderes claros, está imune à captura por grupos interessados, o que é mais um milagre -- ou, como dizem, um ponto de Schelling.

Esse período crucial na história do Bitcoin fez com ficasse claro que hard-forks são essencialmente incompatíveis com a natureza do protocolo, de modo que no futuro não haverá a possibilidade de uma sugestão como a de imprimir mais bitcoins do que o que estava programado sejam levadas a sério (mas, claro, sempre há a possibilidade da cultura toda se perder, as pessoas esquecerem a história e o Bitcoin ser cooptado, eis a importância da auto-educação e da difusão desses princípios).

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O caso da Grêmio TV

enquanto vinha se conduzindo pela plataforma superior daquela arena que se pensava totalmente preenchida por adeptos da famosa equipe do Grêmio de Porto Alegre, viu-se, como por obra de algum nigromante - dos muitos que existem e estão a todo momento a fazer más obras e a colocar-se no caminhos dos que procuram, se não fazer o bem acima de todas as coisas, a pelo menos não fazer o mal no curso da realização dos seus interesses -, o discretíssimo jornalista a ser xingado e moído em palavras por uma horda de malandrinos a cinco ou seis passos dele surgida que cantavam e moviam seus braços em movimentos que não se pode classificar senão como bárbaros, e assim cantavam:

Grêmio TV pior que o SBT !

@ 6042d703:e3e62213

The Nostr protocol is amazing. I love learning about it every day, and it's inspiring to see all the developer activity in this ecosystem. I believe it has a real shot at bringing us closer to a more decentralized internet. However, it won't solve all problems. That's why I decided to write a short post about what Nostr does and doesn't do.

Attacks from Governments

When Telegram CEO Pavel Durov was arrested in August 2024, many said that couldn't happen on Nostr. They're right — no Nostr CEO will ever be arrested, as long as there is no Nostr CEO (ok, maybe Derek Ross).

Nostr's strength lies in its decentralized nature, making it difficult to shut down. Anyone can run relays and create notes, which creates a regulatory hydra that is nearly impossible to kill. However, individual users can still be identified and shut down if they don't carefully protect their IP addresses and dissociate from their real identities.

Social Media Ills

Another misconception about Nostr is that it will solve all of social media's problems. Will it? In his manifesto, Fiatjaf identified many issues with the current state of social media. Most of them stem from the fact that it is centralized and therefore vulnerable to censorship by big tech and governments. This is true, and Nostr is a solid answer to the problem of centralization and censorship.

However, some argue that social media's problems go beyond censorship. Social envy, addiction, and other issues persist. While I agree that individuals and their communities, rather than governments, are responsible for addressing many of these problems, they are still real issues, and Nostr can't easily fix them.

Bots

Bots are a major issue on social media, especially on Crypto Twitter, where scams often aim to drain user wallets. Nostr also has bots and a spam problem. It's incredibly easy to create an npub/nsec key pair, allowing for the quick creation of bot armies that post kind 1 notes and other information. So, Nostr is not, nor will it be, free of bots.

However, Nostr has a few valuable tools at its disposal to reign them in: WoT scores, Zaps, and Filters. Let's see how these tools will be used to tackle this problem.

Society

While Pavel Durov's arrest caused an outcry among Nostriches, many commentators said, "Well, that's what you get if you don't censor." I think the need for free speech is still poorly understood and not recognized as a core pillar of free societies. As long as people don't see the importance of uncensored free speech, they will struggle to understand the benefits of Nostr.

Nostr can't fix that, but it can be a bastion of free speech for those who value it and help ignite a fire of free discourse that others can join once they recognize the need.

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My stupid introduction to Haskell

While I was writing my first small program on Haskell (really simple, but functional webapp) in December 2017 I only knew vaguely what was the style of things, some basic notions about functions, pure functions and so on (I've read about a third of LYAH).

An enourmous amount of questions began to appear in my head while I read tutorials and documentation. Here I present some of the questions and the insights I got that solved them. Technically, they may be wrong, but they helped me advance in the matter, so I'm writing them down while I still can -- If I keep working with Haskell I'll probably get to know more and so my new insights will replace the previous ones, and the new ones won't be useful for total begginers anymore.

---

Here we go:

• Why do modules have odd names?
• modules are the things you import, like Data.Time.Clock or Web.Scotty.
• packages are the things you install, like 'time' or 'scotty'
• packages can contain any number of modules they like
• a module is just a collection of functions
• a package is just a collection of modules
• a package is just name you choose to associate your collection of modules with when you're publishing it to Hackage or whatever
• the module names you choose when you're writing a package can be anything, and these are the names people will have to import when they want to use you functions
  • if you're from Javascript, Python or anything similar, you'll expect to be importing/writing the name of the package directly in your code, but in Haskell you'll actually be writing the name of the module, which may have nothing to do with the name of the package
  • people choose things that make sense, like for aeson instead of import Aeson you'll be doing import Data.Aeson, import Data.Aeson.Types etc. why the Data? because they thought it would be nice. dealing with JSON is a form of dealing with data, so be it.
  • you just have to check the package documentation to see which modules it exposes.
• What is data User = User { name :: Text }?
• a data type definition. means you'll have a function User that will take a Text parameter and output a User record or something like that.
• you can also have Animal = Giraffe { color :: Text } | Human { name :: Text }, so you'll have two functions, Giraffe and Human, each can take a different set of parameters, but they will both yield an Animal.
  • then, in the functions that take an Animal parameter you must typematch to see if the animal is a giraffe or a human.
• What is a monad?
• a monad is a context, an environment.
  • when you're in the context of a monad you can write imperative code.
  • you do that when you use the keyword do.
  • in the context of a monad, all values are prefixed by the monad type,
  • thus, in the IO monad all Text is IO Text and so on.
  • some monads have a relationship with others, so values from that monad can be turned into values from another monad and passed between context easily.
  • for exampĺe, scotty's ActionM and IO. ActionM is just a subtype of IO or something like that.
  • when you write imperative code inside a monad you can do assignments like varname <- func x y
  • in these situations some transformation is done by the <-, I believe it is that the pure value returned by func is being transformed into a monad value. so if func returns Text, now varname is of type IO Text (if we're in the IO monad).
    • so it will not work (and it can be confusing) if you try to concatenate functions like varname <- transform $ func x y, but you can somehow do
    • varname <- func x y
    • othervarname <- transform varname
    • or you can do other fancy things you'll get familiar with later, like varname <- fmap transform $ func x y
    • why? I don't know.
• How do I deal with Maybe, Either or other crazy stuff? "ok, I understand what is a Maybe: it is a value that could be something or nothing. but how do I use that in my program?"
• you don't! you turn it into other thing. for example, you use fromMaybe, a function that takes a default value and that's it. if your Maybe is Just x you get x, if it is Nothing you get the default value.
  • using only that function you can already do whatever there is to be done with Maybes.
  • you can also manipulate the values inside the Maybe, for example:
  • if you have a Maybe Person and Person has a name which is Text, you can apply a function that turns Maybe Person into Maybe Text AND ONLY THEN you apply the default value (which would be something like the "unnamed") and take the name from inside the Maybe.
• basically these things (Maybe, Either, IO also!) are just tags. they tag the value, and you can do things with the values inside them, or you can remove the values.
  • besides the example above with Maybes and the fromMaybe function, you can also remove the values by using case -- for example:
  • case x of
    • Left error -> error
    • Right success -> success
  • case y of
    • Nothing -> "nothing!"
    • Just value -> value
  • (in some cases I believe you can't remove the values, but in these cases you'll also don't need to)
  • for example, for values tagged with the IO, you can't remove the IO and turn these values into pure values, but you don't need that, you can just take the value from the outside world, so it's a IO Text, apply functions that modify that value inside IO, then output the result to the user -- this is enough to make a complete program, any complete program.
• JSON and interfaces (or instances?)
• using Aeson is easy, you just have to implement the ToJSON and FromJSON interfaces.
• "interface" is not the correct name, but I don't care.
• ToJSON, for example, requires a function named toJSON, so you do
  • instance ToJSON YourType where
  • toJSON (YourType your type values) = object [] ... etc.
• I believe lots of things require interface implementation like this and it can be confusing, but once you know the mystery of implementing functions for interfaces everything is solved.
• FromJSON is a little less intuitive at the beggining, and I don't know if I did it correctly, but it is working here. Anyway, if you're trying to do that, I can only tell you to follow the types, copy examples from other places on the internet and don't care about the meaning of symbols.

See also

• Haskell Monoids

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Classless Templates

There are way too many hours being wasted in making themes for blogs. And then comes a new blog framework, it requires new themes. Old themes can't be used because they relied on different ways of rendering the website. Everything is a mess.

Classless was an attempt at solving it. It probably didn't work because I wasn't the best person to make themes and showcase the thing.

Basically everybody would agree on a simple HTML template that could fit blogs and simple websites very easily. Then other people would make pure-CSS themes expecting that template to be in place.

No classes were needed, only a fixed structure of header. main, article etc.

With flexbox and grid CSS was enough to make this happen.

The templates that were available were all ported by me from other templates I saw on the web, and there was a simple one I created for my old website.

• https://github.com/fiatjaf/classless
• https://classless.alhur.es/
• https://classless.alhur.es/themes/

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In this article, we'll investigate how electricians in Sunshine Coast are supporting the move towards environmentally friendly power and why their work is so significant.

Click here> Best Electrician in Sunshine Coast

1. Installing Solar Panel chargers

One of the most widely recognized ways of saddling sustainable power on the Sunshine Coast is by utilizing sunlight based chargers. Sunlight powered chargers catch daylight and convert it into power that can control homes and organizations. Electricians in Sunshine Coast are fundamental for introducing these sunlight powered chargers. They ensure the boards are put accurately on rooftops or different places where they can get the most daylight. When the boards are set up, circuit repairmen interface them to the electrical arrangement of the structure with the goal that the sunlight based energy can be utilized productively.

1. Setting Up Sun based Inverters

Sunlight powered chargers create power, yet the power they produce isn't promptly usable by most domestic devices. This is where sun powered inverters come in. A sun based inverter changes over the power from the boards into a structure that can be involved by the machines in your home or business. Electricians in Sunshine Coast are talented in introducing and setting up these inverters. Without their ability, the sun based energy gathered by the boards wouldn't be usable.

1. Introducing Battery Stockpiling Frameworks

While sunlight powered chargers create power during the day when the sun is sparkling, they don't deliver power around evening time. For this reason many individuals on the Sunshine Coast are putting resources into battery capacity frameworks. These frameworks store abundance sun based energy created during the day so it very well may be utilized around evening time or on overcast days. Electricians in Sunshine Coast are at risk for introducing these battery systems and associating them to the sun controlled chargers and electrical structures. This ensures that the energy set aside in the batteries can be used whenever it's required.

1. Keeping up with Environmentally friendly power Frameworks

Like some other innovation, environmentally friendly power frameworks require ordinary support to keep them moving along as expected. Electrical technicians in Sunshine Coast are prepared to assess, clean, and fix sunlight based chargers, inverters, and battery stockpiling frameworks. Ordinary support forestalls issues and guarantees that the frameworks work at top proficiency. By keeping these frameworks ready to go, Electricians assist property holders and organizations with getting a good deal on energy charges and decrease their carbon impression.

1. Overhauling Electrical Frameworks for Environmentally friendly power

Many homes and organizations on the Sunshine Coast were worked before environmentally friendly power became well known. Subsequently, their electrical frameworks probably won't be prepared to deal with the requests of sunlight based chargers, inverters, and battery stockpiling. Electrical experts in Sunshine Coast are frequently called upon to update these electrical frameworks. This could include supplanting old wiring, putting in new circuit breakers, or adding more electrical plugs. Updating the electrical framework guarantees that the structure can securely and effectively utilize sustainable power.

1. Supporting the Development of Electric Vehicles

Electric vehicles (EVs) are turning out to be more famous on the Sunshine Coast. These vehicles burn power as opposed to gas, making them a cleaner and more practical choice for transportation. Electrical experts in Sunshine Coast are assuming a vital part in supporting the development of EVs by introducing EV charging stations. These stations are where EV proprietors can connect their vehicles to charge the batteries. Without these charging stations, it would be significantly more hard for individuals to claim and work electric vehicles.

1. Interfacing Environmentally friendly power to the Lattice

The power created by sunlight based chargers can be utilized right away, put away in batteries, or sent back to the electrical lattice. The matrix is the organization that conveys power to homes and organizations across the locale. Exactly when sun fueled chargers produce more energy than a home or business needs, the excess energy can be sent back to the cross section. Electrical specialists in Sunshine Coast are responsible for ensuring the relationship between the sustainable power system and the cross section is secured and trustworthy.

1. Instructing the Local area

Electricians in Sunshine Coast additionally assume a significant part in teaching the local area about environmentally friendly power. They help individuals with grasping how sun fueled chargers, inverters, battery structures, and EV chargers work. They can figure out the upsides of exchanging for sustainable power, for instance, lower energy bills, diminished natural impact, and extended energy independence. By sharing their insight, Electricians engage more individuals to do the change to sustainable power.

1. Supporting Environmentally friendly power in New Development

As the Sunshine Coast keeps on developing, many new homes and organizations are being fabricated. Circuit repairmen in Sunshine Coast are associated with the preparation and development of these new structures. They work with engineers and manufacturers to plan electrical frameworks that are viable with sustainable power all along. This could incorporate pre-wiring structures for sunlight powered chargers, introducing energy-productive lighting, and setting up savvy home frameworks that advance energy use. By anticipating environmentally friendly power all along, electrical experts assist with making structures that are more maintainable and future-proof.

1. Advancing Energy Autonomy

Energy autonomy implies depending on your own energy sources instead of relying totally upon the electrical lattice. This is especially significant during blackouts or in distant regions where the network probably won't be solid. Electrical experts in Sunshine Coast assist property holders and organizations with accomplishing energy autonomy by introducing and keeping up with environmentally friendly power frameworks. With sunlight based chargers, battery capacity, and perhaps even wind or hydro power, a structure can create and utilize its own power. This decreases the dependence on petroleum products and expands the strength of the local area.

1. Decreasing Carbon Impression

The carbon impression is how much carbon dioxide (CO2) and other ozone depleting substances that are delivered into the climate because of human exercises. Consuming petroleum products like coal, oil, and flammable gas to create power is a significant wellspring of these discharges. By supporting environmentally friendly power, electrical experts in Sunshine Coast are assisting with decreasing the carbon impression of homes and organizations. Sunlight based energy, for instance, creates no immediate discharges, making it a much cleaner option in contrast to petroleum products.

1. Empowering Advancement

The field of sustainable power is continually advancing, with new advancements and techniques being fostered constantly. Electricians in Sunshine Coast are at the front of this advancement. They are ceaselessly finding out about new items, establishment strategies, and best practices. By keeping awake to-date with the most recent headways, Electricians guarantee that their clients benefit from the most productive and powerful environmentally friendly power arrangements that anyone could hope to find.

1. Giving Master Guidance

With regards to sustainable power, there are numerous choices to browse. Circuit repairmen in Sunshine Coast give master exhortation to assist property holders and organizations with settling on informed choices. They can suggest the best sunlight powered chargers, inverters, and battery frameworks in view of the particular necessities of the client. They can likewise offer direction on the most proficient method to augment energy productivity and make the most of the advantages of environmentally friendly power.

1. Supporting the Nearby Economy

By employing electrical technicians in Sunshine Coast for sustainable power ventures, occupants and organizations are likewise supporting the neighborhood economy. Nearby circuit repairmen are know all about the special necessities of the Sunshine Coast people group and are focused on offering top notch assistance. The cash burned through on inexhaustible effort establishments and support stays inside the local area, making position and helping the neighborhood economy.

1. Adding to Supportability Objectives

Numerous state run administrations and associations have defined manageability objectives to lessen fossil fuel byproducts and advance sustainable power. Electrical experts in Sunshine Coast are assisting the local area with meeting these objectives by expanding the reception of environmentally friendly power. Each sunlight powered charger introduced, each battery framework associated, and each EV charger set up carries the local area one bit nearer to a more manageable future.

1. Adjusting to Environmental Change

Environmental change is a worldwide test that influences everybody, including the Sunshine Coast. Increasing temperatures, more outrageous climate occasions, and changing precipitation designs are only a portion of the effects of environmental change. By supporting sustainable power, circuit repairmen in Sunshine Coast are assisting with relieving these impacts. Sustainable power lessens dependence on non-renewable energy sources, which are a significant supporter of environmental change. Furthermore, sustainable power frameworks can be stronger notwithstanding environment related disturbances, like tempests or heatwaves.

1. Establishing a Cleaner Climate

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1. Supporting People in the future

The choices we make today about energy use will affect people in the future. By advancing and supporting environmentally friendly power, circuit repairmen in Sunshine Coast are assisting with making a more practical world for people in the future. This incorporates guaranteeing that youngsters and grandkids acquire a planet with cleaner air, water, and a steady environment.

1. Upgrading Property Estimation

Homes and organizations with environmentally friendly power frameworks, as sunlight powered chargers and EV chargers, are much of the time more appealing to purchasers. These properties can offer lower energy bills and a more modest natural effect, which are engaging elements in the present market. Electricians in Sunshine Coast assist with upgrading the worth of properties by introducing and keeping up with environmentally friendly power frameworks. This can have a major effect when it comes time to sell or rent a property.

1. Building a More grounded Local area

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Conclusion Electricians in Sunshine Coast are essential in promoting renewable energy. They handle everything from installing solar panels to educating the community. Their work helps create a cleaner, more sustainable future. As more people adopt green energy, these electricians will continue to play a key role in fighting climate change and supporting a sustainable world.

@ 3bf0c63f:aefa459d

The "Drivechain will replace altcoins" argument

The argument that Drivechain will replace shitcoins is not that people will sell their shitcoins or that the existing shitcoins will instantly vanish. The argument is about a change at the margin that eventually ends up killing the shitcoins or reducing them to their original insignificance.

What does "at the margin" mean? For example, when the price of the coconut drops a little in relation to bananas, does that mean that everybody will stop buying bananas and will buy only coconuts now? No. Does it mean there will be zero increase in the amount of coconuts sold? Also no. What happens is that there is a small number of people who would have preferred to buy coconuts if only they were a little less expensive but end up buying bananas instead. When the price of coconut drops these people buy coconuts and don't buy bananas.

The argument is that the same thing will happen when Drivechain is activated: there are some people today (yes, believe me) that would have preferred to work within the Bitcoin ecosystem but end up working on shitcoins. In a world with Drivechain these people would be working on the Bitcoin ecosystem, for the benefit of Bitcoin and the Bitcoiners.

Why would they prefer Bitcoin? Because Bitcoin has a bigger network-effect. When these people come, they increase Bitocin's network-effect even more, and if they don't go to the shitcoins they reduce the shitcoins' network-effect. Those changes in network-effect contribute to bringing others who were a little further from the margin and the thing compounds until the shitcoins are worthless.

Who are these people at the margin? I don't know, but they certainly exist. I would guess the Stark people are one famous example, but there are many others. In the past, examples included Roger Ver, Zooko Wilcox, Riccardo Spagni and Vitalik Buterin. And before you start screaming that these people are shitcoiners (which they are) imagine how much bigger Bitcoin could have been today if they and their entire communities (yes, I know, of awful people) were using and working for Bitcoin today. Remember that phrase about Bitcoin being for enemies?

But everything that has been invented in the altcoin world is awful, we don't need any of that!

You and me should not be the ones judging what is good and what is not for others, but both you and me and others will benefit if these things can be done in a way that increases Bitcoin network-effect and pays fees to Bitcoin miners.

Also, there is a much stronger point you may have not considered: if you believe all altcoiners are scammers that means we have only seen the things that were invented by scammers, since all honest people that had good ideas decided to not implement them as the only way to do it would be to create a scammy shitcoin. One example is Bitcoin Hivemind.

If it is possible to do these ideas without creating shitcoins we may start to see new things that are actually good.

@ 9fc6b5fc:5bacb10a

Details

• ⏲️ Prep time: 45 minutes
• 🍳 Cook time: 40 minutes
• 🍽️ Servings: 4-6

Ingredients

• 1 frozen puff pastry sheet, thawed
• 2 red organic apples (skin color adds great visual pop)
• Juce of half a lemon
• 1 tablespoon of flour, to sprinkle the counter
• 3 tablespoons of apricot preserve
• Cinnamon (optional)
• Powdered sugar for decorating (optional)

Directions

1. 1. Thaw the puff pastry if you haven't done so yet. It should take about 20-30 minutes.
2. 1. Prepare a bowl with some water and the lemon juice. Cut the apples in half, remove the core and cut the apples in paper thin slices. Leave the peel so it will give the red color to your roses.
3. 1. Right away, place the sliced apples in the bowl with lemon and water, so that they won't change color.
4. 1. Microwave the apples in the bowl, for about 3 minutes, to make them slightly softer. If you prefer, you can also simmer the apple slices in the water in a small pan on the stove.
5. 1. Unwrap the puff pastry over a clean and lightly floured counter. Using a rolling pin stretch the dough a little, trying to keep it in a rectangular shape. Cut the dough in 6 strips. These are about 2 in x 9 in (5 cm x 22 cm).
6. 1. In a bowl, place three tablespoons of apricot preserve with two tablespoons of water. Microwave for about one minute, so that the preserve will be easier to spread. Spread the preserve on the dough.
7. 1. Preheat the oven to 375 degrees F (190 degrees C). Drain the apples.
8. 1. Place the apples on the dough so that the skin side is facing away from you, and the bottom of the slice is at the middle of the dough (see cover image). Sprinkle with cinnamon if you'd like.
9. 1. Fold up the bottom part of the dough over the apple slices, so that it cups them.
10. 1. Carefully roll, seal the edge, and place in a silicone muffin cup. No need to grease the muffin mold if it's silicone. Otherwise, make sure to grease it.
11. 1. Do the same for all 6 roses. Bake at 375 degrees F (190 degrees C) for about 40-45 minutes, until fully cooked. If using a convection oven, check the roses after 20 minutes and cover if the apple slices are already sufficiently browned. Convection ovens dry out the apples more quickly and will result in 10 minutes shorter cooking time.

@ 3bf0c63f:aefa459d

A list of things artificial intelligence is not doing

If AI is so good why can't it:

• write good glue code that wraps a documented HTTP API?
• make good translations using available books and respective published translations?
• extract meaningful and relevant numbers from news articles?
• write mathematical models that fit perfectly to available data better than any human?
• play videogames without cheating (i.e. simulating human vision, attention and click speed)?
• turn pure HTML pages into pretty designs by generating CSS
• predict the weather
• calculate building foundations
• determine stock values of companies from publicly available numbers
• smartly and automatically test software to uncover bugs before releases
• predict sports matches from the ball and the players' movement on the screen
• continuously improve niche/local search indexes based on user input and and reaction to results
• control traffic lights
• predict sports matches from news articles, and teams and players' history

This was posted first on Twitter.

@ ea1e6f68:49fe0005

There is consensus on the internet that the chaotic times we are living is a result of the 4th turning. The trust in old institutions that originated after WW2 is breaking down, which causes chaos around the globe. Most people who experienced the last 4th turning already died. The people currently alive know that authoritarianism is bad, but they don’t realise it because they never lived it. That’s why we have to learn the same hard lessons again.

Another widely accepted view is that this 4th turning will last until at least 2030. That WW3 is still ahead of us and that we will have another 6 years of increasing chaos. Even Wikipedia claims that the current 4th turning started just before the financial crisis in 2008. Since a turning generally last around 20 years but can take some longer, it would make 2030 a good ETA to end.

*According to Wikipedia the current 4th turning started in 2006 and will end in 2033

Recently, another scenario where the 4th turning ends around 2025 popped up in my head. The more I been thinking about it the more supporting arguments I find. What if we are already further in the current 4th turning than everyone thinks? What if we have just one or two years to go before the momentum turns positive again?

*This article is not a prediction, nobody knows the future. However, it’s an alternative scenario that’s in my mind supported by plenty good arguments. I like to think in probabilities, and at the time of writing I give this scenario around 40% chance. What do you think? Leave me a comment!

Could the 4th Turning Almost be Done?

What if the current 4th turning is almost near its end? What if it only last until around 2025? Would it be possible that we will get our D-Day moment somewhere in the coming two years followed by a massive positive momentum shift in society that signals the 1st turning? Or could it be that the transition isn’t that obvious this time and that we slowly smooth into the first turning without a D-Day moment this time around?

2025 would be exactly 80 years after the end of WW2, which is historically exactly a full cycle. Further, if we consider 9/11 as the start of the 4th turning instead of the Great Financial Crisis, it last already 24 years and is already overdue to end. There is more to support this thesis:

The Last 4th Turning

I know many people will get triggered by the comparison between the 2020’s and Nazi Germany. If this is you, stop reading now and go read Donald Duck or some happy fairytale. If you are willing to accept reality, you'll see an obvious similarity between those two era’s:

They are both 4th turnings with a massive wave of collectivism including extreme authoritarianism like censorship, movement restrictions, democide and war. Both times are universally recognised as a time of global chaos and a clear negative momentum in society.

1940 VS 2020

The corrosion of the institutions in Germany started long time before it became obvious in WW2. The real global chaos only took place over the last 5 years of the 4th turning in the form of a massive hot war, occupation of many countries and a genocide known as the Holocaust.

If you compare this to today, I would say that the global chaos started in 2020 with global lockdowns, movement restrictions, heavy censorship and forced medical interventions followed by some very nasty wars. If this last to around 2025 it would be a perfect rhyme!

When Did the 4th Turning Start?

What about the beginning of the 4th turning? Did it really start in the Great Financial Crisis as most people say? In my mind the trust in the institutions really started to break down after 9/11 in 2001. This was the event where the government violated our basic rights on a global scale by reversing the burden of proof and started multiple forever-wars.

Before 9/11 they had to prove whether you are a terrorist, now you have to prove that you are not. Innocent until proven guilty was a universally accepted basic human right in the entire Western world. After 9/11 this was violated on a global scale and this was quickly normalised. Our rights would later be violated again in the same way, when healthy people had to prove that they aren't sick.

It marked a critical breakdown of basic human rights, it was a fundamental change in society and it was the first major step into authoritarianism. In my opinion, this was the end of the free West and the start of the modern surveillance state we lived under since, which is clearly getting out of the hand today.

Realisation Will Come Later

Authoritarianism doesn’t get suddenly implemented, it comes in a long serie of tiny changes. The media is spreading the narrative that these changes are good or necessary. This is how society slowly slides into full blown authoritarianism without the population realising it.

Even in Nazi Germany most people didn’t realise how bad their regime was until it was all over and the Germans were asked for an explanation for what happened. A very famous answer from the general German population after the war was ‘Wir haben das nicht gewurst’, which means ‘we didn’t know’.

Westerners today are busy living their life while their government does really evil shit. The media simply doesn’t tell them what happens or they push the narrative that it is necessary for ‘our safety’. What’s considered murder or genocide when read in a history book, is considered normal and necessary when our government does it today.

People living a 4th turning are clearly not realising how bad it actually is, probably because of a combination of 'the boiling frog' effect, the inability to zoom out because the focus on 'the current thing' and denial of a different worldview. This realisation will only come later when it’s all over and they look back on this crazy time.

The Winner Writes History

We all know and recognise the evil and destruction of WW2. Most of us are probably expecting to get about the same in this 4th turning. We are still far away from that. Aren't we?

The evil stories of the Nazi’s are written by the Allies after the 4th turning ended, while our perception today is formed by the same institutions that cause all the death and destruction. Could it be that the winner this time will write history very differently? Who is going to be the winner this 4th turning and how will history be written?

Our Perspective VS The ‘Winner’ Perspective

Our institutions told us that Afghanistan had to be invaded because scary terrorists were hiding in the caves. Iraq had to be invaded because there were dangerous weapons of mass destruction. We had to do KYC and AML because we had to defund terrorists.

Businesses had to be closed to prevent a dangerous virus from spreading, people had to be injected because it was the only way out, Ukraine had to be supported because otherwise crazy Russians would invade all of Europe and Gaza had to be attacked because they are all terrorists.

What if the winner writes history as follows? The regime murdered 176.000 people in Afghanistan and 150.000 in the Iraq war to enforce the fraudulent dollar standard. Then they starved 500.000 Iraqi children to death with sanctions. KYC and AML rules prohibited billions of people from connecting to the global financial markets which kept them in poverty and caused starvation on a massive scale.

Many businesses were destroyed to monopolise giant corporations and centralise power over the economy. 5 billion people were forced into a medical experiment, which caused massive harm and death, to aim for total control over the people through movement passes and make a lot of money for corrupted organisations in the process.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KP1OAD9jSaI

It’s Probably much Worse Than We Realise…..

Since the globally forced lockdowns and medical experiments, there is an excess death rate almost all over the world. It’s very hard to figure out how many people died, because the responsible people are still in power, and the media is totally ignoring it. Since 5 billion people are injected, a 1/500 death rate would mean 10 million deaths.

This means that if you believe the death rate was over 1/500, this forced medical experiment was about as deathly as the Holocaust. It’s very speculative at this moment, but a 20% excess deaths in most of the world for multiple years reveals that it might be much bigger than that. We will probably only know and realise when the victor writes history in the next 1st turning.

Do We ‘Need’ a Full Blown War Until 2030?

The consensus on the internet today is that we still have at least 6 years of chaos to go and that WW3 in the form of a massive hot war is inevitable. I call the thesis in this article a white pill scenario, because I believe this doesn’t have to be like that at all. I think there are some good reasons why it may not happen.

Firstly, as described earlier, we might have had a level of death and destruction comparable to the last 4th turning already, we just don’t realise it yet. We may be living it already, but ‘wir haben das nicht gewurst’ until the current regime falls and the winner writes history.

Secondly, humanity tend to get less violent over time, which could reduce the amount of blood spilled in this 4th turning. New technologies could change how war is done. It makes a lot of sense that war was done in an industrial way (tanks and guns) during the Industrial Age, while it would be mostly an information war in the Information Age.

Thirdly, all global powers have nuclear weapons this time around. This enforces the game theory that the biggest powers practically can’t invade each other, because this would mean total destruction of both. Could this be the reason that we see all these relatively small proxy wars and biological warfare instead of a full blown global hot war?

Lastly, if you understand that war is generally used as a way to default on a failing financial system, was this done with the massive Covid liquidity injection? This suspicion was strengthened after I heard how macro trader Raoul Pal described how the current monetary situation looks a lot like the post-WW2 era. Have we had our WW3 already in a very different format?

Is Bitcoin a New Institution for the Next Turning Cycle

Bitcoiners generally think that Bitcoin is a tool to help us through the 4th turning. This can be true, but what if is the new institution to replace the central banks in the new turning cycle? What if Bitcoin crossing te Chasm, which is expected to happen soon, is the Bretton Woods of this cycle?

Bretton woods happened at the end of the war and kicked off the 1st turning. It didn’t happen before the war. Is Bitcoin mass adoption marked by the Bitcoin ETF’s also signalling the end of WW3 like Bretton Woods did for WW2? It would be a perfect rhyme again!

Please let me know what you think in the comments and follow me for more!

@ 3bf0c63f:aefa459d

Um algoritmo imbecil da evolução

Suponha que você queira escrever a palavra BANANA partindo de OOOOOO e usando só alterações aleatórias das letras. As alterações se dão por meio da multiplicação da palavra original em várias outras, cada uma com uma mudança diferente.

No primeiro período, surgem BOOOOO e OOOOZO. E então o ambiente decide que todas as palavras que não começam com um B estão eliminadas. Sobra apenas BOOOOO e o algoritmo continua.

É fácil explicar conceber a evolução das espécies acontecendo dessa maneira, se você controlar sempre a parte em que o ambiente decide quem vai sobrar.

Porém, há apenas duas opções:

1. Se o ambiente decidir as coisas de maneira aleatória, a chance de você chegar na palavra correta usando esse método é tão pequena que pode ser considerada nula.
2. Se o ambiente decidir as coisas de maneira pensada, caímos no //design inteligente//.

Acredito que isso seja uma enunciação decente do argumento "no free lunch" aplicado à crítica do darwinismo por William Dembski.

A resposta darwinista consiste em dizer que não existe essa BANANA como objetivo final. Que as palavras podem ir se alterando aleatoriamente, e o que sobrar sobrou, não podemos dizer que um objetivo foi atingido ou deixou de sê-lo. E aí os defensores do design inteligente dirão que o resultado ao qual chegamos não pode ter sido fruto de um processo aleatório. BANANA é qualitativamente diferente de AYZOSO, e aí há várias maneiras de "provar" que sim usando modelos matemáticos e tal.

Fico com a impressão, porém, de que essa coisa só pode ser resolvida como sim ou não mediante uma discussão das premissas, e chega um ponto em que não há mais provas matemáticas possíveis, apenas subjetividade.

Daí eu me lembro da minha humilde solução ao problema do cão que aperta as teclas aleatoriamente de um teclado e escreve as obras completas de Shakespeare: mesmo que ele o faça, nada daquilo terá sentido sem uma inteligência de tipo humano ali para lê-las e perceber que não se trata de uma bagunça, mas sim de um texto com sentido para ele. O milagre se dá não no momento em que o cão tropeça no teclado, mas no momento em que o homem olha para a tela.

Se o algoritmo da evolução chegou à palavra BANANA ou UXJHTR não faz diferença pra ela, mas faz diferença para nós, que temos uma inteligência humana, e estamos observando aquilo. O homem também pensaria que há //algo// por trás daquele evento do cão que digita as obras de Shakespeare, e como seria possível alguém em sã consciência pensar que não?

@ a012dc82:6458a70d

Table Of Content

• An Ideal Environment for Crypto Growth

• Economic Impact of Bitcoin in Texas

• Future Prospects

• Conclusion

• FAQ

The Lone Star State has witnessed a phenomenal rise in Bitcoin and cryptocurrency adoption in recent years. This article will explore the factors behind this surge, the benefits it offers to the local economy, and the potential implications for the future of Bitcoin and the broader crypto landscape in Texas and beyond.

An Ideal Environment for Crypto Growth

A. Energy Abundance

Texas boasts abundant and affordable energy resources, particularly from wind and natural gas. This has attracted a growing number of cryptocurrency mining operations, which require vast amounts of energy to maintain and secure the blockchain.

B. Regulatory Framework

Texas has embraced a relatively open regulatory environment for cryptocurrencies. The state government has shown a willingness to adapt existing regulations and create new ones to support the growth of the crypto industry.

C. Tech-Friendly Population

Texas has a tech-savvy population with a strong entrepreneurial spirit. This has led to the establishment of numerous startups and businesses focused on blockchain technology and cryptocurrency services.

Economic Impact of Bitcoin in Texas

A. Job Creation

The rise of Bitcoin and cryptocurrency-related businesses has created thousands of jobs in Texas. These range from mining operations to software development, financial services, and support roles.

B. Attracting Investment

The growth of the crypto sector in Texas has attracted significant investment from both domestic and international sources. This influx of capital has spurred the local economy and fostered innovation in the state.

C. Increased Tax Revenue

With more businesses and individuals engaging in cryptocurrency transactions, tax revenues have increased. This additional revenue can be used to improve public services and infrastructure in Texas.

Future Prospects

A. Becoming a Global Crypto Hub

As Texas continues to foster a favorable environment for cryptocurrencies, it has the potential to become a global hub for blockchain technology and digital assets. This could help attract even more talent and investment to the region.

B. Wider Adoption of Cryptocurrencies

The rise of Bitcoin in Texas could lead to broader adoption of cryptocurrencies throughout the state and beyond. As more people and businesses become familiar with digital assets, they may increasingly use them for everyday transactions.

C. Challenges and Risks

Despite the promising outlook, there are still challenges and risks associated with the growth of Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies. These include regulatory uncertainty, potential environmental impact, and volatility in the crypto markets.

Conclusion

The rapid rise of Bitcoin in Texas is a testament to the state's favorable conditions and forward-looking approach to emerging technologies. With continued investment and innovation, Texas has the potential to become a global leader in the cryptocurrency space. However, it remains essential to address the associated challenges and risks to ensure a sustainable and responsible growth trajectory.

FAQ

Why has Bitcoin become popular in Texas? Bitcoin has become popular in Texas due to the state's favorable regulatory environment, its thriving energy industry, and a growing interest in alternative forms of investment.

Is Bitcoin legal in Texas? Yes, Bitcoin is legal in Texas. In fact, the state has taken steps to encourage the development of the cryptocurrency industry.

Can I use Bitcoin to buy goods and services in Texas? Yes, you can use Bitcoin to buy goods and services in Texas. Some businesses in the state have begun accepting Bitcoin as payment.

What does the rise of Bitcoin in Texas mean for the future? The rise of Bitcoin in Texas could be a sign of things to come, as more people become interested in digital currencies and more businesses begin accepting them as payment. It could also lead to increased investment in the cryptocurrency industry and further innovation in the field.

That's all for today

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DISCLAIMER: None of this is financial advice. This newsletter is strictly educational and is not investment advice or a solicitation to buy or sell any assets or to make any financial decisions. Please be careful and do your own research.

@ 472f440f:5669301e

As I'm sure many of you are aware already, Israel executed an attack on thousands of Hezbollah members in Lebanon earlier today. At the moment, it looks like Israel successfully waged a supply chain attack on the pagers used by Hezbollah members. Intercepting the devices and placing highly explosive material on the batteries that could be triggered remotely by raising the temperature of the batteries.

To my knowledge, this is the first time an attack of this nature and of this scale has ever been waged. This is a very serious and dangerous precedent that should make anyone reading this think long and hard about the ramifications of the normalization of this type of warfare.

It's not clear to me yet whether this is exactly what happened, but this seems to be where all of the reports are pointing. And when you consider the scale of this operation, it is hard to think of alternative ways that this could have been achieved outside of corrupting the supply chain of this particular pager. Regardless, the die has been cast and remote detonation attacks in crowded civilian areas has been battle tested as an appropriate war tactic.

Not only does this set a terrible precedent for war, but it also begs the question; if they can do something like this with a relatively dumb pager, how much damage could they do with something like an iPhone? How vulnerable are the billions of people who hold smartphones in their pockets, or drive internet connected electric vehicles with lithium ion batteries? How trivial was it for Mossad to gain access to these devices and at what part of the supply chain? Now that this attack has been deemed to be "on the table" how long will it take before others begin to wage similar attacks?

War tactics and their costs are rapidly changing right before our eyes. The war between Russia and Ukraine is showing that low cost drones strapped with bombs can be very effective weapons that can do damage to military equipment worth anywhere between tens of millions to billions of dollars. The Houthi rebels have used cheap drones to completely disrupt the Suez Canal for the better part of a year. The world has only seen the tip of the iceberg in regards to how this type of technology can be used at scale to tip the leverage of power towards those with less financial resources, but a willingness to engage in kinetic conflict. Some of these drones are strapped with thermite flame throwers!

Now that new information has been brought to the market - you can turn pagers and (likely) cellular phones into a network of improvised explosive devices via a software push that increases the temperature of the devices' batteries - it is only a matter of time before others figure out how to do it and begin using these tactics themselves. War machines have never been easier and cheaper to deploy. In a world that is becoming increasingly fractured and angry, this is absolutely frightening. Asymmetric warfare as predicted in the Sovereign Individual is upon us.

As it relates to bitcoin hardware, these attacks highlight that an attack that has been long talked about in the industry but not yet exploited to the best of our knowledge is very real. Supply chain attacks, particularly on bitcoin signing devices that store private key information, have just been proven to be very possible by motivated state actors. If a nation state wanted to somehow "prove" that bitcoin is insecure or figure out a low effort way to do a mass confiscation of bitcoin all they have to do is successfully attack the supply chain of a hardware manufacturer, corrupt the devices, and let them flow to the hands of individuals who believe they are securing their bitcoin in the best way possible. The best way to mitigate this risk is to hold you bitcoin in a multi-sig wallet using a quorum of keys produced by different hardware produced by different manufacturers. Companies like Unchained make this process as seamless and possible and supply chain attacks like the one that was laid bare today highlight why these collaborative custody models are so important. Especially if you are holding a large amount of wealth in bitcoin.

This is a sad day for the world. I'll be praying for peace and sanity to prevail.

Final thought... That was a terrible loss by the Birds.

@ 1123ece2:7d1e00c0

Hey everyone and welcome to Refinery Life Australia.

“Amen and Amen” has been the theme for the last few Sundays.

This series is a study from the Psalms, in which the psalmist gives voice to prayers that resound in our hearts today.

Today we are discussing, A Prayer for Divine Correction.

Text

Psalm 139:23-24 NKJ

23 Search me, O God, and know my heart;\ Try me, and know my anxieties;

24 And see if there is any wicked way in me,\ And lead me in the way everlasting.

Scripture Reading

Psalm 139:1-12 NKJV

God’s Perfect Knowledge of Man

1 O Lord, You have searched me and known me.

2 You know my sitting down and my rising up;\ You understand my thought afar off.

3 You comprehend my path and my lying down,\ And are acquainted with all my ways.

4 For there is not a word on my tongue,\ But behold, O Lord, You know it altogether

5 You have hedged me behind and before,\ And laid Your hand upon me.

6 Such knowledge is too wonderful for me;\ It is high, I cannot attain it.

7 Where can I go from Your Spirit?\ Or where can I flee from Your presence?

8 If I ascend into heaven, You are there;\ If I make my bed in hell, behold, You are there.

9 If I take the wings of the morning,\ And dwell in the uttermost parts of the sea,

10 Even there Your hand shall lead me,\ And Your right hand shall hold me.

11 If I say, “Surely the darkness shall fall on me,”\ Even the night shall be light about me;

12 Indeed, the darkness shall not hide from You,\ But the night shines as the day;\ The darkness and the light are both alike to You.

Psalm 139:23-24 NKJV

23 Search me, O God, and know my heart;\ Try me, and know my anxieties;

24 And see if there is any wicked way in me,\ And lead me in the way everlasting.

Introduction.

A devotional study of the Psalms can be particularly helpful in nourishing our faith and assisting us in our prayer life.

Psalm 139 emphasises that God has unlimited knowledge and also that God is always and everywhere present.

This great psalm celebrates the truth that God is our Creator.

It closes with a prayer against the wicked and a prayer for divine correction as the psalmist faced the present and the future.

1. A prayer for divine probing.

The psalmist was positioning himself on the doctors examination table and asking Him to examine the motives of his heart and the thoughts of his mind.

He recognised that the source of actions and conduct is found in the thoughts and emotions of the inward man.

Perhaps David was motivated to pray this prayer for divine probing because he was being severely tested by his enemies.

He considered himself to be the enemy of those who were enemies of God.

Perhaps he was disturbed by some of his hostile thoughts toward those ungodly enemies of God who were also his enemies

2. A prayer for divine directions.

The psalmist brought his mind and heart under the searchlight of God’s watchful eye, not merely so that he might be informed about himself, but that he might correct his way.

We read in the book of proverbs, “Every way of man is right in his own eyes.”

We also read , “There is a way which seems right unto a man, but the end thereof are the ways of death.”

God spoke through Isaiah and urged the wicked to forsake his way and the unrighteous man his thoughts.

Isaiah 55:7, Let the wicked forsake his way,\ And the unrighteous man his thoughts;\ Let him return to the Lord,\ And He will have mercy on him;\ And to our God,\ For He will abundantly pardon.

God spoke further and said in Isaiah 55:8-9, “For My thoughts are not your thoughts, Nor are your ways My ways,” says the Lord.

“For as the heavens are higher than the earth,\ So are My ways higher than your ways,\ And My thoughts than your thoughts.

A person may be quite sincere and yet be thinking the wrong kind of thoughts and walking in the wrong way.

The psalmist recognised this truth and urged God to reveal to him whether there was some wicked way within his heart.

The psalmist prayed, “Lead me in the way everlasting.”

He wanted to forsake any false paths that would lead to the wrong destination.

He wanted to be delivered from self deception.

He wanted to be saved from inaccurate thought processes and decision making.

He prayed that God would guide him into paths that would be pleasing to God and that would bring peace to his own heart and mind.

Conclusion.

How long has it been since you have had a thorough physical examination?

How long has it been since you have taken your temperature to see if you had an undetected infection in your body?

How long has it been since you looked into your mouth to see if you had a red spot in your throat?

These are some of the techniques that are used to detect the presence of infection or illness.

How long has it been since you brought yourself into God’s presence for a spiritual examination?

It might be a painful experience, but it could be highly profitable.

We would be exceedingly wise if day by day we would pray, Psalm 139:23-24, Search me, O God, and know my heart;\ Try me, and know my anxieties;

And see if there is any wicked way in me,\ And lead me in the way everlasting.

Until next time

Stay in the Blessings

I really want to encourage you to be diligent with your Bible study time, because God has so much more for us than we can get from just going to church once or twice a week and hearing someone else talk about the Word.

When you spend time with God, your life will change in amazing ways, because God is a Redeemer.

Theres nothing thats too hard for Him, and He can make you whole, spirit, soul and body!

You’re important to God, and you’re important to us at The Refinery.

When it comes to prayer, we believe that God wants to meet your needs and reveal His promises to you.

So whatever you’re concerned about and need prayer for we want to be here for you! Or even if you just want to say Hi, you can contact us at www.refinerylife.org

2024 IS A YEAR OF DECISIONS AND OPEN DOORS

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@ 3bf0c63f:aefa459d

Per Bylund's insight

The firm doesn't exist because, like Coase said, it is inefficient to operate in a fully open-market and production processes need some bubbles of central planning.

Instead, what happens is that a firm is created because an entrepreneur is doing a new thing (and here I imagine that doing an old thing in a new context also counts as doing a new thing, but I didn't read his book), and for that new thing there is no market, there are no specialized workers offering the services needed, nor other businesses offering the higher-order goods that entrepreneur wants, so he must do all by himself.

So the entrepreneur goes and hires workers and buys materials more generic than he wanted and commands these to build what he wants exactly. It is less efficient than if he could buy the precise services and goods he wanted and combine those to yield the product he envisaged, but it accomplishes the goal.

Later, when that specific market evolves, it's natural that specialized workers and producers of the specific factors begin to appear, and the market gets decentralized.

@ 6bae33c8:607272e8

I went 2-3 in Circa which hurts because I was 1-4 in Week 1. To offset a 3-7 start, you need a couple 8-2s to get back on pace — a tall order. But I don’t want to get ahead of myself.

Last week was better — I barely lost the Texans-Bears, and the Seahawks had their chances against the Pats. The only really bad pick was the Lions, and it was the one I felt least strongly about. The one thing I’m kicking myself about is I originally liked the Bengals and Cardinals but talked myself out of both. “Sean McVay off a loss” in the former and “Andy Reid with 10 days prep” in the latter. My instincts were fine. Have to trust them now that I’m back into it.

I still haven’t looked at the lines, only the schedule. I want to fade the Pats again on Thursday night instinctively — I don’t think their style is sustainable, and I neglected to consider Seattle making such a long distance trip for an early game last week.

I like the Giants this week — they should have won but for the kicker, and Danny Dimes looked at least like an NFL QB. But Myles Garrett might be in his face all day. I don’t know, probably pass on that.

Bears at Colts — maybe buy low on the Colts, but they’re bad, can’t stop the run and lost DeForest Buckner. Pass.

Texans at Vikings. Depends on the line. Maybe sell high on the Vikings, especially if Justin Jefferson is out.

Eagles at Saints. No strong feeling. Saints won’t be fully priced, usually you ride the streak until they are.

Chargers at Steelers. I’d make this a pick ‘em. Pass.

Broncos at Bucs. Bo Nix is overmatched. Line should be at least 10.

Packers at Titans — too ugly, probably take the Titans, but pass.

Panthers at Raiders — Andy Dalton will give them a lift, Raiders cocky off the big win, but I like Antonio Pierce. Pass.

Dolphins at Seahawks — Backup QB, hard to handicap, pass.

Lions at Cardinals. Lions really out of sync, Goff better at home. And yet — might take the Lions, have to look at the line.

Ravens at Cowboys — Two desperate teams, but the Ravens are more desperate. Probably taking them at -2.5 or better. Expect a pick ‘em maybe.

49ers at Rams — No Deebo, no McCaffrey, no problem. Would lay eight-plus, maybe 10 even given how destroyed the Rams are.

Chiefs at Falcons — I like the Falcons though it’s a short week. Chiefs are tough to go against, though, and both teams won on last second plays.

Jaguars at Bills. There’s something wrong with the Jaguars, Bills had 10 days off. Probably take Jacksonville on a hunch with enough points, but pass.

Football Team at Bengals. I think the Bengals get going, probably destroy them.

@ 3bf0c63f:aefa459d

OP_CHECKTEMPLATEVERIFY and the "covenants" drama

There are many ideas for "covenants" (I don't think this concept helps in the specific case of examining proposals, but fine). Some people think "we" (it's not obvious who is included in this group) should somehow examine them and come up with the perfect synthesis.

It is not clear what form this magic gathering of ideas will take and who (or which ideas) will be allowed to speak, but suppose it happens and there is intense research and conversations and people (ideas) really enjoy themselves in the process.

What are we left with at the end? Someone has to actually commit the time and put the effort and come up with a concrete proposal to be implemented on Bitcoin, and whatever the result is it will have trade-offs. Some great features will not make into this proposal, others will make in a worsened form, and some will be contemplated very nicely, there will be some extra costs related to maintenance or code complexity that will have to be taken. Someone, a concreate person, will decide upon these things using their own personal preferences and biases, and many people will not be pleased with their choices.

That has already happened. Jeremy Rubin has already conjured all the covenant ideas in a magic gathering that lasted more than 3 years and came up with a synthesis that has the best trade-offs he could find. CTV is the result of that operation.

---

The fate of CTV in the popular opinion illustrated by the thoughtless responses it has evoked such as "can we do better?" and "we need more review and research and more consideration of other ideas for covenants" is a preview of what would probably happen if these suggestions were followed again and someone spent the next 3 years again considering ideas, talking to other researchers and came up with a new synthesis. Again, that person would be faced with "can we do better?" responses from people that were not happy enough with the choices.

And unless some famous Bitcoin Core or retired Bitcoin Core developers were personally attracted by this synthesis then they would take some time to review and give their blessing to this new synthesis.

To summarize the argument of this article, the actual question in the current CTV drama is that there exists hidden criteria for proposals to be accepted by the general community into Bitcoin, and no one has these criteria clear in their minds. It is not as simple not as straightforward as "do research" nor it is as humanly impossible as "get consensus", it has a much bigger social element into it, but I also do not know what is the exact form of these hidden criteria.

This is said not to blame anyone -- except the ignorant people who are not aware of the existence of these things and just keep repeating completely false and unhelpful advice for Jeremy Rubin and are not self-conscious enough to ever realize what they're doing.

@ 06639a38:655f8f71

• Some small updates at nostr-php.dev
  • https://njump.me/nevent1qvzqqqqqqypzqrwzmjc5mz0efw9pty8p0r5lhjew789shct452pcgtuac4rc0qq6qqsgvtfguvqv9d64jyeuzfmvzxapz5gfk3wdcltmsq7cq7z775n3fqqan6ne3
• Build a NIP-52 RSVP to Calendar Event Vue / Javascript component which is live on https://nostrdam.com
• My Telegram bot Botstix returns my latest note from my personal relay (using the PHP Framework Symfony for this)
  • https://njump.me/nevent1qvzqqqqqqypzqpnrnguxe8qszsshvgkvhn6qjzxy7xsvx03rlrtddr62haj4lrm3qy2hwumn8ghj7un9d3shjtnyv9kh2uewd9hj7qgewaehxw309ahx7um5wgh8xetzv9ehg6tc9ejx2a30qqs8z8ufkgnpejpalpwep7tzu4j53a5skd2tn6vkpeg3qh7h6as23jcx52ufe
• Fix issue were Nostr-PHP was installed as a dev dependency (which it is not) https://github.com/nostrver-se/nostr-php/issues/61
• Raising sats at Geyser for our Nostr Booth initiative: https://geyser.fund/project/nostrboothbitcoinamsterdam/ 
• Proof of concept async requests with Http/Guzzle using this package https://github.com/valtzu/guzzle-websocket-middleware
  • Code snippet: https://gist.github.com/Sebastix/857478b161af8074a5cfc22af13be54e

@ 1a48e74d:02c0e00f

This is a question that isn't thought about very often but should be reconsidered in my opinion. While I'm not super technical when it comes to Bitcoin, anyone that has been around Bitcoin for awhile can and will notice disturbing trends in the mining space.

What is the first thing that pops into your head when you think about Bitcoin. For me its the 21 million hard cap and censorship resistant money but what does it mean to be censorship resistant? In essence what censorship resistant means is that your transaction can not be stopped arbitrarily by a third party unlike what they can do in the fiat system. In the fiat system there are tons of choke points that can stop your transaction from going through and conducting business with anyone that you want. Banks stop payments all the time for all kinds of stupid reasons.

This is a form of censorship. The government doesn't like you or your political activism, bam there goes your bank account so no you have no way of even conducting commerce in a efficient way. Don't believe me? Here a a few examples of banks and governments censoring individuals and groups they don't approve of.

Chokepoint 2.0: How Regulator Fight Bitcoin With Financial Censorship

[Nigerian Banks Shut Them Out, so These Activists Are Using Bitcoin to Battle Police Brutality]

There are just two examples of how censorship is being used as a weapon to stop people from using their god given rights as human beings to live their lives as they see fit. We know that the fiat world has the power to censor your transactions but what about in the Bitcoin ecosystem?

As a Bitcoiner you would think that you don't have to worry about stuff like that. Well think again. If you have been watching the Bitcoin mining space lately, you have seen the growth of these large companies with a boat load of ASICs and hashrate. As a Bitcoin pleb its hard to compete with that kind of scale, so less regular joes like us can't mine profitably at home thus reducing the decentralization of hashrate to the large public miners.

In addition to less hashrate being controlled by pleb miners, these large miners point there hashrate to the largest pools out there such as Foundry and Antpool.

https://image.nostr.build/fb547485c8414dab4ef0c2997ae10cda89f7d866d255ce4e97613f5d71bf6ed4.jpg

This image is from the minermag.com. What do you notice about this graph? Lots and lots of centralization going on. Between 2020 and 2024 the top three pools went from 50 percent, mind you which isn't great to begin with and now the top 3 pools control 65 percent of the Bitcoin hashrate is scary as hell and is not a topic that I hear anyone on #Nostr talking about. That's not a diss on anyone, just an issue that needs to be more widely discussed as it has wider implications for all of us.

With this much centralization going on in the mining space how easy will it be for governments to target these large mining pools and tell them to start to censor certain types of transactions.

Governments would have this ability because most miners simply provide hash power and leave the construction of what goes into a #Bitcoin block to the pool operators. To be honest I had no idea that this was the case until recently. So basically Antpool and Foundry get to decide what blocks look like, cool right? Bitcoin isn't looking so decentralized now, is it?

It would be rather trivial for governments to tell these pools to exclude things like ordinals, coinjoins or even opening lightning channels for that matter. When you put a gun to their head and threaten them with excessive fines and jail time, guess what these CEO are going to do. Sellout and cover their assess. It happens every time. This is why it is so incredibly important to decentralize mining pools and promote solo mining as much as we can. There are moves being made in that direction with the Ocean Mining Pool and their radically different approach to operating a mining pool.

Ocean Mining only coordinates the payout split and does not payout simply because you are supplying hashrate to the pool such as with the Pay Per Last N Shares (PPLNS) set up that is popular right now.

There are companies that are trying to turn the tide on mining centralization, the one I like the most and is the most accessible to the average person is the Bitaxe miner. Sure its not very powerful when you compare it to the latest and greatest ASIC but it stays true to the Bitcoin ethos of decentralized mining.

Not long ago a Bitaxe miner found a block! The odds of finding a block with these tiny machines is small but hey why not. You have a chance to find a block and you are living up to the ethos of Bitcoin. That's enough for me to be honest.

I hope that this recent trend of centralization can be reversed before its too late. In the mean time spread the word about Bitcoin and Nostr to all of your friends and family!

Bitcoin

@ 3bf0c63f:aefa459d

IPFS problems: Conceit

IPFS is trying to do many things. The IPFS leaders are revolutionaries who think they're smarter than the rest of the entire industry.

The fact that they've first proposed a protocol for peer-to-peer distribution of immutable, content-addressed objects, then later tried to fix that same problem using their own half-baked solution (IPNS) is one example.

Other examples are their odd appeal to decentralization in a very non-specific way, their excessive flirtation with Ethereum and their never-to-be-finished can-never-work-as-advertised Filecoin project.

They could have focused on just making the infrastructure for distribution of objects through hashes (not saying this would actually be a good idea, but it had some potential) over a peer-to-peer network, but in trying to reinvent the entire internet they screwed everything up.

@ 3bf0c63f:aefa459d

Replacing the web with something saner

This is a simplification, but let's say that basically there are just 3 kinds of websites:

1. Websites with content: text, images, videos;
2. Websites that run full apps that do a ton of interactive stuff;
3. Websites with some interactive content that uses JavaScript, or "mini-apps";

In a saner world we would have 3 different ways of serving and using these. 1 would be "the web" (and it was for a while, although I'm not claiming here that the past is always better and wanting to get back to the glorious old days).

1 would stay as "the web", just static sites, styled with CSS, no JavaScript whatsoever, but designers can still thrive and make they look pretty. Or it could also be something like Gemini. Maybe the two protocols could coexist.

2 would be downloadable native apps, much easier to write and maintain for developers (considering that multi-platform and cross-compilation is easy today and getting easier), faster, more polished experience for users, more powerful, integrates better with the computer.

(Remember that since no one would be striving to make the same app run both on browsers and natively no one would have any need for Electron or other inefficient bloated solutions, just pure native UI, like the Telegram app, have you seen that? It's fast.)

But 2 is mostly for apps that people use every day, something like Google Docs, email (although email is also broken technology), Netflix, Twitter, Trello and so on, and all those hundreds of niche SaaS that people pay monthly fees to use, each tailored to a different industry (although most of functions they all implement are the same everywhere). What do we do with dynamic open websites like StackOverflow, for example, where one needs to not only read, but also search and interact in multiple ways? What about that website that asks you a bunch of questions and then discovers the name of the person you're thinking about? What about that mini-app that calculates the hash of your provided content or shrinks your video, or that one that hosts your image without asking any questions?

All these and tons of others would fall into category 3, that of instantly loaded apps that you don't have to install, and yet they run in a sandbox.

The key for making category 3 worth investing time into is coming up with some solid grounds, simple enough that anyone can implement in multiple different ways, but not giving the app too much choices.

Telegram or Discord bots are super powerful platforms that can accomodate most kinds of app in them. They can't beat a native app specifically made with one purpose, but they allow anyone to provide instantly usable apps with very low overhead, and since the experience is so simple, intuitive and fast, users tend to like it and sometimes even pay for their services. There could exist a protocol that brings apps like that to the open world of (I won't say "web") domains and the websockets protocol -- with multiple different clients, each making their own decisions on how to display the content sent by the servers that are powering these apps.

Another idea is that of Alan Kay: to design a nice little OS/virtual machine that can load these apps and run them. Kinda like browsers are today, but providing a more well-thought, native-like experience and framework, but still sandboxed. And I add: abstracting away details about design, content disposition and so on.

---

These 3 kinds of programs could coexist peacefully. 2 are just standalone programs, they can do anything and each will be its own thing. 1 and 3, however, are still similar to browsers of today in the sense that you need clients to interact with servers and show to the user what they are asking. But by simplifying everything and separating the scopes properly these clients would be easy to write, efficient, small, the environment would be open and the internet would be saved.

See also

• On the state of programs and browsers

@ 3bf0c63f:aefa459d

"House" dos economistas e o Estado

Falta um gênio pra produzir um seriado tipo House só que com economistas. O House do seriado seria um austríaco é o "everybody lies" seria uma premissa segundo a qual o Estado é sempre a causa de todos os problemas.

Situações bem cabeludas poderiam ser apresentadas de maneira que parecesse muito que a causa era ganância ou o mau-caratismo dos agentes, mas na investigação quase sempre se descobriria que a causa era o Estado.

Parece ridículo, mas se eu descrevesse House assim aqui também pareceria. A execução é que importa.

@ 361d3e1e:50bc10a8

https://forex-strategy.com/2024/09/17/why-is-it-necessary-to-reduce-the-population-of-the-earth-the-real-reason/

Why is it necessary to reduce the population of the Earth? The real reason!

usa #georgia #population #billgates #wef #politics #climatechange

@ 3bf0c63f:aefa459d

notes on "Economic Action Beyond the Extent of the Market", Per Bylund

Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7St6pCipCB0

Markets work by dividing labour, but that's not as easy as it seems in the Adam Smith's example of a pin factory, because

1. a pin factory is not a market, so there is some guidance and orientation, some sort of central planning, inside there that a market doesn't have;
2. it is not clear how exactly the production process will be divided, it is not obvious as in "you cut the thread, I plug the head".

Dividing the labour may produce efficiency, but it also makes each independent worker in the process more fragile, as they become dependent on the others.

This is partially solved by having a lot of different workers, so you do not depend on only one.

If you have many, however, they must agree on where one part of the production process starts and where it ends, otherwise one's outputs will not necessarily coincide with other's inputs, and everything is more-or-less broken.

That means some level of standardization is needed. And indeed the market has constant incentives to standardization.

The statist economist discourse about standardization is that only when the government comes with a law that creates some sort of standardization then economic development can flourish, but in fact the market creates standardization all the time. Some examples of standardization include:

• programming languages, operating systems, internet protocols, CPU architectures;
• plates, forks, knifes, glasses, tables, chairs, beds, mattresses, bathrooms;
• building with concrete, brick and mortar;
• money;
• musical instruments;
• light bulbs;
• CD, DVD, VHS formats and others alike;
• services that go into every production process, like lunch services, restaurants, bakeries, cleaning services, security services, secretaries, attendants, porters;
• multipurpose steel bars;
• practically any tool that normal people use and require a little experience to get going, like a drilling machine or a sanding machine; etc.

Of course it is not that you find standardization in all places. Specially when the market is smaller or new, standardization may have not arrived.

There remains the truth, however, that division of labour has the potential of doing good.

More than that: every time there are more than one worker doing the same job in the same place of a division of labour chain, there's incentive to create a new subdivision of labour.

From the fact that there are at least more than one person doing the same job as another in our society we must conclude that someone must come up with an insight about an efficient way to divide the labour between these workers (and probably actually implement it), that hasn't happened for all kinds of jobs.

But to come up with division of labour outside of a factory, some market actors must come up with a way of dividing the labour, actually, determining where will one labour stop and other start (and that almost always needs some adjustments and in fact extra labour to hit the tips), and also these actors must bear the uncertainty and fragility that division of labour brings when there are not a lot of different workers and standardization and all that.

In fact, when an entrepreneur comes with a radical new service to the market, a service that does not fit in the current standard of division of labour, he must explain to his potential buyers what is the service and how the buyer can benefit from it and what he will have to do to adapt its current production process to bear with that new service. That's has happened not long ago with

• services that take food orders from the internet and relay these to the restaurants;
• hostels for cheap accommodation for young travellers;
• Uber, Airbnb, services that take orders and bring homemade food from homes to consumers and similars;
• all kinds of software-as-a-service;
• electronic monitoring service for power generators;
• mining planning and mining planning software; and many other industry-specific services.

See also

• Profits, not wages, as the originary factor
• Per Bylund's insight

@ 361d3e1e:50bc10a8

https://forex-strategy.com/2024/09/17/harvard-professor-confirms-these-are-bioweapons-of-mass-destruction/

Harvard professor confirms: These are bioweapons of mass destruction

usa #harvard #research #covid #vaccine #bioweapons

@ ab67c528:51ceb8fb

I have been watching the Bitcoin ecosystem grow up very quickly over the last few years. Personally, I agree with the statements that the Nostr protocol will only help enhance adoption. I find this all very exciting, but as a non-technologist it can often be challenging for me to fully comprehend all the nuances and to make meaningful contributions. Something I do understand well is corporate governance, and maybe this is where I can add some value.

On the surface, corporate governance sounds quite boring (and you’d be mostly right to think so), but from my background in private equity and as a company director, I can tell you that how you structure your company can absolutely make or break you. The board room can quickly become a battleground for conflicting interests, and so you need to be careful about who is invited in and how decisions are actually made.

If you believe that every company is eventually a bitcoin company, it might follow that the low time preference of current Bitcoiners offers their companies a strategic advantage over those yet to embrace the Bitcoin network. Beyond benefiting from price appreciation, many current Bitcoiners are already demonstrating the positives are switching their outlook from a quarterly view to a generational view. However, if the businesses Bitcoiners are building are to last for generations, they need to be purposefully structured to do so.

One a side note: The grownup sharks from the fiat world have also been waking up to Bitcoin, and they’ll eat you for lunch if you let them. So, this is in part a heads-up for the naive among us.

What do I mean by corporate governance?

Corporate governance is the system of rules, practices, and processes by which a company is directed and controlled. Basically, it defines at a high level how the company will be run and how decisions will be made.

The simplest governance structure is the “one man show”. Leaving different legal forms aside, this is essentially a single individual running a business on his own. Freelancers, for example, are free to make every personal business decision on their own. They choose their clients, their hours, their location, etc. This arrangement is fine because there is no expectation of business continuity should the freelancer cease working. Where the “one man show” becomes problematic is when other people are introduced to the business (e.g. employees, investors, heirs) and the singe decision-maker becomes a single point of failure for the business.

Now, I am not suggesting that all small businesses need to go out and form a board of directors and bureaucracy on par with S&P 500 companies’. Measures should be proportional. However, a good starting point for all business owners is to consider their inevitable exit from the business. Do you want to pass down a family business? What happens if the kids don’t want the business? Do you want to take on outside capital and aim for an IPO? Every potential path has different implications for the long-term survival (and future value) of the business. So, it’s important to get the basics of governance right before adding more complexity to the organization.

The Basics

\ I will come at this section from the view of a small, family business with a few employees run by the head of the family. Personally, I thought of a pizza shop owner adding bitcoin to the business when working through this (Does he want to eventually sell the shop for his retirement? Does his kid want to take over the business? Does the family want to find investors and expand?). But, of course, think of this in a way that works for you.

Anyway, this list is not comprehensive, as plenty of PhDs can probably confirm, but from my experience, here are some of the fundamental practices of corporate governance that are pretty much non-negotiable for long-term survival.

1. Identify and eliminate single points of failures

Like with your private keys, if your company is to survive you, you need a plan in place for continuity otherwise all could be lost. Sharing and delegating authority can often be difficult for business owners, but it is necessary for survival. Can basic operations continue without you? Do you have potential successors and are they adequately trained? It is better to build redundancy into processes as early as possible so that roles can be replaced, people can be promoted, and business can move forward as the landscape changes.

1. Build checks and balances into decision-making

Business owners can often be bottlenecks. Operational authority can easily be delegated to individuals within the business. For example, you can set thresholds for basic procurement, so that owner approval is not needed for the tiny and insignificant purchases. Have routine checks to make sure there is policy compliance and no theft/fraud, but don’t get sucked into every tiny detail of day-to-day operations. It’s more important to focus on the bigger things, like performance and strategy. When it comes to making the big decisions, it is also worth having advisors to gain feedback and work through possible outcomes. This could be a board or just trusted individuals in a loose committee, but there should be clear roles for the participants, even if the final decision is unilateral, and push-back should be actively encouraged. Such a venue offers two primary benefits: (1) it ensures business owners have properly thought through important decisions and (2) it can serve as a useful training ground for succession planning.

1. Formalize a vision and strategy

Traditionally, strategies have been thought about in five-year increments in order to achieve a longer-term vision for the company. Without getting into the business school woo, you need a rough idea of when it will be time for you to make your exit and what the company should be at that point in time. Then you backcast what would need to be done to achieve this vision and break that down into segments to be achieved over set time increments. Timelines and tactics will be different for every business, but it’s important that the goals are measurable and clearly communicated throughout the business. These are also clearly very big decisions, so make sure to include checks and balances like in Point 2 above.

1. Review business performance and the strategy

It is simply not enough to have a vision and strategy. Performance needs to be measured. Things change, and you need to know when it’s time to pivot and change the strategy. But how do you know if things have truly changed? Does the strategy need amending or just the tactics? If performance is good, is it because your execution was good or because you got lucky with the business environment? Business owners should be asking themselves (and others) these questions routinely. An annual strategic review of business performance and the overall strategy is probably a sufficient starting point. You want to do it often enough where you can correct course, but not so often that you cause chaos internally. Hold yourself accountable for your stewardship of the business, include your checks and balances in the review process.

Getting the basics right should help business owners sleep at night. Like multi-sig and estate planning, you can rest a little easier knowing that structures are in place to ensure continuity. It doesn’t need to all fall on you. You want to be replaceable.

Getting the basics right will also make your exit much easier. Clear records and processes make life much easier for any successor, especially if they were already active in the business and being trained for the leadership role. Buyers and investors will also demand basic corporate governance. Having it in place already will set your business apart from less “professionalized” businesses and thus make yours more attractive.

That being said, if attracting outside capital is a part of plan, there is some higher-level planning you should consider or at least be aware of.

Higher-level Planning

As with wedding planning, if you take money from others, they will want to influence decision-making. It’s completely understandable. Investors put capital at risk, and so they want to be involved in decision-making to protect that investment. Now, each one of the following points could be it’s own chapter in a LinkedIn influencer's book, but here are a few of the things investors will want from you in a Shareholders’ Agreement or other document.

1. Reserved Matters List: a list of things that require special (shareholder) approval, usually designed to protect the interests of certain shareholders (e.g. minority shareholders).

2. Board Seats: investors want a way to control performance, influence decision-making and steer the company. They often also want to limit the influence of others.

3. Audits: this is an easy was to provide checks and balances on operations and finances.

4. Preemptive Rights: if anyone wants to sell shares, investors often want a say in who gets to buy those shares.

None of these things is inherently good or bad. The devil is always in the detail. However, if terms are too one-sided for any party, it could compromise the long-term success of the company. So, make sure to vet your potential business partners. From my experience, how people behave in negotiations reveals a lot about how the partnership will be. If interests are truly aligned (e.g the business should last for generations), then all parties should naturally land on a fair arrangement.

Final Thoughts

No organization is perfect. Initiatives like @OpenSats are freshing because they are at least trying to be transparent and to set a high standard of conduct. However, transparency is not always enough. You need to actively practice the values. This is what is most important. There are plenty of examples in public markets where poor (and transparent) corporate governance is having a clear negative impact on the company. Private markets are frankly black boxes when it comes to corporate governance, but it is clear that private equity and venture cre now viewed as the new boogeymen of society. Probably not without reason.

I’m bullish on Bitcoiners, and I want to see them succeed the right way – generationally. Hopefully, this piece gets you thinking about how to lay the foundation of your citadel.

A few final random thoughts:\ Always keep your own legal counsel (separate from the business’s legal counsel). Going to church doesn’t make someone a good person; people seek power where they can find it. Be a good steward.

Disclaimer: This is food for thought, not advice.

@ 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

-

@ 271f516a:33235cdd

Our history will be what we make of it And if there are any historians about fifty or a hundred years from now And there should be preserved the kinescopes for one week of all three networks They will there find recorded in black and white and in colour Evidence of decadence, escapism, and insulation from the realities of the world in which we live We are currently wealthy, fat, comfortable and complacent We have a built-in allergy to unpleasant or disturbing information, our mass media reflect this But unless we get up off our fat surpluses And recognize that television in the main is being used to distract, delude, amuse and insulate us And history will take its revenge and retribution will not limp in catching up with us

It may be that he human race is doomed never to learn from its mistakes We are the only animal on this globe who periodically set out to slaughter each other For the best, the noblest, the most inescapable of reasons We know better but we do it again and again, in generation after generation It may be that our empire too is doomed like all those that have gone before it To continue to spill and waste its best blood on foreign soil No matter what we say or do in its place, or think, or believe, or have learned from history But, thank God for us

Band: Maybeshewill Song: Our History Will Be What We Make of It Album: Sing the word Hope in Four Part Harmony Yt: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5XOFy83MoKo

@ 3bf0c63f:aefa459d

Ripple and the problem of the decentralized commit

This is about Ryan Fugger's Ripple.

The summary is: unless everybody is good and well-connected at all times a transaction can always be left in a half-committed state, which creates confusion, erodes trust and benefits no one.

If you're unconvinced consider the following protocol flow:

1. A finds a route (A--B--C--D) between her and D somehow;
2. A "prepares" a payment to B, tells B to do the same with C and so on (to prepare means to give B a conditional IOU that will be valid as long as the full payment completes);
3. When the chain of prepared messages reaches D, D somehow "commits" the payment.
4. After the commit, A now really does owe B and so on, and D really knows it has been effectively paid by A (in the form of debt from C) so it can ship goods to A.

The most obvious (but wrong) way of structuring this would be for the entire payment chain to be dependent on the reveal of some secret. For example, the "prepare" messages could contain something like "I will pay you as long as you know p such that sha256(p) == h".

The payment flow then starts with D presenting A with an invoice that contains h, so D knows p, but no one else knows. A can then send the "prepare" message to B and B do the same until it reaches D.

When it reaches D, D can be sure that C will pay him because he knows p such that sha256(p) == h. He then reveals p to C, C now reveals it to B and B to A. When A gets it it has a proof that D has received his payment, therefore it is happy to settle it later with B and can prove to an external arbitrator that he has indeed paid D in case D doesn't deliver his products.

Issues with the naïve flow above

What if D never reveals p to C?

Then no one knows what happened. And then 10 years later he arrives at C's house (remember they are friends or have a trust relationship somehow) and demands his payment, and shows p to her in a piece of paper. Or worse: go directly to the court and shows C's message that says "I will pay you as long as you know p such that sha256(p) == h" (but with an actual number instead of "h") and the corresponding p. Now the judge has to decide in favor of D.

Now C was supposed to do the same with B, but C is not playing with this anymore, has lost all contact with B after they did their final settlement many years ago, no one was expecting this.

This clearly can't work. There must be a timeout for these payments.

What if we have a timeout?

Now what if we say the payment expires in one hour. D cannot hold the payment hostage and reveal p after 10 years. It must either reveal it before the timeout or conditional IOU will be void. Solves everything!

Except no, now it's the time we reach the most dark void of the protocol, the flaw that sucks its life into the abyss: subjectivity and ambiguity.

The big issue is that we don't have an independent judge to assert, for example, that D has indeed "revealed" p to C in time. C must acknowledge that voluntarily. C could do it using messages over the internet, but these messages are not reliable. C is not reliable. Clocks are not synchronized. Also if we now require C to confirm it has received p from D then the "prepare" message means nothing, as for D now just knowing p is not enough to claim before an arbitrator that C owes her -- because, again, D also must prove it has shown p to C before the timeout, therefore it needs a new signed acknowledgement from C, or from some other party.

Let's see a few examples.

Subjectivity and perverse incentives

D could send p to C, and C acknowledge it, but then when C goes to B and send it B will not acknowledge it, and claim it's past the time. Now C loses money.

Maybe C can not acknowledge it received anything from D before checking first with B? But B will have to check with A too! And it subverts the entire flow of the thing. And now A has a "proof of payment" (knowledge of p) without even having to acknowledge anything! In this case knowing p or not becomes meaningless as everybody knows p without acknowleding it to anyone else.

But even if A is honest and sends an "acknowledge" message to B, now B can just sit quiet and enjoy the credit it has just earned from A without ever acknowleding anything to C. It's perverted incentives in every step.

Ambiguity

But isn't this a protocol based on trust?, you ask, isn't C trusting that B will behave honestly already? Therefore if B is dishonest C just has to acknowledge his loss and break his chain of trust with B.

No, because C will not know what happened. B can say "I could have sent you an acknowledgement, but was waiting for A, and A didn't send anything" and C won't ever know if that was true. Or B could say "what? You didn't send me p at all", and that could be true. B could have been offline when A sent it, there could have been a broken connection or many other things, and B continues: "I was waiting for you to present me with p, but you didn't, therefore the payment timed out, you can't come here with p now, because now A won't accept it anymore from me". That could be true or could be false, who knows?

Therefore it is impossible for trust relationships and reputations to be maintained in such a system without "good fences".[^ln-solution][^ln-issue]

[^ln-solution]: The Lightning Network has a solution for the problem of the decentralized commit. [^ln-issue]: Ironically this same ambiguity problem is being faced by the Lightning Network community when trying to create a reputation/payment system to prevent routing abuses. It seems simple when you first think about it: "let each node manage its own trust", but in fact it is somewhat impossible.

@ 271f516a:33235cdd

Everybody knows things are bad. It's a depression. Everybody's out of work, or scared of losing their job. The dollar buys a nickel's worth; banks are going bust; shopkeepers keep a gun under the counter; punks are running wild in the street, and there's nobody anywhere who seems to know what to do, and there's no end to it

We know the air is unfit to breathe and our food is unfit to eat. And we sit watching our TVs while some local newscaster tells us that today we had fifteen homicides and sixty-three violent crimes, as if that's the way it's supposed to be! We know things are bad - worse than bad - they're crazy. It's like everything everywhere is going crazy, so we don't go out any more. We sit in the house, and slowly the world we're living in is getting smaller, and all we say is, "Please, at least leave us alone in our living rooms. Let me have my toaster and my TV and my steel-belted radials, and I won't say anything. Just leave us alone."

Well, I'm not going to leave you alone

I want you to get mad!

I don't want you to protest. I don't want you to riot. I don't want you to write to your Congressman, because I wouldn't know what to tell you to write. I don't know what to do about the depression and the inflation and the Russians and the crime in the street. All I know is that first, you've got to get mad. You've gotta say, "I'm a human being, goddammit! My life has value!"

So, I want you to get up now. I want all of you to get up out of your chairs. I want you to get up right now and go to the window, open it, and stick your head out and yell, "I'm as mad as hell, and I'm not going to take this anymore!"

Band: MaybeSheWill

Album: Not for want of triyng

Song: Not for want of trying

YT: https://youtu.be/YvBn2Sd1ju0?si=Ei67KynHu-IALwVx

Movie Scene: https://youtu.be/ZwMVMbmQBug?si=a982zC-b0D0e6dFn

@ 271f516a:33235cdd

In this serie the aim is to post some musics followed by the lyrics and some times a few thoughts that as the name said express and looks for freedom and liberty!

Disclaimer: This serie will not focus about any artist or opinion expressed by them!

I hope you enjoy!

music: I Want out artist: Helloween

I want out

From our lives' beginning on We are pushed in little forms No one asks us how we like to be In school, they teach you what to think But everyone says different things But they're all convinced that they're the ones to see

So, they keep talking and they never stop And at a certain point, you give it up So, the only thing that's left to think is this:

I want out—to live my life alone I want out—leave me be I want out—to do things on my own I want out—to live my life and to be free

People tell me "A" and "B" They tell me how I have to see Things that I have seen already clear So, they push me, then, from side to side They're pushing me from black to white They're pushing till there's nothing more to hear

But don't push me to the maximum Shut your mouth and take it home 'Cause I decide the way things gonna be

I want out—to live my life alone I want out—leave me be I want out—to do things on my own I want out—to live my life and to be free

There's a million ways (Million ways) to see the things in life A million ways to be the fool (Million ways) In the end of it (In the end), none of us is right Sometimes, we need to be alone (Alone, alone, alone)

No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no Leave me alone

To live my life alone I want out—leave me be I want out—to do things on my own I want out—to live my life and to be free

I want out

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FjV8SHjHvHk

@ 6871d8df:4a9396c1

A recent court ruling has thrust Google into the spotlight, sparking debate about its monopoly market position. The ruling centers on Google's deals over the last decade with device manufacturers, such as Apple and Samsung, which set Google as the default search engine on those devices operating systems. The court deemed these deals illegal because they argued they entrenched Google's monopoly.

However, public discourse has quickly shifted from the ruling to the societal issues Google has created using its monopoly power. Frustrations are high, tides are turning, and the mob seems to be coming for their head. Many quickly accepted the ruling as obvious, but I remain skeptical whether it genuinely benefits consumers, the US business landscape, or free market capitalism in general. I disagree, not because Google doesn't have a bias problem – it does – but because government intervention often creates more problems than it solves.

The internet's inherent decentralization and openness have introduced new business paradigms and unprecedented value creation on a global scale. We should ask whether this ruling — and its repercussions — helps or hinders innovation on the web or if our disdain for Google's bias justifies their downfall.

Untangling the ruling

It’s important to drill down into the court's ruling, which I believe has significant flaws. As I stated above, the ruling suggests that Google's deals with device manufacturers, like Apple, were unfair. But what should have happened instead? Manufacturers had valuable space to sell, and it's logical they would sell it to the highest bidder. As the market leader, Google naturally won these bids.

The court's decision effectively penalizes Apple for making a rational business choice, restricting its ability to sell this space to the highest bidder. I am having trouble understanding what the court proposes should have happened as an alternative. In their fantasyland world where Apple and Google have the supposed moral clarity to see this would be controversial, what would have been okay?

Should Apple, knowing Google was dominant, have just handed the space to a competitor out of goodwill? Should they have forced users to choose a default or randomly assign search engines each time the browser opens? Apple should only have to think about what’s the best experience for their customers, and this ruling puts that at risk. The court seems to be ignoring the most fundamental question they should be trying to answer:

What creates the best experience for consumers?

It would be one thing if customers were begging for something else, but Google snuffed out alternatives at every turn. Instead, the court suggests that Apple should have deliberately chosen an inferior product to avoid giving Google a leg up. But penalizing companies for making smart business decisions doesn't help consumers—it just creates artificial competition.

Given a choice, how many would still select Google as their default search engine? What truly changes in a world where Apple can't sell this space? Societal habits have Google ingrained as the default search engine. It's a verb that translates to "searching the web."

The consequences of this ruling may affect Apple more than Google. It's taking considerable revenue opportunities off the table without significantly impacting Google's dominance, as most consumers would likely choose Google anyway.

Didn't consumers already have a choice?

What I also find strange about the disconnect between reality and the ruling is that in terms of mobile,

users already have a choice.

The deals the court found problematic never stipulated that Apple had to force or compel users to use Google under this deal; it was simply a default. There was never a gun to users' heads punishing them for changing their search preferences; it's a simple setting switch. If the search engine did not fulfill their needs, there was no obligation for use.

The court's ruling threatens business success by penalizing a company for simply making an obvious business decision. A business decision that never forced or compelled a user into using a specific service, only what showed up on startup. The user was always free to choose alternative services if they felt the default didn't fulfill their needs.

Interestingly enough, very rarely does anyone feel the need to make the switch. Consumers stay because Google is clearly the best product. People aren’t clamoring for an alternative; they have plenty and have never needed to abandon Google in mass.

Has Antitrust ever helped?

Okay, maybe the courts just got this wrong, especially given that antitrust interventions have appeared to "work" in the past.

But have they really?

Take the Microsoft ruling, for example. In 2000, a court ruled that Microsoft had monopoly power in the PC operating system market, ruling that its OS business practices stifled competition. The initial ruling ordered Microsoft to split into two companies: one for its operating system and one for its software apps. However, in 2001, a settlement was reached where Microsoft agreed to share its APIs, allow oversight, and give PC manufacturers more flexibility.

But what if this ruling never happened, and Microsoft won the case? In theory, Windows and Internet Explorer would have been able to continue their dominance unchecked; would the world today look any different?

My thesis is no.

I think the world would look very similar to today, and it's because, in the grand scheme of things, those applications had little relevance in what came next:

Apple ate their lunch.

Burdened by its size and market dominance, Microsoft missed the next wave of innovation: mobile. The mobile revolution vastly improved the computer experience, solving consumer problems in new ways. Microsoft's operating system couldn't adapt effectively to mobile, and despite their efforts, they couldn't maintain their dominance or even gain a meaningful sliver of the market.

If courts didn't force Microsoft to open up Windows, Internet Explorer would likely still be irrelevant today. I haven't owned a PC in over a decade because, for me, Apple makes superior products. The antitrust ruling didn't pave the way for Apple—

Steve Jobs did that by making something substantially superior.

Steve wasn't concerned with building a slightly better browser; he aimed to revolutionize the entire ecosystem.

The mistake is believing entrepreneurs have the right to market share. What is the point in building a product that adds no additional tangible value to one already being supplied by a market incumbent?

You may have the right to compete, but why waste your time if you aren't going to fill a significant gap in the market? Instead, the focus should be on developing products that add substantial value to users, not on refighting battles over markets already won.

Cui Bono?

If the most critical innovators of our generation aren't benefiting from these regulations, who is?

For this, there's no better place to look than the EU, which has taken a much more heavy-handed approach to regulating the internet. But has this regulation helped their business community?

The answer appears to be no. I can count thriving European internet companies on one hand—and even those, like Spotify, Adyen, and Klarna, rely on US markets for a large portion of their revenue. These companies also face little competition from within Europe.

The EU has embraced heavy regulation with often inefficient results. For example, they recently posted a photo celebrating the completion of AI regulation despite having few AI startups to show for it. This irony didn't go unnoticed and quickly became a meme.

https://x.com/ThierryBreton/status/1733256557448630344

However, even if we narrow our focus back to Google, European regulators have already taken significant action regarding their business practices. Over the last decade, they have already imposed a series of antitrust fines on Google:

• Google Shopping Case (2017): €2.42 billion ($2.7 billion) for favoring its own price comparison shopping service in search results.
• Android Case (2018): Originally €4.3 billion, reduced to €4.1 billion in 2022, for illegal practices related to Android mobile devices.
• AdSense Case (2019): €1.49 billion ($1.7 billion) for restrictive contract clauses with third-party websites.

In total, the EU has fined Google over €8 billion ($8.6 billion), not including the additional fines in France totaling $864 million for failing to negotiate in "good faith" with news organizations.

What have any of these cases done to "help competition and consumers" in Europe? Did these rulings improve the experience of the web for European citizens?

The Android case is a perfect parallel to the recent US ruling. In 2018, an EU court found them guilty of abusing their dominant position in search and browser markets by adding it as a default on Android phones. Six years later, what has this €4.1 billion fine done for European search and browser competition? I'll save you the research; it's obviously nothing. There are no new search or browser companies in Europe, and existing companies have barely picked up any ground. Google is still dominant, and users still largely prefer and use Google.

These massive fines have done little to promote competition or consumer experience and, instead, have lined mainly the pockets of lawyers and bureaucrats.

The money is going to the wrong people.

It's hard to argue that the money the EU forced Google to spend on fines and years of legal battles was better spent there than if Google had used those resources for innovation and delivering more value to its customers.

These actions are parasitic.

Like the Microsoft ruling, the recent judgments on Google will likely achieve little beyond funneling capital into useless channels—thousands of hours, billions of dollars, and almost nothing to show for it.

Earning Market Share Through Value, Not Regulation

So, if not antitrust, how are companies supposed to succeed?

This idea shouldn't be controversial, but

overtaking market share from an incumbent — especially a competent incumbent — should be hard.

The Government shouldn't award market share because it seems 'fair'—real competition comes from creating something dramatically better, not just being in the game.

For this to happen healthily, I subscribe to Peter Thiel's 10x principle: a product must be ten times better than existing alternatives to overtake an incumbent. Consumers won't switch for marginal improvements; they require true innovation.

This principle drove Google's dominance in the early 2000s. Their superior search algorithm, which prioritized relevance and quality — primarily through its PageRank system — quickly set it apart from competitors like AltaVista and Yahoo! After surpassing those incumbents, newer rivals like Bing and DuckDuckGo could never reach parity, let alone surpass it by 10x. This reality held even when competitors had substantial backing, as in Bing's case. Google's superior product over a long time is why they won—and deserved to keep winning—the market.

Capital should flow to where it can drive significant innovation and add value, not to companies satisfied with copycat products that are always a step behind.

Market share should be earned, not regulated. Dominance is acceptable if the company keeps up with market trends and doesn't betray its customers. Lucky for entrepreneurs, dominance usually leads to stagnation, where an incumbent gets lazy with their market position. This creates opportunities for entrepreneurs to innovate and challenge these dominant players, which is the better way to dethrone market leaders.

Market incumbents should fall because they got lazy and failed to keep up with entrepreneurs innovating with next-generation technologies.

Taking down the frustrating behemoths

So, without antitrust, how does the market correct people's frustration with Google's dominant position?

" When your enemy is in the process of destroying himself, don't interrupt him."

Google has had one of the most successful businesses of all time, capitalizing on the early Internet era and helping users efficiently find what they need.

However, with recent developments in innovation, cracks are beginning to show. Google has become a giant bureaucratic machine and is slow and sloppy with its product releases. They have also not been shy about their obvious biases and political leanings.

Over the past few years, entrepreneurs have noticed these vulnerabilities.

Regarding bias, companies built on free speech — like Rumble and X — have risen and taken market share, built on providing a superior experience for freedom of expression.

Companies at the leading edge of AI innovation are starting to chip away at their search market share, offering services that provide a 10x experience over traditional web search.

Companies are also using these technologies in tandem. These free speech platforms no longer have to rely on Google because of improvements in AI and LLMs for search.

For myself, companies like OpenAI, Perplexity, and Brave have already taken a significant portion of my search traffic. While I still use Google for specific tasks, most of my queries now go elsewhere. To me, this is a sign of things to come.

Similar to Microsoft not keeping up with Apple in mobile, Google is behind in the battle in AI, with faster, more innovative competitors like OpenAI leading the way. Interestingly, Meta is also a market leader, seeing an opening to chip away at Google's lead by creating their own open-source models. These open-source models have empowered many startups to innovate and build superior search experiences to Google without having to focus on search themselves.

Market forces are already winning this battle, proving that true disruption comes from innovation, not regulation.

Why now?

Since it's so clear to me that entrepreneurship and innovation will be the downfall of Google, as I feel it's happening in plain sight, I have to ask:

Why now?

Why is this ruling happening just as companies are on the cusp of innovating away Google's market dominance in search?

This ruling is part of a broader global trend, where governments in Europe, Asia, and elsewhere are also ramping up regulation on Big Tech. From the EU's Digital Markets Act to China's crackdown on tech giants, there's growing momentum to curb the power of tech companies. But these actions often have unintended consequences, stifling the innovation driving our digital economy.

Politicians know that taking on Big Tech plays well with voters, especially in an election year. With growing concerns about privacy, data control, and online bias, targeting companies like Google allows them to appear tough on monopolies. But behind the political posturing, these rulings do little to benefit consumers or the market, and that's what concerns me.

Rash actions set dangerous precedents, and we must ensure innovation is left to flourish.

Meanwhile, the tech landscape is rapidly evolving. Google's search dominance is already being challenged by companies like OpenAI and decentralized technologies focusing on digital sovereignty. Innovation, not regulation, is already shifting the balance of power. These newer companies are delivering the kinds of breakthroughs that consumers actually want, leaving Google scrambling to keep up.

It may take longer than a draconian breakup from powerful bureaucrats, but the outcome will be better for technology, innovation, and consumers. We need a little patience—Google's time will come, and I believe we are seeing it happen naturally, without interference, right before our eyes.

@ 3bf0c63f:aefa459d

Mises' interest rate theory

Inspired by Bob Murphy's thesis against the "pure time preference theory" (see also this series of podcasts) -- or blatantly copying it -- here are some thoughts on Mises' most wrong take:

• Mises asserts that the market rate of interest is not the originary rate of interest, because the market rate involves entrepreneurial decisions, risk, uncertainty etc. No one lends money with 100% guarantee that it will be paid back in the market and so. But if that is true, where can we see that originary interest? We're supposed to account for its existence and be sure that it is logically there in every trade between present and future, because it's a category of action. But then it seems odd to me that it has anything to do with the actual interest.
• Mises criticizes the notion of "profit" from classical economists because it mashed together gains deriving from speculation, risk, other stuff and originary interest -- but that's only because he assumes originary interest as a given (because it's a category of action and so on). If he didn't he could have just not cited originary interest in the list of things that give rise to "profit" and all would be fine.
• Mixing the two points above, it seems very odd to think that we should look for interest as a component of profit. It seems indeed to be very classifical-economist take. It would be still compatible with Mises'sworldview -- indeed more compatible -- that we looked for profit as a component of interest: when someone lends some 100 and is paid 110 that is profit. Plain simple. Why he did that and why the other person paid isn't for the economist to analyse, or to dissect the extra 10 into 9 interest, 1 risk remuneration or anything like that. If the borrower hadn't paid it would be a 100 loss or a 109 loss?
• In other moments, Mises talks about the originary rate of interest being the same for all things: apples and bicycles and anything else. But wasn't each person supposed to have its own valuation of each good -- including goods in the present and in the future? Is Mises going to say that it's impossible for someone to value an orange in the future more than a bycicle in the future in comparison with these same goods in the present? (The very "more" in the previous sentence shows us that Mises was incurring in cardinal value calculations when coming up with this theory -- and I hadn't noticed it until after I finished typing the phrase.) In other words: what if someone prefers orange, bycicle, bycicle in the future, orange in the future? That doesn't seem to fit. What is the rate of interest?
• Also, on the point above, what if someone has different rates of interest for goods in different timeframes? For example, someone may prefer a bycicle now a little more than a bycicle tomorrow, but very very much more than a bycicle in two days. That also breaks the notion of "originary interest" as an universal rate.
• Now maybe I misunderstood everything, maybe Mises was talking about originary interest as a rate defined by the market. And he clearly says that. That if the rate of interest is bigger on some market entrepreneurs will invest capital in that one until it equalizes with rates in other markets. But all that fits better with the plain notion of profit than with this poorly-crafted notion of originary interest. If you're up to defining and (Mises forbid?) measuring the neutral rate of interest you'll have to arbitrarily choose some businesses to be part of the "market" while excluding others.
• By the way, wasn't originary interest a category of action? How can a category of action be defined and ultimately fixed by entrepreneurial action in a market?

@ 3bf0c63f:aefa459d

Thafne venceu o Soletrando 2008.

As palavras que Thafne teve que soletrar: "ocioso", "hermético", "glossário", "argênteo", "morfossintaxe", "infra-hepático", "hagiológio". Enquanto isso Eder recebia: "intramuscular", "destilação", "inabitável", "subcutâneo", "homogeneidade", "predecessor", "displicência", "subconsciência", "psicroestesia" (isto segundo o site da folha, donde certamente faltam algumas palavras de Thafne). Sério, "argênteo"? Não é errado dizer que a Globo tentou promover o menino pobre da escola pública do sertão contra a riquinha de Curitiba.

O mais espetacular disto é que deu errado e o Brasil inteiro torceu pela Thafne, o que se verifica com uma simples busca no Google. Eis aqui alguns exemplos:

• O problema de Thafne traz comentários tentando incriminar o governo do Estado de Minas Gerais com a vitória forçada de Eder.
• este vídeo mostrando os erros do programa e a vitória triunfal, embora parcial, de Thafne, traz a brilhante descrição "globo de puleira quis complicar a vida da menina!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!"
• este vídeo, com o mesmo conteúdo,, porém chamado "Thafne versus Luciano Huck, o confronto do século", tem, além disto, vários comentários de francos torcedores de Thafne:
• "Nossa isso é burrice porq o doutor falou duas vezes como o luciano não prestou atenção logo thafine deu duas patadas no luciano... Proxima luciano presta atenção na pronuncia"
• "ele nao pronunciou errado porque é burro, isso foi pra manipular o resultado"
• "Gabriel o Bostador ficou pianinho. Babaca do krl"
• "Pena que ela perdeu :("
• "verdade... ela que ganhou, o outro só ficou com o título :S"
• "A menina deu um banho nesse que além de idiota é BURRO."
• e muitos, muitos outros.
• Globo Erra e Luciano Huck dá Vexame, um breve artigo descrevendo alguns dos pontos em que Eder foi favorecido.
• esta comunidade do Orkut, apenas a maior dentre várias que foram criadas.

O movimento de apoio a Thafne é um exemplo entre poucos de união total da nação em prol de uma causa.

@ 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

@ 361d3e1e:50bc10a8

https://forex-strategy.com/2024/09/17/trump-and-kennedy-are-revolutionizing-the-food-industry-if-elected/

Trump and Kennedy are revolutionizing the food industry if elected

usa #trump #kennedy #food #politics

@ 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

Lagoa Santa: como chegar -- partindo da rodoviária de Belo Horizonte

Ao descer de seu ônibus na rodoviária de Belo Horizonte às 4 e pouco da manhã, darás de frente para um caubói que toma cerveja em seus trajes típicos em um bar no setor mesmo de desembarque. Suba a escada à direita que dá no estacionamento da rodoviária. Vire à esquerda e caminhe por mais ou menos 400 metros, atravessando uma área onde pessoas suspeitas -- mas provavelmente dormindo em pé -- lhe observam, e então uma pracinha ocupada por um clã de mendigos. Ao avistar um enorme obelisco no meio de um cruzamento de duas avenidas, vire à esquerda e caminhe por mais 400 metros. Você verá uma enorme, antiga e bela estação com uma praça em frente, com belas fontes aqüáticas. Corra dali e dirija-se a um pedaço de rua à direita dessa praça. Um velho palco de antigos carnavais estará colocado mais ou menos no meio da simpática ruazinha de parelepípedos: é onde você pegará seu próximo ônibus.

Para entrar na estação é necessário ter um cartão com créditos recarregáveis. Um viajante prudente deixa sempre um pouco de créditos em seu cartão a fim de evitar filas e outros problemas de indisponibilidade quando chega cansado de viagem, com pressa ou em horários incomuns. Esse tipo de pessoa perceberá que foi totalmente ludibriado ao perceber que que os créditos do seu cartão, abastecido quando de sua última vinda a Belo Horizonte, há três meses, pereceram de prazo de validade e foram absorvidos pelos cofre públicos. Terá, portanto, que comprar mais créditos. O guichê onde os cartões são abastecidos abre às 5h, mas não se espante caso ele não tenha sido aberto ainda quando o primeiro ônibus chegar, às 5h10.

Com alguma sorte, um jovem de moletom, autorizado por dois ou três fiscais do sistema de ônibus que conversam alegremente, será o operador da catraca. Ele deixa entrar sem pagar os bêbados, os malandros, os pivetes. Bastante empático e perceptivo do desespero dos outros, esse bom rapaz provavelmente também lhe deixará entrar sem pagar.

Uma vez dentro do ônibus, não se intimide com os gritalhões e valentões que, ofendidíssimos com o motorista por ele ter parado nas estações, depois dos ônibus anteriores terem ignorado esses excelsos passageiros que nelas aguardavam, vão aos berros tirar satisfação.

O ponto final do ônibus, 40 minutos depois, é o terminal Morro Alto. Lá você verá, se procurar bem entre vários ônibus e pessoas que despertam a sua mais honesta suspeita, um veículo escuro, apagado, numerado 5882 e que abrigará em seu interior um motorista e um cobrador que descansam o sono dos justos.

Aguarde na porta por mais uns vinte minutos até que, repentinamente desperto, o motorista ligue o ônibus, abra as portas e já comece, de leve, a arrancar. Entre correndo, mas espere mais um tempo, enquanto as pessoas que têm o cartão carregado passem e peguem os melhores lugares, até que o cobrador acorde e resolva te cobrar a passagem nesse velho meio de pagamento, outrora o mais líqüído, o dinheiro.

Este último ônibus deverá levar-lhe, enfim, a Lagoa Santa.

@ 3bf0c63f:aefa459d

Liquidificador

A fragilidade da comunicação humana fica clara quando alguém liga o liquidificador.

@ 3bf0c63f:aefa459d

An argument according to which fractional-reserve banking is merely theft and nothing else

Fractional-reserve banking isn't anything else besides transfer of money from the people at large to bankers.

It has been argued that fractional-reserve banking serves a purpose in making new funds available out of no one's pocket for lending and thus directing resources to productive borrowers. This financing method is preferrable to the more conservative way of borrowing funds directly from a saver and then using that to lend to others because it uses new money, money not tied to anyone else before, and thus it's cheaper and involves less friction.

Instead, what happens is that someone must at all times be the owner of each money. So when banks use their power of generating fractional-reserve funds, they are creating new money and they are the owners – at this point, a theft occurs from the public at large to them – and then they proceed to lend their own money. From this description it is clear that the fact that bank customers have previously deposited their own funds in the banks' vaults have no direct relation with the fact that banks created money afterwards, there's only a legal relation and the fact that banks may need cash deposited by its customers to redeem borrowers claims, but even that wouldn't be necessary if banks were allowed to print their own cash.

@ 3bf0c63f:aefa459d

Thomas Kuhn sequer menciona o "método científico"

O que define uma ciência é o recorte de uma realidade a partir de um paradigma que todos os que entram no campo daquela ciência aceitam como verdade. Pronto.

O "método científico" não é nem necessário nem suficiente (apesar de que ele mesmo precisa pressupor uma série de axiomas para funcionar, do contrário a pessoa ficaria tendo que testar cada sílaba dos seus experimentos e cada um desses testes seria impossível de realizar pois eles necessariamente precisariam de outros conhecimentos prévios etc.).

Por isso - a física teórica pode ser uma ciência embora não faça experimentos; - e a economia pode ser uma ciência embora não faça experimentos (tá bom, existem pessoas que insistem em fazer "experimentos" em economia, mas que na verdade são só uma enorme perda de tempo baseada em estatísticas, mas isso não importa, até essas coisas podem ter algum valor desde que não se as entenda como sendo parte de um método científico); - e a história pode ser uma ciência, por mais estranho que isso pareça, bastando apenas que o historiador junte fatos de antigamente tendo como pressuposto um paradigma, por exemplo, de que existe um sentido da história, ou sei lá (não acho que exista essa ciência da história hoje em dia, me parece que cada historiador está fazendo uma coisa diferente, sem muitos paradigmas além do bom senso); - e a biologia pode ser uma ciência mesmo consistindo unicamente num longo esforço de classificação, e de fato é hoje, já que vê cada espécie e suas partes como frutos de um processo evolutivo cujas bases constituem um paradigma, e nega outras visões, como a teleologia.

• Método científico
• A estrutura paradigmática da ciência
• Um algoritmo imbecil da evolução

@ bf95e1a4:ebdcc848

This is the AI-generated transcript from Bitcoin Infinity Show #126 with Derek Ross, lightly cleaned up for clarity and readability. It might not be perfect, but it's pretty good!

Check out http://bitcoininfinity.com/ for all our books, merch, and more!

Welcoming Derek

Luke: Derek, welcome to the Bitcoin Infinity Show. Thanks so much for joining us.

Derek: Thanks for having me.

Knut: Yeah. Hi. Glad to have you here, Derek. so let's start off with, the TLDR. who are you and why

Derek: Well, it's, my dad liked Bo Derek, so he chose the name Derek. I don't know if we want to go that far back.

Introducing Derek Ross

Derek: I fell in love with Nostr, back in December of, 2022 when Jack Dorsey, discovered Nostr when he was looking for projects to fund and a bunch of Bitcoin developers and Bitcoiners said, Hey, you should fund Nostr and check out Nostr.

So a lot of Bitcoiners checked out Nostr at the same time too, and I found out that I could build Basic services on Nostr, because it was pretty simple to do so and add a few bells and whistles for people. I just really embraced the technology, really embraced what Nostr could mean for the world and started talking about Nostr And now, that's my passion.

I love going around to conferences, Bitcoin conferences, building and growing Nostr, and that's kind of, I guess, brought me to you guys today.

Luke: Yeah, I mean, we're here at Nostriga, basically the beginning of Nostriga. Still the morning has happened. Yes. But, this place is awesome. We had the Noob day yesterday, and you gave. Nostr 101 at the Noob Day, and so I don't think we need Nostr 101 for this audience necessarily, but can you at least do like a broad strokes of the important points of Nostr just so we have a little bit of a baseline?

Knut: And

The Basics of Nostr

Derek: Well, Nostr is decentralized and censorship resistant, and if that sounds familiar, it's because it shares a lot of the same ethos that Bitcoin shares. So I recognized immediately, you know, how important Bitcoin is for the world. Like I've been a Bitcoiner for a few years now, and I recognize that Nostr shares a lot of the same ethos, where it is censorship resistant, decentralized.

You can control your social information similarly to Bitcoin, where you can control which financial rules you decide to run on your own node. So it gives you A lot of ownership over your financial transactions for Bitcoin. Nostr gives you a lot of ownership over your social transactions, so I really liked the correlation to the two that really resonated with me.

it was really easy to understand if Bitcoin is the freedom to transact, then Nostr is the freedom to communicate, and I really liked that relationship. I really recognized that social media is broken and Nostr fixes a lot of that by giving the power and the choice back to users. I really think that that paired with a portable digital social identity that you own and you control for the very first time that you can take with you.

To whatever application, whatever social application you want to use, it's just really unique because you can't log into Twitter, take your social graph and then log into TikTok with it. You know, you just can't do that now. Nostr, you could technically do that. You could have a video streaming app and you log into an audio streaming app or a podcast app or your general social app, and you have the same followers, the same social graph, your contact list, everything is all there.

And that, that's really, really neat. And I think that that's a unique thing that we've never had before.

you explain the social graph in a little bit of detail? Yeah. So your, your social graph is basically who you are social with. It's your, you know, your circle of friends, your followers, the people you interact with on a daily basis in traditional social media that varies from different app to app. You had, you would have to ask everybody. Hey, what's your Instagram account?

I want to follow you there. What's your Twitter account? I want to follow you there. So your social graph is all of your, the people you interact with, the people you follow, the people that follow you. you're able to bring that with you with Nostr, no matter what app you sign into, all of that comes with you.

that's all portable. your social circle, your social experience.

Luke: Yeah. so the key feature of Nostr in that respect is this portability, but this is all still tied down by the, public private key cryptography similar to Bitcoin. In fact, it's the same, cryptography setup as Bitcoin.

Derek: Yes. Yeah. Yeah. So just like Bitcoin, you know, you, you want to keep your private key safe. Nostr is the same way. Your private key unlocks access to your social identity, just like your Bitcoin private key unlocks access to your Bitcoin. So you want to keep them safe. You want to make sure that you're, you're practicing safe nsex and you're, you're storing your, Yeah, like, I like that dad joke.

It's a good one.

But you make sure that key is secure and you're not putting that key into random applications because like I said, it unlocks your identity.

Luke: Yeah. I mean, I think on a practical level, that actually is kind of a scary thing in this early days of Nostr, because first of all, people who are into the Nostr environment early are going to get this extremely strong web of trust with other early Nostr users.

Derek: Oh man, this is a fighting point. Like the Nostr is decentralized. So there's no correct way to say it. I've heard Nostr, Nostr, Nostra, like whatever you want. It's just like the logo. There's no official logo. You know, you can make a logo and you can use it. You can make your own saying and use it.

Luke: Nostr actually seems like the

Derek: say,

Knut: we'll go with no

Derek: I, you know, the next time you're gonna have somebody else in your show, they're gonna say Nostr. It's just how it is.

Luke: Totally.

Trust, Reputation, and Identity

Luke: I mean, the decentralization aspect of it, that's good. But the, so, okay, I think that the point I was getting at is that, yeah, these NSECs are really actually valuable in the sense of that, nothing is going to, from this point onward, if someone loses their NSEC, you're not really going to get back the same kind of network in the same way.

Derek: yeah, that's a valid point. If I spent, let's say, a year building my reputation, building my web of trust, my social graph. And then I leak my NSEC accidentally, I have to start all over again, and that's going to be hard because I essentially lost the last year's worth of work. I lost all that proof of work.

Now, people that know you and interact with you, people you've met in person, they'll immediately, transfer that trust to the new identity, but everybody else that doesn't physically know you, that's going to take time to rebuild that.

Luke: Yeah, and, okay, this is, a point here. Why is it important to have this trust and reputation? Why does Nostr need that to work?

Derek: Well, I think that, in Bitcoin, we say, don't trust verify. But, I think that a certain level of trust for certain social interactions has to happen. You know, if we're constantly afraid of interacting with other humans or, you know, stepping outside our comfort zone and being social with humans because we need verification, it just, paints a negative picture.

It, I think that a certain level of Trust will allow us to be more human, more social because we do have to trust for certain aspects of life. And if we don't want a third party to have to KYC us and we have to play by all sorts of other rules, I think that our reputation becomes our identity.

And that allows us to have all these new types of experiences, new types of interactions. Like if I wanted to sell something on Nostr. I have a lot of people that follow me and they say, Hey, I tried to sell something on Nostr and I wasn't able to do it. I said, Oh, I've sold stuff on Nostr.

They're like, yeah, but you're Derek. And you have a lot of people that follow you. And then I've had people. Come to me and say, hey, can you reshare this item that I'm selling to gain exposure because I have a lot of people that follow me and I say, well, I don't know if I want to do that.

I told a guy recently, I didn't know if I wanted to do that because I didn't know them. He wasn't in my web of trust and I didn't want to promote essentially his item that he was selling. Because I didn't know who he was. Now, if he was in my web of trust, maybe Luke, if you were selling something and you wanted me to, I know you, I I've interacted with you.

Sure. You're in my web of trust. I will help you out. I will reshare the item you're selling. And I think that that type of trust in. You know, human interactions is okay.

Breaking Nostr

Knut: one question I have about this whole thing and that, I still haven't wrapped my head around is like. It's super simple to fire up a cryptographic key pair. So, what's preventing basically DDoS attacks and someone firing up a ton of these and like,

Derek: there's essentially really nothing preventing it. We had a Bitcoin Core developer. Ron Stoner, I believe, recently. He decided to show this exact example. And he mined like four million end pubs and he sent a million of them to follow Will from Damus and just to show that, this is essentially an exploit. maybe, we need clients to start to look at low, I'll call them low value key, accounts that don't really follow anybody that have no credit. interactions, that look like they're spam because ultimately anybody can create an infinite number of new keys. Like that's just, that's kind of how it works.

Knut: Yeah, I know Twitter's way of mitigating that is probably the blue check nowadays, like where they, I love that they kick the celebrities off of their high horses and like now everyone can get a blue check. It's just a small payment per month. I don't know if it's 8 or something, but as I understand it, that's the way to fight the bots because like you need to get above a threshold.

Derek: And that kind of exists, in a way on Nostr. So Nostr has, it's not the same type of verification that you would have on Twitter because nothing is truly being verified except for A website exists that says this person has some way of updating a file on this webpage, it's a NIP05 Nostr address.

Luke: Nostr Improvement Protocol,

Derek: Improvement Protocol, or no, Nostr Implementation Possibility.

Yes. because you don't have to implement it if you don't want to. If you don't want to implement it, you don't have to.

And possibility was a miss, it was proposal I was thinking of, but yeah, possibility. Proposal. Yeah. that rings a bell. . Yeah, so, with these Nostr addresses, like, you can kind of have Some type of verification that somebody exists, but then bots could sit there and just spin up new accounts and constantly just verify themselves over and over and over again. So that's not a really good spam, mitigation technique.

I think the best that we have right now is rate limiting and relays. being paid. It's kind of a paywall. So there's free relays that are public that anybody can write to. But then there is also the paid relays where maybe it's a monthly fee. Maybe it's a one time fee, yearly fee, but it's some type of paywall.

Nostr's Relay Architecture

Luke: Can you lightly refresh the relay client,

Derek: Sure, sure. So Clients are just like your web browser, or just like your email browser, your email client, your email application. They connect to relays that store all of your Nostr data. Relays are just like, servers, they're nodes, and they store all of your events, all your nodes, all your Nostr content.

A client then connects to, All these different relays that a user would be utilizing and downloads or pulls the content from the relays. And then the user sends the content to the relays for other people to pull, to pull down. The relays are the real, real, like dumb part of Nostr. They don't really do anything overly exciting besides store and house information where clients are the power houses.

Clients are the ones that are unique and doing all the, Unique, features and displaying the content differently.

Knut: so is there a risk that it goes the same route as SMTP and email and we end up with your Hotmail and your Gmails are

Derek: centralized servers. Like there's like, what I can remember running email servers, you know, two decades ago and it was like no big deal. And now it's a lot harder. you basically get blacklisted by all the big, all the big companies, for, for being an unknown new host, essentially.

Could we see that? Maybe, but there's a new methodology that clients are starting to adopt that drastically improves decentralization. Right now, we would have to, on the majority of clients right now, for us to communicate and know each other exists on Nostr, we would have to share at least one relay in common.

So that way our content is both sent to and pulled from at least one server that we have in common. So we know each other exists and we can communicate that way. Which means you could then have centralization issues where everybody could be using the same Ten whatever relays in common, and you really don't want that in a true decentralized model.

So there's a new methodology that developers are slowly starting to implement in their clients. It's referred to as the outbox model, and the way that this works is that the client will look at all of the people, or all the end pubs, the profiles that A user is following and go out to that user's relays where they're publishing their content and pull the content down from that user's relays instead of the initial user's relays.

So it drastically improves decentralization because the two users don't have to share a relay in common. The client does all the work pulling the content down from whichever the relays are. So I could, in theory, publish all of my content to just like the Derek relay. And if your client supports this new type of outbox model and you don't use the Derek relay, you could still see my content because your client knows to go to the Derek relay to get Derek's content.

Knut: but nothing is forcing people to implement this model. Right.

Derek: No, no, no, exactly. So that, that's why right now we don't have every single client across Nostr using it, but if clients are built with the, NDK, the Nostr development toolkit, Outbox is supported by default now. Snort, Iris, Amethyst, Coracle, I believe. There's a handful of clients that support it now.

And Dalmas doesn't have it yet. Primal doesn't have it yet, but their developers are both committed to adding it in the future. Once all the major clients are doing it, it's like a social consensus at that point.

And just a quick follow on, on this. I think the distinction, the reason this works in my understanding, right. Is that most of these relays would be anyone can read, but you have to have access to write to it. is that correct? Yeah. Well, yeah. For example, like for my relay, anybody can read from my relay, but only, I only allow my wife and I to write to my relay, but since everybody in the world can read from it with the outbox model, you don't have to specifically tell your client.

Your client will know where my content is and go to my relay to get it for

Luke: right? So a model that actually would in fact work in this scenario is someone signs up for maybe one or two big paid relays, something like that. And that relay just lets anyone read from it. Then this outbox model would just let people pull down from those paid relays.

I think we'll see in the future a lot more smaller community based relays just because that methodology will just work like right now. If you have all sorts of smaller community relays, you have to know where the people you follow publish their content.

Derek: And then if they would start publishing it on a new relay and no longer use that relay, you could lose contact with that person. So this new method will fix that.

Nostr User Experience and Adoption

Knut: It's, I mean, all of this sounds complicated, and I think like, do, does Nostr get the masses, like, and can it be fixed with, improved user interfaces and stuff? Like how? there's always a trade off between usability and security, right? So like, how do you see that

Derek: I like to say that technology works best once it fades into the background. You should not know The protocol that you're using. You shouldn't know how all of the sausage is made. You should just know, man, I like sausage. It's delicious. Like, that's all you need to know. Right? and Nostr needs to, to get to that level.

Are we there yet? Definitely not. relays are important, but maybe in the future, whenever a new user signs in, they don't actually really need to choose the relays that often. Maybe it's just going to randomize. You know, there's a thousand relays out there just randomly picks, six relays or something, a half a dozen relays at random.

So it's drastically increasing decentralization. And it does all this in the background. And then under an advanced setting, you can add your own personal one or something like that. most people won't ever go into advanced settings. they'll just use their app because everything else just fades into the background.

They'll just use it. They won't need to know to go in to add media servers or they won't know to go in and configure relays. The clients will just do all of this for them because the technology stack has improved to the point where this can be done.

Knut: yeah, I'm going to continue on the devil's advocate, like

Derek: Fire away. We need

Knut: attack vectors here.

Ethical Concerns and Open Protocols

Knut: so since it's so open and anyone can develop Nostr stuff, like right now you have the ethos and like all the developers, like, I love that all of these young 180 IQ developers are now, they're not making shitcoins anymore and They're all on Nostr, and like, I love that fact, because that's, that's the right usage of that brainpower.

But going forward, and if this really takes off, or when this really takes off, don't you see, don't you think you'll see, people with not as ethical intentions get into the space and try to like, take over?

Derek: Yeah, I mean, sure. I think that, you know, Nostr is an open protocol. So anything will be tried because it can be tried because it's open. But then we need to look at the free market and we need to look at staying open. If Nostr is truly permissionless, then yes, shitcoiners should be able to come build on Nostr.

I don't want to use their clients. I won't recommend anybody. they should be able to come and try to build something because Nostr is open and maybe they'll only have their shitcoin corner of Nostr and they'll have their own community over here. The rest of us won't be using that.

And that's probably okay. Well,

Knut: It's all about optionality, right?

Derek: that I think is the issue that Nostr really solves is because it's giving people choice. And in legacy social media, you don't really have a lot of choice. You need to use what is spoon fed to you. So if somebody wants to come build, you know, Ethereum tipping or Solana tipping or something on Nostr, I mean, that's,

Cool. Like I'm not going to use it. I'm not going to tell my wife that she now needs to Ethereum zap me, but the fact that somebody could do it would prove that Nostr really is permissionless and open.

Knut: Yeah, this leads me directly to a deeper philosophical question.

Hypernostrification vs. Hyperbitcoinization

Derek: Yeah. Because, in your mind, what happens first? Hypernostrification or hyperbitcoinization? And the reason I ask this now is like, because if we get hyperbitcoinization first, then it might be harder for, for shitcoins Oh yeah.

Knut: But in your mind, what happens first of the two?

Knut: I don't know. Again, we're going to go to a Derekism, another saying I like to say. I like to say that the purple pill helps the orange pill go down. So it's lube.

Derek: I think that we see more Nostr adoption first, and that helps with Bitcoin adoption through just ease of use and fun and frictionless manners.

I really think that, we know the money's broken, but social's also broken too. I don't think, The world is entirely going to move to Bitcoin. we're going to see hyperbitcoinization in the next couple of years, but maybe we'll see hyper Nostrification in the next couple of years as applications slowly start to rebuild and try out Nostr and see how that works for them.

And then from there, they get on boarded to Bitcoin through that.

Knut: So the reason that the web is broken, and the reason social media is broken, is that because of bad money. Like, what's the correlation there? Like, have you thought about that?

Derek: Maybe I like to think back to, you know, two decades ago, if you wanted to run a server out of your house to run your own media server, your own, you know, photos, your own documents, you know, movies, music, whatever you wanted to do, any type of social. you really couldn't do it. Like we didn't really have the infrastructure or the technology to really do it.

It was very expensive to run a server at home. we didn't have point and click installs for the average person. We didn't have point and click, you know, setups for in configurations for routers, we just didn't have the technology. For the average person to do it, you know, if, if you're a, you know, systems administrator, network engineer, sure, you can do all that stuff.

I mean, I was doing that 20 years ago too, but nobody else, you know, besides people in that like profession really did that. Nowadays, you can spend 50 and buy a raspberry pi and Install piece of software on it and touch a couple buttons and boom, you can deploy all these home services.

I think that since we couldn't do that 20 years ago, 30 years ago, we moved the technology stack into these large data centers where. The technology existed for people to run these services because they had the software, they had the high bandwidth, they had the fast servers, computers.

So we moved everything into these data centers and we trusted these large technology companies because they had the resources to do that. But then as technology improves, the infrastructure improves. Software improves and becomes easier. Now we can start pulling that out of the data center and the users can do it at home.

I don't think it's related to bad money. I just think it's related to, you know, we were early, so we moved to centralization because we had to, and now that we've advanced enough, now we can kind of. Recapture that and pull it back.

Knut: Yeah.

Luke: I actually like that argument for this because I mean, it's the gold thing, right? Like the gold physically couldn't do these things, but now Bitcoin does that. so gold centralized into vaults. Because that was just the way that

Knut: And fiat solved that problem.

Luke: exactly. so now maybe what you're saying is that, yeah, at the time, the actual server infrastructure had to be centralized like that.

And now there's a decentralized alternative. I can buy that.

Derek: and here's, a thought on this, maybe fiat money and, you know, our kids take the bill and pushing things forward faster and faster, that led to the computer revolution and the internet revolution. If that had been done in a sounder way, then maybe the internet would have developed slower, but in a more sound way, maybe, you know, technology bills getting published And money printing to fund, you know, so they just build fast and quick and they built too fast. Maybe it wasn't sustainable. The only way to be sustainable was to centralize who knows. It's all related to bad money.

I get it.

Knut: My tip is to not spend 50 on a raspberry pi, but spend a couple of hundred bucks and buy a start 9 instead.

Luke: something that, Definitely has the slightly more resources. And I mean, I think definitely, we, we had, someone asked the question at the noob day about, about running relays and everything. And I mean, it's great that people are actually wanting to do the self sovereign thing with Nostr the same way as they, Do with the Bitcoin nodes and stuff.

And it's great to see that these like node in the box

Derek: Yeah.

Luke: are making that easy for people.

Running Your Own Relay

Luke: So maybe, maybe here's like a, like a practical thing, just like a little bit on running your own relay and being as self sovereign as possible. And Nostr, do you have some thoughts on that?

Derek: Yeah. So I personally run two different relays. I run a relay on my phone just to basically act as a place for my DMs and my offline notes to go. So I can have my, I'm sorry, not DMs. I meant drafts. The other D with drafts for my drafts to go. And then for my offline notes to go, I run a relay in my house for my wife and I to use, as I had mentioned earlier.

And I do a little bit more of a complicated method because I want my relay in my house to be accessible from the outside world. That piece of the puzzle was still a little bit technical because you have to configure some network settings to allow the outside world to connect in to a computer that you're running at home.

So that, portion of it isn't like point and click easy yet. But, if you do have a start nine or you do have an umbral, you can point and click to have a relay at home installed. And then while you're at home on, Wi Fi or if you have a desktop, it's hardwired, whatever, anything that's on your home network can easily use those local relays.

And then if you want to access them from the outside world, you have to know that networking piece that I was just talking about, or you need to use like a home VPN. Or something like tail scale. And then you can accomplish that.

Onboarding and User Accessibility

Knut: so when will my 78 year old mother, fire up a Nostr, keep her?

Derek: I don't know. Maybe does she use social media now?

Knut: Yeah, she does.

Derek: What does she use?

Knut: Facebook, mainly.

Derek: Okay. Well, maybe someday I think Facebook's going to be a holdout on this. Maybe we'll see Elon do it in the next, two or three years, but I think someday we'll see a large legacy.

Traditional social media client turn into a very highly customized Nostr client and users really won't even know it. They'll custody the keys for the user, give you a username and password. They'll do all of that stuff. It'll be a, filtered relay, maybe moderated relay, who knows. But it'll essentially look the same and function the same for users, except they'll be connected to the Nostrverse.

they'll be publishing publicly to Nostr, and they won't even know it yet. So maybe when that happens, then she'll have her keys. Otherwise, I think the onboarding process needs to be improved a little bit

Knut: Mm hmm.

Derek: We can have 78 year olds, actively using Nostr.

I think it needs to be easier.

Knut: Boomer.

Derek: Yeah.

Luke: Well, some 78 year olds are more tech savvy than others,

Knut: yes, most of them are more tech savvy than my mother for sure.

Luke: there you go.

Beyond Twitter Alternatives

Luke: But this actually leads to another point here, is that the Twitter alternatives are really the clients that are the big thing. And actually, I think even people who are in the Nostr ecosystem already, Don't really do much outside of these Twitter alternatives, but there are other ways to display the Nostr information that looks a lot different, right?

Can you go into that a little bit?

Derek: yeah, I think that the reasons that Twitter alternatives are the most popular is because that's what we needed most, you know, and that's what was the most popular use case in the beginning, and it still holds true today, but it's also because These applications kind of manage the key for you, like on your device.

And a lot of this other stuff, a lot of these new unique use cases are web applications, they're websites, and people don't want to just go and paste their private key, their NSEC into a random website, which you should never do anyways. I found out that using extensions is something a lot of people don't use.

Like, with my app, NostrNest. com, so many people just don't use extensions. And you need to use an extension to sign in. The extension manages your key for you on the web. It acts as like your key management signing device. And a lot of people just don't use it. I would tell them, oh, you need to use an extension.

They're like, well, how do I use an extension? It's like, oh, you just need to go here and install that. And so many people just aren't familiar with it. It's really, that was really surprising to me. my point is that the other stuff, while it can be exciting unique and cool, it's not used as much because I think signing into all these web apps is, Very different from the average user.

They're used to using a username and password. They're not used to having to go and install an extension in Safari or install a whole nother web browser on Android or a whole nother app, to access a website. That's weird. it's a little too different. And once that workflow improves, then maybe we'll see, your Twitch alternative or your, medium alternative, blow up.

And become more popular.

Luke: Well, and actually the funny thing is the experience. Once you have the extension set up and you just go

Derek: Oh, it's easy

clients, like frictionless, it's perfect. But once you get over that hurdle of installing the extension, putting your private key into it and logging into that first website where it says, Hey, you're trying to log in and this website wants to know who you are. Do you want to allow it? Yes. you're going to post something and you know, do you want to have this post to your profile?

Yes. Once you understand how that works, then it's a no brainer, but it's just that first technical hurdle that so many people struggle with. But hopefully we Nostr developers can make this easier, in the coming future.

Luke: it's the natural innovation beyond because, a lot of services had been adopting a password lists, authentication model, basically just send a code to your email address. and I like that model. I think that's a lot more secure. You just have to worry about your email being secure

But then you go, one, next level, and it's everything is from that key pair. we are Nostr pilled as far as the use case and what it is. But it comes down to, I think, a little more of the pain points and the usability of it,

Nostr Algorithms

Luke: I will use Nostr, like the, the feed and everything, but I'll also use the, the Twitter feed as well because there's just so much more information on that. and the thing is, my current thing that I would like to see improvement on, or at least my ability to make my own improvements on is the algorithm selection.

and I know you've got a talk, coming up about this, like how to tailor your own algorithm, basically. And so before I give any other specific questions on this topic, could you preview, what you're going to talk about in terms of how to

Derek: Sure. So even though there is no blockchain, time chain, whatever for Nostr, I like to say that Nostr is a proof of work protocol because there are no algorithms at the protocol level. And the content isn't necessarily all the time brought forward for you. You're not spoonfed content.

So that means you have to do the work. You have to put in the work to be social. You have to do the work to get discovered and to discover content. And people aren't so much used to that anymore because they're used to being spoonfed a fire hose of content from your major platform. So with Nostr, we have the ability to regain and control our attention.

And we can control our social experience. So you have to do the work. You have to go out and comment on people's posts and you have to socially engage. You need to let people know that you're here. You have to make your voice heard. You have to interact with people. You have to just be social.

And it's really, it's just an interesting take because right now on these traditional platforms, you can kind of just lurk and have a decent experience because you're fed content. And on Nostr, that isn't the case most of the time, but now we have these, algorithm stores that are starting to pop up, where you can use them if you want to, it's not a requirement, which is, you know, like, maybe on, Twitter or Instagram or something like that, like, the algorithm is there, and maybe you can view a different feed, but It's, not the default.

and right now, like Nostr clients, the default is your chronological feed. if that's what you want, you can always have it. But if you want to do some algorithm, you can choose to do that. And it's open and transparent. So you could go and look at the algorithm to see what it's doing.

And that's just unique. We don't really have that type of user choice. So you can be your own algorithm socially. Or you can use an algorithm that somebody else built.

Knut: All right. so I think this was sort of, at least partially, an answer to my next question. And this is something I talked to Giacomo about, but because of the very reasons you just mentioned, you get very high quality people on Nostr and people who agree with one another and are nice and friendly to one another and you take care, it's your reputational capital and so on.

But. Many people are on Twitter for the opposite reason, that they want to argue with people. So how do we get more assholes on Nostr that are wrong on the internet, you know, and

you know, Yeah.

Derek: but I like to say that these algorithms on these traditional platforms were built to keep us enraged and engaged because if we're constantly upset and engaged, we're going to be using the application more.

We're going to see more ads. Ads are going to make more money. And it's going to fuel them to build bigger, better, more algorithms. We're going to use the app more. We're going to be more engaged and enraged. And it's just a never ending cycle.

I think that sure, if somebody wanted to build an asshole algorithm and just only show you controversial, mean content on Nostr, it's open. You can do that. And then they can have their asshole feed, I guess.

Nostr's Competitiveness

Knut: but, okay, this ties into a more serious point, if the, traditional platforms are optimized for engagement and, you know, to keep you on, how does Nostr take off if it doesn't have that drug,

Derek: Yeah, sure. I think most humans generally, want to be good people and don't want to be bad and negative all the time. It's just that, media really fuels that clown world also is very upsetting to people sometimes too.

And it drives their social experiences that way. another Derek ism is that, we're doom scrolling on other platforms. But humans weren't born to doom scroll, they should bloom scroll, people want to be good, I hope, If you're surrounded by good content, it's going to make you more positive.

If you're surrounded by negative content, it's going to make you more negative.

Knut: yeah, I certainly hope that people will use it more, because it ties into why newspapers that have aggressive headlines and like fearful headlines sell better, because our brains are wired for fear,

Derek: Yeah, exactly. we need to change that. We need to take it back. We need to use Nostr to take it back. we should be selling good stuff, not bad stuff.

I totally agree, Is it going to work in practice?

Knut: we'll see.

Luke: actually, so part of the practical thing on this, you can scroll virtually infinitely on these, Twitter apps. But Nostr, there always is some kind of limit. And let me explain what I mean by that. So in Primal, for example, Primal being the app that I use mostly on the web and the phone now, I do like, some others such as, Amethyst, and I've tried other, clients for the web, great to have the variety, but mostly I use Primal for the ease of use factor.

You got into this, at the noob day a little bit. but the, the two styles of feed that I get there through Primal is basically a latest. a version of latest and a version of, trending and the ways that, so, okay, not to overcomplicate this exactly, but I like, for example, concepts of, your tribe, the people who you follow and who follow you

Li limits based on the web of trust, I think. I think that's good And primal gives you tools to limit. So if you decide you want to see a wider feed, maybe you get the people who your followers follow. And then when I click that, I always get a whole ton of Japanese and Thai stuff like that, right? So, it's funny that it's not quite perfect at that level.

To be able to discover new stuff. Okay. I'm, this is actually going to be multiple questions. So maybe we'll start with that one. But how do you discover new stuff on Nostr that isn't the top, top, top most trending thing? Cause this is another side of the problem. but isn't someone that you already know and already follow.

Data Vending Machines (DVMs)

Derek: so I use my main client is Amethyst and there's several clients now that support these things called DVMs. It stands for Data Vending Machine. it sounds kinda, you know, nerdy but all it is, is an algorithm, really. I mean, an algorithm that is executed when somebody says, hey, I want to obtain this piece of data from you, give it to me.

Some of these data vending machines may be free. Some of them may be like a vending machine where you pay it some sats, and then it gives you the data, the algorithms executed after it gets paid. So I use DVMs to find new content. Like that's part of that whole algorithm to discover content.

There's all sorts of different ones. Like maybe I want to. Find, popular notes of cats or dogs, fluffy friends is what I think it's called. Or maybe I want to find, a trending, or there's a new DVM that was suggested recently. It's really cool. it finds the latest note from people you follow.

So if you constantly are posting in the feed every single day, all day long, and then there's other people that maybe post once a week or something, you would never see their content because they're always drowned out by more active users. So this new data vending machine, like algorithm, it'll go out there and find just the top latest note from somebody you follow.

So it's just a feed of like latest notes and that's a way to find content that you. Might generally miss, and that there's actually one called, something like what, while you were away or find content while you weren't active, or something like that on Nostr. And it tries to find content for you that way.

There's all these unique ways to find content and now that they're showing up more and more clients like no strudel and cortical. Coracle does some really neat stuff on, discoverability, finding content now. And this gets back to building your own algorithm. If you want that and you use these clients and it helps you, you find content and you're right.

Like sometimes they're not perfect. Like maybe you'll see some, content from other languages, you know, but you know, that, yeah.

Luke: It's fine that that exists. It's just not relevant to me at all. I mean, I know there are

Derek: that's a feature, maybe that's a filter or something like that on a client that needs to be built in is only show content from my native, or from my language that I normally post in, or my locale, or something like that is a way to maybe that's a new DVM right there.

If we just figured it out, we need,

Well, how do users find information on DVMs? yeah, well, if you're at, this gets back to the, we're early and Nostr is very technical. They're onboarding on Nostr as a whole generally sucks. It does because it's technical. We need more explanations or we need things to be simpler. And because these things, neither of these exist, there's probably a lot of people that use maybe Amethyst or maybe use.

Nostrudel or Coracle that have no clue what these things are. today, Primal announced their DVM store. Their, algorithm marketplace, essentially. And they do it very, very well. It's gonna be, it looks like it's gonna be kind of front and center for you to choose. And you can configure your feed with just a toggle radio button.

It looks like it's designed really, really nice. And maybe we'll see some of this user experience slip over to other clients, because right now you can get to them on several other clients, but they need a little bit more work, I think, to be, more user friendly.

Luke: Sure, and well, okay, and so, you find this stuff even by asking where to find this stuff on Nostr?

Derek: I can give you a website, I don't know the name of it, but it's something like datavendingmachines. com or nostrdvms. com, I don't remember the exact domain name, but it lists them all and explains what they are and how they work.

You should, we should have some of that in app, I think, to have a better user experience.

Luke: And how difficult is it to make your own?

Derek: to make your own DVM or to use one.

Luke: even, for example, just configure it

Derek: To make your own DVM, you probably need to be a Nostr developer. You need to know how to do some development programming. But if you want to utilize one, it's just a few clicks of a button. The most configurable one that exists today, Coracle. You can build these custom feeds with DVMs, with hashtags, with lists of people, with all sorts of stuff, and you can build a very, very user customized, feed, and I believe Damus NoteDeck is going to have something similar like that, too, where in the future, they'll have these algorithm stores and all these different types of feeds that you're going to be able to very easily point and click and build these feeds, but to build your own feed, Custom DVM, yeah, you should probably be a developer for that.

Otherwise, you'll just use somebody else's DVM that they built.

Luke: Okay, and then, so, I guess the engagement side of it. That's the other way to so called build your own feed?

Derek: right, like if, and this kind of mimics the real world, right, if we're standing outside in the conference hall and you and Knut are talking and I want to interject in the conversation, I'm not gonna just stand there off to the side and hope that you look at me and say, hey, do you want to talk?

I gotta go over and stand there and I gotta join the conversation. And that's really what you need to do on Nostr. if somebody is posting, commenting, replying, whatever, if you want to join the conversation, you need to join the conversation. You need to comment and talk too. And then those people are going to be like, Oh, hey, look, Derek's replying.

Luke: I don't know who he is, but now he's joined the conversation. I liked his reply. Maybe I want to follow him. And it just mimics real world in that. and as I understand it, the primal algorithm is largely reply based, like, the, the trending is, is, notes that get a lot of, replies, and, that, that's, that's important for that algorithm, and that's, this is actually one of these things I would like to personally be able to, to, to toggle, is, is, I don't necessarily look for the things that have the most interest.

replies, maybe I want it, maybe I want, because that's engagement, maybe I want the things that, that have the most likes, or, the most zaps, that one, that one's easy, I like that, that one's usually, pretty available and all this,

Derek: yeah, the mentioning the Primal algorithm for their trending is an interesting topic because over the past year, like when they first announced trending I think their signal indicator might have been zaps and people were doing like fake zaps just to show that this could be gamed and then Primal went back and retooled a little bit and then it was people were doing like spamming like thousands and thousands of reactions and then hitting trending again.

It's an open protocol. Anybody's going to do anything. And then, you know, Primal went back again and retooled and made their algorithm better and, then they, once they, hit a working model that couldn't be gamed as easily, then they published it very transparent. This is how our algorithm works.

You can go review it all on GitHub, yada, yada, yada. And, you know, that's kind of where we're at today. I think that, having an algorithm or having a DVM or something that, You could customize, Hey, I want to see most likes or most zaps or most replies. I think that's cool with it. Cause maybe your signal indicator is different than mine.

And you'll have the one from, the client, like however their algorithm is configured, but maybe you can go in and configure your algorithm just a little bit differently because you like comments, but you want to see those big zaps and there actually is a DVM for top zaps or something like that.

Luke: It sounds like there's something for everyone here, it's just a matter of figuring out how to use it

Knut: It's sort of like the saying with Bitcoin. Bitcoin is for everyone and people pointing out that no, it's not. It's for anyone. Yeah, and that's a better description.

Luke: Well, and actually this is another philosophical question here, right, because still we're going to get people that come into this who aren't going to want to do any customization. They just want to come in and have it work and be like their Twitter.

And then what happens is that the default algorithm of the largest app turns into the new

Derek: into like the default.

Luke: yeah, which also turns into the things that people see and all of this.

Derek: well, right now, as far as I know, there are no clients that the default feed that you get is an algorithm. I think you have to go in and configure that and change that and choose to do that. As long as that stays the case. You know, the chronological, some people might say chronological order is its own algorithm, but as long as the, chronological algorithm is the default one, I really don't see that's that big of a deal, but even if it is, we have user choice, you're right.

If the most popular client would automatically say, Hey, We're gonna switch to using this algorithm. Whenever Facebook makes a feed change, or Twitter would make a feed change, you know people are up in arms and they yell and they complain, but you can't do anything about it. Well, Nostr's different. You, you literally can, you can say, well, I'm going to use a new client.

So I'm curious what would happen if, the most popular client makes a major change like this, they change the algorithm, the default algorithm, would everybody really do what they say they want to do on Facebook? Like I'm never using Facebook again because you changed my feed. Well, they can't go anywhere else.

So they stick to Facebook, but now you could. So would people actually move to another app?

Funny that you should say that, because that's one of the things that made me leave Facebook, right? Because they actually did some social experiment by pissing people off but now you would have a choice, right? Like, so that opens up a whole new

Knut: yeah, and I could take my posts with me.

Derek: You take your content, your social graph with you. so maybe we won't see that, or maybe once someone does it, they shoot some self in the foot and they're like, Oh, we don't, maybe we shouldn't do this.

We should give users a choice.

The Permanency of Online Content

Knut: There's another thing about the social graph and the permanency of it, like how permanent it is, because everyone should know that anything you do on the internet is as permanent as a tattoo. And that's why you can't delete posts from Nostr, like the whole deleting of data is a mirage.

It's not real.

you can delete, but not every relay is going to honor that request. but what I'm coming to here is that, is that going to scare people that their stupid post from when they were 15 years old will be there forever?

Derek: Well, what I'd be curious about is, on legacy social platforms, when you hit delete, Is it actually deleted from a database or is it just flagged as deleted and don't show again?

probably the latter. Yeah, so probably, you can screenshot stuff. Like if you post something on the internet, it's literally never going to go away.

Knut: People just need to learn this. So maybe Nostr is the way that they learn that, because it's more honest.

Derek: it is more honest. Like I can make a request for a deletion from every relay that my content exists on.

Knut: Yeah.

Derek: If I, you know, let's say there's a thousand relays and 999 of them delete the content, but one of them says, yeah, I'm going to archive everything, I'm not deleting it.

Well, then it still exists on the internet, like it just, so that's why we say there's no delete. Yeah, maybe you're right, maybe it is the most honest that you can request it to be deleted, but there's no guarantee that the request is going to be honored.

Luke: Good. Yeah. okay.

Getting the Most Out of Nostr

Luke: So, the principles of Nostr seem to be getting pretty clear here that, it's all about this portability, this decentralization, this new way of doing things, and yes, there is going to be some. Switchover, that people have to do to, really get the most out of it.

But, that said, there's so much cool stuff going on, that once you make that switch, there's this whole new world of it. And, for me personally, the biggest thing that's prevented me from going all in is, I guess I just, haven't got quite The right thing, the right feed, the engagement. I mean, I think timezone right now plays a big role here, because when is everyone actually active?

How do you get involved in conversations? For Europe, it's a bit tough. You almost have to post on Nostr in the European evening to get any engagement with North American users, which at the moment are the majority. At least in the English speaking world.

Derek: That doesn't really happen unless you specifically seek. That on Nostr. So a little hack about being your own algorithm that I've used over the past, year and a half or so is, you know, people used to say it was bad form to retweet your own tweets, but you need to do that.

You need to boost your own content on Nostr. You need to, I do it specifically for different time zones. Like you said, you know, maybe I posted something really good. In 8 o'clock in the morning and then six hours later, I'm like, you know what? There's more people up and out and about in the world right now.

I'm going to boost that because I thought that was really good. I don't do it for every single one of my notes because that's probably overkill. But maybe once or twice a day, if I thought I did something, I think, man, that needs more views.

So this gets back to being your own algorithm. So I would say try that. People aren't going to hate on you for it. people understand that you need to be your own algorithm and bring your own content forward.

Knut: know how Nostr reminds me that I should be more careful on the internet because like sometimes I accidentally like posts that I want to, I want to declick the button and make the like go away, but it doesn't.

Derek: But well, so that depends on the client. So what that would do is that would send a delete request

Knut: yeah, exactly what we talked about before.

Yeah, to all like amethyst supports on, you know, unliking, but it sends a delete request to all the relays saying, Hey, delete that, that reaction. that's the thing. It's, it reminds me of what's actually going on under the hood while the other social media platforms just are optimized for make it simple for the user. Yeah.

Nostr vs Bitcoin

Knut: to take this in a slightly different direction and, a final point here, we've found out why you're so bullish on Nostr.

Why are you bullish on Bitcoin? Like what's, what's your, what are you most excited for in the Bitcoin space right now?

Derek: The most exciting thing about Bitcoin for me is to see these developing communities around the world, like using Bitcoin because it's better than their corrupt money. they're inflated money. And seeing them being able to save for the very first time and being able to essentially like be their own bank, you know, banking the unbanked and just being better money for them.

I think that is so cool. Like I absolutely love watching all these videos of Communities around the world bettering themselves and educating their youth or children on money and finances and seeing the kids being able to have better lives because of this. Like that's the use case. It's cool.

wealth preservation is cool. I understand, sound money Everything is broken, after reading, Safedine's, the fiat standard. thinking about Bitcoin is another element there's a lot of interesting use cases and ways to think about it.

But my favorite is, communities having these circular economies and bettering themselves.

Knut: Great.

Luke: Yeah, fantastic answer and very much aligned with us. And, since we've been, poking at different bits of Nostr this whole time, I also was hoping to end on a, on a optimistic note on the Nostr side as, as well.

Most Exciting Projects on Nostr

Luke: So what are you most excited about that's coming up right now? What do you think is going to make the biggest impact in what you're aware of?

Derek: There's so many really cool projects out there. Oh man. there's probably ones being demonstrated right now that I've never even, you know, wasn't aware of. I really like the ability to have, so the, There's a Nostr app called zap. store. It is a Google Play or App Store, replacement, FOSS, built on Nostr.

It allows us to see, applications that are reviewed and installed by our web of trust. So An application that's really popular and has good reviews by people, you know, people that are in your web of trust versus who knows who they are, if they're bots or whatever on, you know, these other app stores. I think that that's a very neat use case.

You know, we see problems in the Bitcoin ecosystem where apps get removed from app stores all the time, And it just seems that everything is getting choked in this regard. So I think that's a neat use case, especially what's been going on in the Bitcoin ecosystem. I'm really excited to see that continue to grow and get fleshed out.

I think just. Everything being able to be more interoperable on Nostr. I'm really bullish for the next big thing to be built on Nostr and then all these other clients to be like, wow, I want to implement it. And then they all implement it. And that feature then is used everywhere, but there's just so much stuff.

It's hard to be bullish on one thing. Like, you know, Pablo's, Nutsack, Cashew wallet is really cool.

Luke: Yeah. What a

Derek: It takes balls to decide the kind of name. does.

Knut: All right.

Wrapping Up

Derek: So other than Nostr, where can people find you on the internet know what? I got tired of Odell yelling about Nostr only and me being a huge Nostr bull, not being Nostr only. So a couple of months ago I deleted everything. It's all gone. I have no Twitter. I have no Facebook. I have no Instagram, no LinkedIn. I'm Nostr only.

Knut: All right.

Derek: you want to find me, You need to go to Nostr because I don't exist anywhere else anymore.

Luke: any specific things that you're working on that you'd like to tell us

Derek: So the most exciting thing that I've personally done recently is I organized a community led Nostr booth at BTC Prague, where I basically said to the community, Hey, Nostr needs to have a big presence so we can purple pill Prague. Let's have a booth. I want developers to be able to come to the booth, talk to their users, talk about their products.

Getting a booth is expensive. And a lot of these indie, smaller developers, can't afford that. So what if they just donate a little bit of Bitcoin? We pooled those funds together. We had maybe a couple larger, Developers, sponsors, and we pull all these funds together. We have this Nostr booth.

it was great. I think it was one of the most well received booths. I'm a little biased there, but it was busy for three days straight. We had tons of people there all the time. everybody that I talked to absolutely loved it. It was great to see. the whole Nostr community come together for this, essentially an educational slash marketing effort really to help grow Nostr and teach and educate people about Nostr.

I'm excited to do it again. Like I don't know when and where, but I want to do it again. I think it was great and I would love to have the same initiative at some point in the near future.

Luke: thanks a lot for coming on.

Derek: for having me.

Luke: We could probably continue to try and pick your encyclopedic brain on the Nostr stuff, but we'll give you a break. We know you've got another panel

Derek: So enjoy the rest of the conference. Thanks again, Derek. This has been the Bitcoin Infinity Show. All right. Thank you

@ 7e538978:a5987ab6

The LNbits Pay Links (LNURLp) extension has undergone several updates since the release of version 0.5.0. These updates focus on enhancing functionality, bug fixes, and refining the user interface. Here’s a look at the key changes and the community members who have contributed to these improvements.

Key Updates Since v0.5.0 on May 14th 2024

The Pay Links extension has had a number of updates aimed at increasing reliability and user experience:

• Bug fix where some Nostr Zap receipts were not being published to relays
• Increased LNAddress Length: The limit for LNAddress lengths was increased, allowing users more flexibility in creating payment links.
• Fixes and Improvements: Several key fixes were made, including:
• Parsing URL errors and issues with empty success URLs were corrected to ensure smoother transaction experiences.
• The change of wallet for a pay link and the early return in functions were adjusted to prevent potential disruptions during payment processing.
• The handling of empty string content was refined to prevent errors in data processing.

Contributions from the Community

This series of updates is the result of dedicated efforts from our community contributors. Special thanks to:

@dni: For their continuous involvement in refining the extension’s functionality.

@motorina0: Whose contributions have consistently addressed critical bugs.

@talvasconcelos: For improving webhook integrations.

@Opago-Pay: Notably made their first contribution, enhancing the LNAddress feature.

These contributors have played a pivotal role in ensuring that the LNBits Pay Links extension remains robust and user-friendly.

Looking Forward

The LNbits project is committed to continuous improvement based on community feedback and emerging needs. We appreciate the community’s active involvement and encourage more users to participate in the development process.

Download the Latest Version: Update your Pay Links extension from within LNbits in the extensions control panel.

Thank you to all our contributors for their hard work and dedication to making the LNbits Pay Links extension better with each update.

@ fd208ee8:0fd927c1

But who will identify the spam?

Any relay will get hit with spam. That's just the cost of being a server admin. (Of course, we're all going to end up server admins, now that local and private relays are becoming ubiquitous, but I digress.)

The question is more: What is spam? Who gets to determine which events are spam?

That's actually a completely subjective decision, so I think individual npubs should be determining it. nostr:npub1494rtg3ygq4cqawymgs0q3mcj6hucvu4kmadv03s5ey2sg32df5shtzmp0 was heading in the direction of individually-trained, intelligent spam filters, with Minitru, but npubs need more standardized information, to make effective decisions and to calibrate their personal filters.

6 Confirmations

Information about an unknown npub is gathered by

Examining it in isolation * interacting with it (such as in a conversation), * reading what it has already published, * asking it to pay money * requesting it to perform some task

... and by examining it within a group * asking other npubs if they follow it (the basis of WoT) * or asking others if the npub is already known to them (community membership, articles they've zapped, replies they've given, etc.)

All of these things should leave a sort of audit trail, so that the next evaluator can judge accordingly, or ask for more information. Then the confirmations build up, without someone needing to be followed.

Like with Bitcoin. The transactions aren't "followed", they're confirmed.

This npub has had 3 confirmations... 6 confirmations... 10470 confirmations.

You could have 10 followers, but 12000 confirmations, because you manage to meet everyone's minimum, but didn't make the hurdle to the "follow" list.

Hit two birds with one stone

This would also allow follow lists to become friend lists, again, eliminate the need for an additional "favorites" list, and raise the information value of following.

@ 3bf0c63f:aefa459d

Drivechain comparison with Ethereum

Ethereum and other "smart contract platforms" capable of running turing-complete code and "developer-friendly" mindset and community have been running for years and they were able to produce a very low number of potentially useful "contracts".

What are these contracts, actually? (Considering Ethereum, but others are similar:) they are sidechains that run inside the Ethereum blockchain (and thus their verification and data storage are forced upon all Ethereum nodes). Users can peg-in to a contract by depositing money on it and peg-out by making a contract operation that sends money to a normal Ethereum address.

Now be generous and imagine these platforms are able to produce 3 really cool, useful ideas (out of many thousands of attempts): Bitcoin can copy these, turn them into 3 different sidechains, each running fixed, specific, optimized code. Bitcoin users can now opt to use these platforms by transferring coins to it – all that without damaging the nodes or the consensus protocol that has been running for years, and without forcing anyone to be aware of these chains.

The process of turning a useful idea into a sidechain doesn't come spontaneously, and can't be done by a single company (like often happens in Ethereum-land), it must be acknowledge by a rough consensus in the Bitcoin community that that specific sidechain with that specific design is a desirable thing, and ultimately approved by miners, as they're the ones that are going to be in charge of that.

@ 3bf0c63f:aefa459d

Lightning and its fake HTLCs

Lightning is terrible but can be very good with two tweaks.

How Lightning would work without HTLCs

In a world in which HTLCs didn't exist, Lightning channels would consist only of balances. Each commitment transaction would have two outputs: one for peer A, the other for peer B, according to the current state of the channel.

When a payment was being attempted to go through the channel, peers would just trust each other to update the state when necessary. For example:

1. Channel AB's balances are A[10:10]B (in sats);
2. A sends a 3sat payment through B to C;
3. A asks B to route the payment. Channel AB doesn't change at all;
4. B sends the payment to C, C accepts it;
5. Channel BC changes from B[20:5]C to B[17:8]C;
6. B notifies A the payment was successful, A acknowledges that;
7. Channel AB changes from A[10:10]B to A[7:13]B.

This in the case of a success, everything is fine, no glitches, no dishonesty.

But notice that A could have refused to acknowledge that the payment went through, either because of a bug, or because it went offline forever, or because it is malicious. Then the channel AB would stay as A[10:10]B and B would have lost 3 satoshis.

How Lightning would work with HTLCs

HTLCs are introduced to remedy that situation. Now instead of commitment transactions having always only two outputs, one to each peer, now they can have HTLC outputs too. These HTLC outputs could go to either side dependending on the circumstance.

Specifically, the peer that is sending the payment can redeem the HTLC after a number of blocks have passed. The peer that is receiving the payment can redeem the HTLC if they are able to provide the preimage to the hash specified in the HTLC.

Now the flow is something like this:

1. Channel AB's balances are A[10:10]B;
2. A sends a 3sat payment through B to C:
3. A asks B to route the payment. Their channel changes to A[7:3:10]B (the middle number is the HTLC).
4. B offers a payment to C. Their channel changes from B[20:5]C to B[17:3:5]C.
5. C tells B the preimage for that HTLC. Their channel changes from B[17:3:5]C to B[17:8]C.
6. B tells A the preimage for that HTLC. Their channel changes from A[7:3:10]B to A[7:13]B.

Now if A wants to trick B and stop responding B doesn't lose money, because B knows the preimage, B just needs to publish the commitment transaction A[7:3:10]B, which gives him 10sat and then redeem the HTLC using the preimage he got from C, which gives him 3 sats more. B is fine now.

In the same way, if B stops responding for any reason, A won't lose the money it put in that HTLC, it can publish the commitment transaction, get 7 back, then redeem the HTLC after the certain number of blocks have passed and get the other 3 sats back.

How Lightning doesn't really work

The example above about how the HTLCs work is very elegant but has a fatal flaw on it: transaction fees. Each new HTLC added increases the size of the commitment transaction and it requires yet another transaction to be redeemed. If we consider fees of 10000 satoshis that means any HTLC below that is as if it didn't existed because we can't ever redeem it anyway. In fact the Lightning protocol explicitly dictates that if HTLC output amounts are below the fee necessary to redeem them they shouldn't be created.

What happens in these cases then? Nothing, the amounts that should be in HTLCs are moved to the commitment transaction miner fee instead.

So considering a transaction fee of 10000sat for these HTLCs if one is sending Lightning payments below 10000sat that means they operate according to the unsafe protocol described in the first section above.

It is actually worse, because consider what happens in the case a channel in the middle of a route has a glitch or one of the peers is unresponsive. The other node, thinking they are operating in the trustless protocol, will proceed to publish the commitment transaction, i.e. close the channel, so they can redeem the HTLC -- only then they find out they are actually in the unsafe protocol realm and there is no HTLC to be redeemed at all and they lose not only the money, but also the channel (which costed a lot of money to open and close, in overall transaction fees).

One of the biggest features of the trustless protocol are the payment proofs. Every payment is identified by a hash and whenever the payee releases the preimage relative to that hash that means the payment was complete. The incentives are in place so all nodes in the path pass the preimage back until it reaches the payer, which can then use it as the proof he has sent the payment and the payee has received it. This feature is also lost in the unsafe protocol: if a glitch happens or someone goes offline on the preimage's way back then there is no way the preimage will reach the payer because no HTLCs are published and redeemed on the chain. The payee may have received the money but the payer will not know -- but the payee will lose the money sent anyway.

The end of HTLCs

So considering the points above you may be sad because in some cases Lightning doesn't use these magic HTLCs that give meaning to it all. But the fact is that no matter what anyone thinks, HTLCs are destined to be used less and less as time passes.

The fact that over time Bitcoin transaction fees tend to rise, and also the fact that multipart payment (MPP) are increasedly being used on Lightning for good, we can expect that soon no HTLC will ever be big enough to be actually worth redeeming and we will be at a point in which not a single HTLC is real and they're all fake.

Another thing to note is that the current unsafe protocol kicks out whenever the HTLC amount is below the Bitcoin transaction fee would be to redeem it, but this is not a reasonable algorithm. It is not reasonable to lose a channel and then pay 10000sat in fees to redeem a 10001sat HTLC. At which point does it become reasonable to do it? Probably in an amount many times above that, so it would be reasonable to even increase the threshold above which real HTLCs are made -- thus making their existence more and more rare.

These are good things, because we don't actually need HTLCs to make a functional Lightning Network.

We must embrace the unsafe protocol and make it better

So the unsafe protocol is not necessarily very bad, but the way it is being done now is, because it suffers from two big problems:

1. Channels are lost all the time for no reason;
2. No guarantees of the proof-of-payment ever reaching the payer exist.

The first problem we fix by just stopping the current practice of closing channels when there are no real HTLCs in them.

That, however, creates a new problem -- or actually it exarcebates the second: now that we're not closing channels, what do we do with the expired payments in them? These payments should have either been canceled or fulfilled before some block x, now we're in block x+1, our peer has returned from its offline period and one of us will have to lose the money from that payment.

That's fine because it's only 3sat and it's better to just lose 3sat than to lose both the 3sat and the channel anyway, so either one would be happy to eat the loss. Maybe we'll even split it 50/50! No, that doesn't work, because it creates an attack vector with peers becoming unresponsive on purpose on one side of the route and actually failing/fulfilling the payment on the other side and making a profit with that.

So we actually need to know who is to blame on these payments, even if we are not going to act on that imediatelly: we need some kind of arbiter that both peers can trust, such that if one peer is trying to send the preimage or the cancellation to the other and the other is unresponsive, when the unresponsive peer comes back, the arbiter can tell them they are to blame, so they can willfully eat the loss and the channel can continue. Both peers are happy this way.

If the unresponsive peer doesn't accept what the arbiter says then the peer that was operating correctly can assume the unresponsive peer is malicious and close the channel, and then blacklist it and never again open a channel with a peer they know is malicious.

Again, the differences between this scheme and the current Lightning Network are that:

a. In the current Lightning we always close channels, in this scheme we only close channels in case someone is malicious or in other worst case scenarios (the arbiter is unresponsive, for example). b. In the current Lightning we close the channels without having any clue on who is to blame for that, then we just proceed to reopen a channel with that same peer even in the case they were actively trying to harm us before.

What is missing? An arbiter.

The Bitcoin blockchain is the ideal arbiter, it works in the best possible way if we follow the trustless protocol, but as we've seen we can't use the Bitcoin blockchain because it is expensive.

Therefore we need a new arbiter. That is the hard part, but not unsolvable. Notice that we don't need an absolutely perfect arbiter, anything is better than nothing, really, even an unreliable arbiter that is offline half of the day is better than what we have today, or an arbiter that lies, an arbiter that charges some satoshis for each resolution, anything.

Here are some suggestions:

• random nodes from the network selected by an algorithm that both peers agree to, so they can't cheat by selecting themselves. The only thing these nodes have to do is to store data from one peer, try to retransmit it to the other peer and record the results for some time.
• a set of nodes preselected by the two peers when the channel is being opened -- same as above, but with more handpicked-trust involved.
• some third-party cloud storage or notification provider with guarantees of having open data in it and some public log-keeping, like Twitter, GitHub or a Nostr relay;
• peers that get paid to do the job, selected by the fact that they own some token (I know this is stepping too close to the shitcoin territory, but could be an idea) issued in a Spacechain;
• a Spacechain itself, serving only as the storage for a bunch of OP_RETURNs that are published and tracked by these Lightning peers whenever there is an issue (this looks wrong, but could work).

Key points

1. Lightning with HTLC-based routing was a cool idea, but it wasn't ever really feasible.
2. HTLCs are going to be abandoned and that's the natural course of things.
3. It is actually good that HTLCs are being abandoned, but
4. We must change the protocol to account for the existence of fake HTLCs and thus make the bulk of the Lightning Network usage viable again.

See also

• Ripple and the problem of the decentralized commit
• The Lightning Network solves the problem of the decentralized commit

@ 3bf0c63f:aefa459d

contratos.alhur.es

A website that allowed people to fill a form and get a standard Contrato de Locação.

Better than all the other "templates" that float around the internet, which are badly formatted .doc files.

It was fully programmable so other templates could be added later, but I never did. This website made maybe one dollar in Google Ads (and Google has probably stolen these like so many other dollars they did with their bizarre requirements).

• https://github.com/fiatjaf/contratos
• http://contratos.alhur.es

@ cb084639:2f16502a

รีวิวงาน #TBC2024 สไตล์ #Richter

เรื่องมันเริ่มมาตั้งแต่ช่วงที่ทาง

npub1ejn774qahqmgjsfajawy7634unk88y26yktvwuzp9kfgdeejx9mqdm97a5

ประกาศขายตั๋วงาน TBC2024 และได้ยินมาว่า จะเปิดรับ อาสาสมัครมาช่วยงาน ตั้งแต่วันนั้นก็คิดมาตลอดว่าอยากจะช่วยงานแต่ไม่รู้จะช่วยอะไรดี อย่างน้อยก็ช่วยทำในสิ่งที่ช่วยได้แล้วให้คนที่เราไปแทนได้ไปทำหน้าที่ที่ดีกว่า ก็ถือว่าเป็นการสนับสนุนส่วนหนึ่ง ก็ยังดี เพราะภาพจากปีที่แล้วมันลอยเข้ามา เราเองก็มางานคนเดียวไม่รู้จักใครเลย ได้เห็นพี่นิวและคุณนิ่ม ที่อยู่ร้านขายเสื้อแบบยุ่งมากๆ ถ้ามีคนมาช่วยเพิ่มก็คงดี พอดีเลยที่ทีมงานจับเราลงตำแหน่งนี้ จึงมีโอกาสได้มาช่วยงาน และรู้สึกเป็นเกียรติที่ได้ร่วมงานครับ ขอบคุณทุกคนที่ได้มาเจอกันในงาน ผมอาจจะไม่ได้พูดถึงทุกคนแต่ แค่มองตากันก็เข้าใจแล้ว เจอกันเยอะมากๆ ถ้าใครได้ผ่านร้านขายเสื้อก็จะเจอผมอยู่ตรงนั้น มีเพื่อนๆแวะเวียนมาทักทาย พูดคุย มาป่วน 😄😄 ประโยคที่ส่วนมากจะได้ยินเวลาผมทักทายไม่ใช่ว่าชื่ออะไรนะ ผมจะถามว่า กินข้าวยัง กินอะไรหรือยัง มันอาจจะเป็นคำง่ายๆ แต่มันแฝงไปด้วยความห่วงใยกัน บางคนเห็นไกลๆได้แต่สบตาแล้ว พยักหน้าให้กัน เหมือนทุกคนในงานเป็นเพื่อน เพื่อนที่พูดจาภาษาเดียวกัน ไม่รู้จะบรรยายออกมายังไงมันรู้สึกดี อิ่มเอมไปหมด ได้แนะนำสินค้า ได้มองเห็นกลุ่มเพื่อนคุยกันสนุกสนาน มันเป็นบรรยากาศที่ดีเลยทีเดียว เอาเป็นว่าเป็นประสบการณ์ที่ดีมากๆ เมื่อเทียบกับปีที่แล้วเลยแหละครับ ขอบคุณ อ.ตั๊ม แม่โบว์ npub1ejn774qahqmgjsfajawy7634unk88y26yktvwuzp9kfgdeejx9mqdm97a5

ที่ให้โอกาสได้ร่วมงาน ขอบคุณเฮียโต้ง สำหรับหนังสือและขนมแสนอร่อยที่เอามาให้เราได้จับจ่ายกัน ขอบคุณ เพื่อนทุกคนที่เข้ามาทักทายกัน ขอบคุณลูกพี่สมนึกหัวหน้าแก๊งค์ร้านเสื้อ พี่แองจี้ แฟนพี่สมนึก แฟนพี่ตั้ม และทีมงานน้องเอิ้น ที่ช่วยขายของ รักทุกคน

siamstr #siamstrog #nostr

@ 3bf0c63f:aefa459d

Gold is not useless

If there's something all common people believe about gold is that it is useless[^1]. Austrian economists and libertarians in general that argue against central banks or defend a primitive gold standard are often charged with that accusation: that gold is useless, it has no use in the industry, it serves no purpose besides ornamental, so it is a silly commodity, a luxurious one, and that it would be almost immoral to have such a thing in a so central position in an economy such as the position of money.

I've seen libertarians in general argue such things as: "it is used in some dental operations", which means people make dental prosthesis of gold, something that fits in same category of jewelry, I would say.

There's also the argument of electronic connectors. That's something that appears to be true, but wouldn't suffice the anti-gold arguments. The fact remains that, besides its uses as money -- because gold is still considered to be a form money even now that it doesn't have that position formally in any country (otherwise it wouldn't be considered as an "investment" or "value store" everywhere) -- gold is used mainly for ornamental purposes[^2].

All that is a hassle for libertarians in general. Even the Mises Regression Theory wouldn't solve that problem of people skeptical of gold due to its immoral nature. That problem is solved once you read what is written in the chapter 17 from Richard Cantillon's Essay on Economic Theory^3 (page 103):

Gold and silver are capable of serving not only the same purpose as tin and copper, but also most of the purposes of lead and iron. They have this further advantage over other metals in that they are not consumed by fire and are so durable that they may be considered permanent. It is not surprising, therefore, that the men who found the other metals useful, valued gold and silver even before they were used in exchange.

So gold is indeed useful. Everybody should already know that. You can even do forks and spoons with gold. You can do furniture with gold, and many other useful stuff. As soon as you grasp this, gold is useful again. It is an useful commodity.

Answering the next question becomes easy: why isn't anyone making gold forks anywhere? The questioner already knows the answer: because it is too expensive for that.

And now the Regression Theory comes with its full force: why is it expensive? Because it has gained a lot of value in the process of becoming money. The value of gold as money is much greater than as a metal used in fork production.

---

[^1]: see http://www.salon.com/2014/02/02/ignore_sean_hannity_gold_is_useless_partner/ or all answers on https://www.quora.com/Why-is-gold-considered-so-precious-and-why-does-it-have-such-high-prices. [^2]: this https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gold#Modern_applications section on the Wikipedia page for gold is revealing.

@ ffbcb706:b0574044

{"name":"Jurjen de Vries","score":0}

@ 64acd5df:8f2159da

@ 3bf0c63f:aefa459d

Filemap

filemap solves the problem of sending and receiving files to and from non-tech people when you don't have a text communication channel with them.

Imagine you want to send files to your grandfather, or you don't use Facebook and your younger cousin who only uses Facebook and doesn't know what is email wants to send you some pictures, it's pretty hard to get a file-sharing channel between people if they're not in the same network. If even the people have a way to upload the files to some hosting service and then share the link everything would still work, but you're not going to write somehostingservice.com/wHr4y7vFGh0 to your grandfather -- or expect your cousin to do that for you and send you an SMS with dozens of those links.

Solution: * Upload your files to https://filemap.xyz/ (you can either upload directly or share links to things already uploaded -- or even links to pages) and pin them to your grandfather's house address; then tell your grandfather to open https://filemap.xyz/ and look for his address. Done. * Tell your younger cousin to visit filemap.xyz and upload all the files to his address, later you open the site and look for his address. There are your files.

---

Initially this used ipfs-dropzone, but IPFS is broken, os I migrated to WebTorrent, but that required the file sender to be online hosting its own file and the entire idea of this service was to make something easy, so I migrated to Firebase Hosting, which is also terrible and has a broken API, but at least is capable of hosting files. Should have used something like S3.

• https://github.com/fiatjaf/filemap.xyz
• https://filemap.xyz/

@ 6bae33c8:607272e8

After the Sunday night debacle I was braced for the worst, but in the end, I have to give this game an eight out of 10. I don’t mean in quality (LOL), just for advancing my interests. I had the Falcons plus 6.5, and why it looked potentially dicey for a second at the end when the Eagles were chewing clock, up three, in the red zone, it was the right side for most of the game.

I also had Drake London going, and while it was dire for a while, the game-winning TD catch salvaged his day. DeVonta Smith produced all game for me too, and even Dallas Goedert got a couple extra points on the Eagles final drive before the Hurts pick. Yes, Goedert’s 6.8 with A.J. Brown out was disappointing, but he’s a tight end, and we now know that’s not a position that ever produces any scoring, no matter how high you draft them. Punting TE in the Primetime was arguably the best decision I made all draft season.

• Bijan Robinson is an awfully smooth runner, but he doesn’t look as explosive or quick as say Kenneth Walker or De’Von Achane. I just don’t get the sense he’s about to take it to the house. (I’m sure he’ll prove me wrong next week with two long TDs), but I see a glider with vision more than a pure speed back. Nothing wrong with this skill set though. Tyler Allgeier also looked solid and saw nine carries to Robinson’s 14.

• Darnell Mooney led the Falcons in receiving thanks to a long TD on which he stopped on a dime and shed the defender. It’s a pretty narrow tree in Atlanta, so Mooney should have value as Kirk Cousins warms up to the new team.

• Cousins was fine and obviously delivered on the crucial drive. Something is just a little off about all offenses league wide though.

• Jalen Hurts hogged all the production as usual, vulturing the goal-line carry from Saquon Barkley. He made a couple nice runs, extending plays for first downs. He’s a decent quarterback, great for fantasy, but ultimately limited. A top QB drives the Eagles into FG range at the end, doesn’t throw that pick.

• Barkley looked good again and got plenty of usage (22 carries, five targets.)

• DeVonta Smith got his, but he had to catch a few passes in traffic. No one else on the Eagles made a serious impact, either. Just another offense that’s not in sync, though missing Brown was likely a big factor.

• Again the “40-minute” edited version had ridiculous replays of ordinary plays. They seem to love “stuffs”, i.e., tackles behind the line of scrimmage on ball carriers. They will show the stuff from three different angles like it’s the assassination of JFK.

@ 3bf0c63f:aefa459d

The illusion of checks and balances

The website history.com has a list of some of the most important "checks and balances" put in place by the United States Constitution. Here are some of them and how they are not real checks, they're flawed and easily bypassed by malicious peers that manage to enter the network.

The president (head of the executive branch) serves as commander in chief of the military forces, but Congress (legislative branch) appropriates funds for the military and votes to declare war.

As it has happened multiple times, the United States has engaged in many undeclared wars -- and many other military encounters that don't get enough media coverage and weren't even formally acknowledged by the Congress.

Congress has the power of the purse, as it controls the money used to fund any executive actions.

There's a separate power called Federal Reserve which is more-or-less under the influence of the executive branch that is controlled by a single man and has the power of creating unlimited money. It was softly abused by the executive branch since its creation, but since 2008 it has been increasingly having its scope expanded from just influencing the banking sector to also directly using its money to buy all sorts of things and influence all sorts of markets and other actors.

Veto power. Once Congress has passed a bill, the president has the power to veto that bill. In turn, Congress can override a regular presidential veto by a two-thirds vote of both houses.

If you imagine that both the executive and the legislative are 100% dedicated to go against each other the president could veto all bills, but then the legislative could enact them all anyway. Congress has the absolute power here (which can be justified by fact that the congress itself is split into multiple voters, but still this "veto" rule seems more like a gimmick to obscure the process than any actual check).

The Supreme Court and other federal courts (judicial branch) can declare laws or presidential actions unconstitutional, in a process known as judicial review.

This rule gives absolute power to the Supreme Court over any matter. It can use their own personal judgement to veto any bill, cancel any action by the executive, reinterpret any existing law in any manner. There's no check against bad interpretations or judgements, so any absurd thing must be accepted. This should be obvious, and yet the entire system which most people believe to be "checked" is actually dependent on the good will and sanity of the judicial branch.

In turn, the president checks the judiciary through the power of appointment, which can be used to change the direction of the federal courts

If the president and congress are being attacked by the judicial power, this isn't of much help as its effects are very long term. On the other hand, a president can single-handedly and arbitrarily use this rule to slowly poison the judicial system such that will turn malicious for the rest of the system after some time.

By passing amendments to the Constitution, Congress can effectively check the decisions of the Supreme Court.

What is written in the Constitution can be easily ignored or misread by the members of the Supreme Court without any way for these interpretations to be checked or reverted. Basically the Supreme Court has absolute power over all things if we consider this.

Congress (considered the branch of government closest to the people) can impeach both members of the executive and judicial branches.

Again (like in the presidential veto rule), this gives the congress unlimited power. There are no checks here -- except of course the fact that the congress is composed by multiple different voting heads of which a majority has to agree for the congress to do anything, which is the only thing preventing overabuse of this rule.

---

As shown above, most rules that compose the "checks and balances" system can be abused and if given enough time they will. They aren't real checks.

Ultimately, the stability and decency of a democracy relies on the majority rule (so congress votes are never concentrated in dictatorial measures) and the common sense of the powerful people (president and judges).

There probably hasn't been a single year in any democracy in which one of these powers didn't abused or violated one of the rules, but still in most cases the overall system stays in place because of the general culture, splitted views about most issues, overall common sense and fear of public shame.

The checks and balances system itself is an illusion. All the complex "democracy" construct depends on the goodwill of all the participants and have only worked so far (when it did) by miracle and by the power of human cooperation and love.

@ 3bf0c63f:aefa459d

jiq

When someone created jiq claiming it had "jq queries" I went to inspect and realized it didn't, it just had a poor simple JSON query language that implemented 1% of all jq features, so I forked it and plugged jq directly into it, and renamed to jiq.

After some comments on issues in the original repository from people complaining about lack of jq compatibility it got a ton of unexpected users, was even packaged to ArchLinux.

• https://github.com/fiatjaf/jiq

@ 76ea2cfb:60905955

Bitcoin representa para el dinero y la propiedad lo que Internet significó para la información: una disrupción fundamental que desafía los cimientos del Estado-nación tradicional, erosionando las estructuras basadas en el mundo físico y dando paso a una nueva realidad digital. En este nuevo paradigma, Bitcoin emerge como la primera forma de propiedad digital absoluta en la historia de la humanidad, prometiendo redefinir no solo nuestras transacciones económicas, sino también nuestra comprensión del valor, la confianza y la soberanía individual.

Esta fase es importante porque nos revelará progresivamente cómo puede Bitcoin llegar a convertirse en un nuevo activo monetario con cualidades hasta ahora nunca vistas en la Historia de la Humanidad

Brecha generacional y conceptual

Al igual que las personas del siglo XIX no podían concebir que enormes máquinas de acero pudieran en el futuro surcar los cielos, muchos individuos educados bajo el paradigma del mundo físico encuentran difícil, si no imposible, comprender plenamente el alcance y las implicaciones presentes y futuras de Bitcoin como propiedad digital absoluta y como dinero. Esta brecha conceptual no es meramente una cuestión de edad o resistencia al cambio, sino un profundo desafío cognitivo que requiere una reorientación fundamental de nuestros modelos mentales sobre el dinero, el valor y la propiedad en la era digital.

Bitcoin: La primera propiedad digital absoluta

Bitcoin se distingue como la primera y única forma de propiedad digital verdaderamente absoluta por varias razones:

1. Escasez digital verificable: Con un suministro máximo de 21 millones de unidades, Bitcoin introduce por primera vez el concepto de escasez digital incorruptible.

2. Inmutabilidad: Gracias a la prueba de trabajo acumulada, una vez registrada una transacción en la cadena de bloques de Bitcoin es prácticamente imposible de alterar o revertir.

3. Resistencia a la censura: Gracias a la descentralización ofrecida por la amplia red de nodos de Bitcoin, ninguna entidad central puede congelar, confiscar o impedir la transferencia de bitcoins entre partes.

4. Soberanía individual: Los usuarios de Bitcoin tienen control total sobre sus fondos, sin intermediarios ni custodios obligatorios.

5. Programabilidad: Como dinero programable, Bitcoin permite nuevas formas de propiedad y contratos que, hasta ahora, eran imposibles en el mundo físico.

El camino hacia la adopción masiva

La transición hacia una adopción generalizada de Bitcoin como propiedad digital absoluta no será instantánea ni lineal. Se estima que serán necesarias al menos tres generaciones, cada una de aproximadamente 33 años, para que se desarrolle una masa crítica de individuos que vivan y operen cómodamente bajo este nuevo paradigma digital no físico. Este proceso no estará exento de obstáculos y desviaciones:

1. Ciclos de innovación y fracaso: Aunque Bitcoin se mantiene como la forma más pura de propiedad digital absoluta, veremos múltiples ciclos de nacimiento y muerte de otras criptomonedas alternativas (altcoins), ofertas iniciales de monedas (ICOs), tokens no fungibles (NFTs), activos del mundo real tokenizados (RWAs) y otros fenómenos inspirados en Bitcoin. Estas "distracciones" son parte integral del proceso de innovación y aprendizaje colectivo, y sus auges y caídas reforzarán con el tiempo la posición única de Bitcoin.

2. Evolución regulatoria: Los marcos legales y regulatorios evolucionarán, muchas veces de manera reactiva, tratando de adaptarse a las realidades cambiantes que Bitcoin introduce como forma de propiedad digital absoluta.

3. Transformación de instituciones financieras: Los bancos tradicionales y otras instituciones financieras se verán obligados a adaptarse o arriesgarse a volverse obsoletos, lo que llevará a una reestructuración significativa del sector financiero global en torno a los principios de propiedad digital absoluta que Bitcoin encarna.

4. Educación y alfabetización en Bitcoin: Surgirán nuevas formas de educación financiera y tecnológica para preparar a las generaciones futuras para operar en este nuevo paradigma, centrándose en la comprensión de Bitcoin como propiedad digital absoluta y sus implicaciones.

5. Adopción por etapas: La adopción de Bitcoin probablemente seguirá un patrón por etapas, que irá de la mano de su evolución tecnológica y económica:

6. Primero, como reserva de valor digital.

7. Luego, como medio de intercambio, tanto para pequeñas transacciones a nivel local como para transacciones internacionales y de alto valor.

8. Finalmente, como unidad de cuenta global y patrón para la fijación de precios.

9. Resistencia institucional: Gobiernos y entidades financieras centralizadas probablemente resistirán la adopción de Bitcoin, lo que podría resultar en períodos de volatilidad regulatoria y de mercado.

10. Mejoras tecnológicas: Continuarán desarrollándose soluciones de escalabilidad y privacidad para Bitcoin, como la Lightning Network y las actualizaciones de privacidad, que facilitarán su adopción masiva.

Implicaciones más allá de lo económico

El impacto de Bitcoin como propiedad digital absoluta se extenderá mucho más allá del ámbito financiero:

• Soberanía individual: Bitcoin ofrece una forma de preservar y transferir valor fuera del control de gobiernos y entidades centralizadas, potenciando la soberanía financiera individual.

• Redefinición de la ciudadanía: La capacidad de poseer y transferir valor globalmente sin restricciones podría llevar a nuevas formas de ciudadanía y pertenencia no vinculadas a estados nacionales.

• Nuevos modelos económicos: La naturaleza deflacionaria y la divisibilidad de Bitcoin podrían fomentar nuevos modelos económicos basados en el ahorro y la inversión a largo plazo.

• Privacidad financiera: Bitcoin ofrece un grado de privacidad financiera que puede proteger a individuos contra la vigilancia y el control gubernamental excesivo.

Conclusión

La revolución iniciada por Bitcoin va mucho más allá de ser una mera innovación financiera. Representa un cambio de paradigma fundamental en cómo concebimos la propiedad y el dinero en la era digital. A medida que avanzamos hacia este futuro, es crucial comprender que Bitcoin no es simplemente una nueva forma de dinero, sino la primera instancia de propiedad digital absoluta en la historia. Este concepto tiene el potencial de reestructurar fundamentalmente nuestras sociedades, empoderando a los individuos con un nivel de soberanía financiera sin precedentes.

@ d2384c4a:433151aa

Did you know our Mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) is inherited exclusively from our mothers?

(If you got them from your dad, which is rare, you would very likely get a mitochondrial disease and die an early death)

This finding was discovered by the evolutionary biologist Dr. Doug C. Wallace in the 1980s

(and mainly conveyed to the masses by Dr Jack Kruse)

This is important because the environment a mother experiences during pregnancy directly affects the mtDNA health of her baby.

An important measurement of mtDNA health & function is something called % heterosplasmy.

As % heteroplasmy rises in mtDNA due to energy deficiencies caused by the environment, so does the prevalence of genetic mutations leading to progressive aging & diseases.

When an expectant mother lives in a stressful environment, marked by disrupted light cycles, toxins, and nnEMF. The baby is born with a higher heteroplasmy rate. This means the baby’s mtDNA could function like that of a much older person, leading to earlier aging and disease. This may explain why children today are getting sicker compared to previous generations, due to our increasingly toxic environments.

This means that although at birth the baby is physically 0 years old, biologically speaking, their mtDNA may be born as a 40 year old

and thus aging and disease will manifest sooner than that of a baby born with a low heteroplasmy rate.

This is why our children are becoming more and more sick today when compared to previous generations. This is because humanity has created a chronically toxic environment.

The brain, the heart and the immune system contain the most mitochondria in the body

(oocytes or female egg cells contain 100,000 mitochondria in each cell)

Is it a coincidence that heart disease, neurodegeneration and autoimmune diseases are booming?

**Could it be related to high % heteroplasmy rates in our mtDNA? ** If you look into Dr Kruse's work,

you'll realise that's the case.

@ a012dc82:6458a70d

Table Of Content

• Nostr: A new player in the social media space

• The Problems with Existing Social Media Platforms

• How Nostr is Different

• The Features of Nostr

• The Benefits of Nostr

• The Future of Nostr

• Conclusion

• FAQ

Social media has been an integral part of our lives for more than a decade now. From Facebook to Instagram, and Twitter to Snapchat, social media platforms have revolutionized the way we communicate and interact with each other. However, as these platforms continue to grow, they have also become breeding grounds for misinformation, hate speech, and cyberbullying. The need for a new social media platform that addresses these issues has never been more pressing. Enter Nostr, a new social media platform that promises to revolutionize the way we interact with each other. In this article, we explore why Nostr might be the future of social media as we know it.

Nostr: A new player in the social media space

Nostr is a new social media platform that has been making waves in the social media space. Founded in 2021, Nostr aims to be a platform that is different from the rest. Unlike other social media platforms, Nostr focuses on creating a positive and safe environment for its users. The platform is designed to encourage meaningful conversations and connections between users.

The Problems with Existing Social Media Platforms

Existing social media platforms have several problems that have been well documented. The platforms have become echo chambers, where people are only exposed to information and opinions that align with their own beliefs. This has led to a rise in polarization and the spread of misinformation. Additionally, social media platforms have become breeding grounds for hate speech, cyberbullying, and harassment. The lack of moderation on these platforms has allowed these problems to fester and grow.

How Nostr is Different

Nostr is different from existing social media platforms in several ways. Firstly, Nostr is designed to be a positive and safe environment for its users. The platform has a strict code of conduct that prohibits hate speech, cyberbullying, and harassment. Additionally, the platform has a robust moderation system in place that ensures that users who violate the code of conduct are dealt with swiftly.

Secondly, Nostr is designed to encourage meaningful conversations and connections between users. The platform is designed to be an antidote to the echo chamber effect that is prevalent on existing social media platforms. Nostr users are exposed to a variety of opinions and viewpoints, which helps to broaden their horizons and foster meaningful connections.

The Features of Nostr

Nostr has several features that set it apart from existing social media platforms. These include:

1. Privacy: Nostr is designed to be a privacy-first platform. Users have complete control over their data, and no data is shared with third parties without the user's explicit consent.

2. Moderation: Nostr has a robust moderation system in place that ensures that the platform is a safe and positive environment for its users.

3. Groups: Nostr has a group feature that allows users to connect with like-minded people and have meaningful conversations.

4. News Feed: Nostr's news feed is designed to be a diverse and engaging space. Users are exposed to a variety of opinions and viewpoints, which helps to broaden their horizons.

The Benefits of Nostr

Nostr has several benefits that make it an attractive alternative to existing social media platforms. These include:

1. Positive Environment: Nostr is designed to be a positive and safe environment

2. Privacy: Nostr puts privacy first and ensures that users have complete control over their data. This is in contrast to other social media platforms that have faced criticism for their handling of user data.

3 . Meaningful Connections: Nostr's emphasis on meaningful conversations and connections makes it an attractive alternative to existing social media platforms. Users are exposed to a variety of opinions and viewpoints, which helps to foster connections and broaden horizons.

4. Diverse News Feed: Nostr's news feed is designed to be a diverse and engaging space. Users are exposed to a variety of opinions and viewpoints, which helps to combat the echo chamber effect that is prevalent on other social media platforms.

The Future of Nostr

Nostr has the potential to be the future of social media as we know it. With its focus on creating a positive and safe environment for users, Nostr addresses the problems that have plagued existing social media platforms. Its emphasis on meaningful connections and diverse perspectives helps to combat the echo chamber effect that is prevalent on other platforms.

Nostr's privacy-first approach and robust moderation system set it apart from other social media platforms. As users become more concerned about their privacy and the impact of social media on their mental health, Nostr's approach may become increasingly attractive.

Conclusion Nostr may be the future of social media as we know it. With its emphasis on creating a positive and safe environment for users, Nostr addresses the problems that have plagued existing social media platforms. Its focus on meaningful connections and diverse perspectives helps to combat the echo chamber effect that is prevalent on other platforms. As users become more concerned about their privacy and the impact of social media on their mental health, Nostr's approach may become increasingly attractive. If Nostr continues to grow and develop, it may become a significant player in the social media space.

FAQ

Is Nostr available worldwide? Yes, Nostr is available worldwide.

How does Nostr differ from other social media platforms? Nostr is different from other social media platforms in several ways. It focuses on creating a positive and safe environment for users and encourages meaningful conversations and connections between users. Nostr also has a privacy-first approach and a robust moderation system.

Is Nostr free to use? Yes, Nostr is free to use.

Can businesses use Nostr for marketing purposes? Yes, businesses can use Nostr for marketing purposes, but they must follow the platform's advertising guidelines.

Does Nostr have a mobile app? Yes, Nostr has a mobile app available for both iOS and Android devices.

That's all for today

If you want more, be sure to follow us on:

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Instagram: @croxroadnews.co

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DISCLAIMER: None of this is financial advice. This newsletter is strictly educational and is not investment advice or a solicitation to buy or sell any assets or to make any financial decisions. Please be careful and do your own research.

@ 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