-
2024-11-22 13:14:39As one does when spending the vast majority of their social media time on Nostr, I find myself wondering, why are so many bitcoiners, in particular, not taking Nostr more seriously; what are they missing here? Are they just algo and attention whores who can’t stomach coming to a new platform and being held accountable for posting valuable content? Are they really thinking that by posting on twitter that they are “onboarding the normies”? Were they scared off because the tech wasn’t good in the really early days of Nostr? It's funny because I also, obviously, think a lot about certain groups of people who also refuse to get into bitcoin in any kind of serious way. Like why isn’t every single libertarian a hard core bitcoiner? How are the gold bugs not getting the value prop that bitcoin is offering? It’s the most powerful weapon that we have ever had to combat war, excessive government spending, money printing, inflation and central banking. I’ve also been listening to some of the people who you would think would be into bitcoin, but somehow only believe in Monero…? hard core Monero maxis? Really? [In a recent interview with Natalie Brunell](https://www.youtube.com/clip/UgkxUXqOgkYHkevdyzGWVnVzfOvUXCQRPFJj), Michael Saylor was asked about bitcoin as a store of value asset vs a currency: “Currency not worth that much… If I said to the richest guy in the world… ‘Hey I have this little token and you can use it to buy coffee, and you don’t have to pay 2% to Visa, you can pay one Satoshi; how much of it do you want to buy?’ ‘Well, I guess I could buy 0.00001% of my wealth…’” Another good point here by Saylor that helped me connect a couple more dots here. If bitcoin were not scarce, if it did not comply with Austrian Economic principles, would it be actively taking over the world right now? Would it have grown past its silk road phase of adoption? I’ll speak for myself here, but I know that this is also true for the vast majority of bitcoiners, I came to bitcoin for the Number go Up (NgU) but became passionate about bitcoin for its Freedom go Up (FgU) technology. I was never a Silk Road user and I would have almost certainty stayed within my early conception of bitcoin, which was to equate it to World of Warcraft gold, if I didn’t watch it melt faces as a store of value asset. But the fact remains that bitcoin is freedom tech. Bitcoin has the potential to increase freedom and sovereignty in a massive way. Will everyone on earth have a UTXO? Probably not. But in the current financial system how many sovereigns are there really? 1? 5? 10? The fact that you have to have defenses strong enough to protect your physical assets (buildings, gold, infrastructure, etc.) in order to protect your wealth, means that only those with the largest militaries in the world can withstand the kinds of attacks that I can easily withstand with a $150 air gapped signing device. Bitcoin is minting sovereigns by the thousands, millions perhaps. But is this why bitcoin adoption is on the rise? The user experience on Nostr is improving at a rate that has never been seen in any new ecosystem on the internet. I believe that by being open source and interoperable, Nostr tech will win out over centralized platforms. Not just in social media, but in so many other internet applications as well. “Sign in with Nostr” will be the default someday and you will no longer need to sign up for an account for literally every single app in your pocket. You will never again be asked rebuild your contact list or your follower list in order to stay in touch with your friends and family. We are definitely still early to bitcoin, but we are much, much earlier to Nostr. But the point remains that Nostr is freedom tech. The decentralized nature of relays means that even if I am being censored by one relay, I will always have access to another relay that will not censor me, and I will never again be in a situation where my freedom to speak will be threatened in a serious way. My freedom to hear other points of view, other opinions, contrarian science, foreign concepts, perspectives from other cultures, will never again be taken away. But is this why Nostr will win? So back to my original question, what gives? Why are more people not coming into bitcoin or Nostr strictly for the freedom tech? I believe the answer is related to censorship. As much as we all know the level to which we can be censored, how many individuals are actively being censored in a major way right now? When, by governmental decree, the Canadian truckers went from normal law-abiding citizens to being labeled terrorists who needed to be closed off from transacting using the banking system, bitcoin was one of the few escape valves. But if we are being honest, there were a lot of crypto projects that would have offered the same escape valve, including Monero, where they may not have been in a situation where on-chain surveillance companies could be used to track people down. Also, I would have to imagine that cash, as in paper notes and coins, were probably the most widely used way to transact when they were shut off from their bank accounts. When Twitter kicked Donald Trump, the sitting president of the United States, off of their platform, what were his options? If Nostr existed in its current form, maybe he would have built his own Truth Social Nostr client… it certainly would have cost less to spin up and would have allowed him to start with a bigger user base. But that was literally one person who was censored. How many YouTube channels have been censored? thousands, millions? How many of them had a bad enough experience to leave their subscribers behind? And how many YouTube channels were not censored? Censorship has been on the rise in a major way over the last several decades. And while some are finally getting the picture that moving to another centralized platform that can also censor them maybe isn’t the best solution, this isn’t happening in a major way to the masses. But censorship can, and it very well may, start happening in a much more significant way in the future… possibly even the near future. So, if Michael Saylor asks his billionaire buddies how much they would pay to transact freely when they are actively being censored financially, I bet they would answer that question about freedom money a lot differently. And if big tech platforms start censoring their users by the tens or hundreds of millions, I bet that even the normies would see the value of Nostr and the ability to communicate freely. The good news though, is that I believe we may be moving into a world that is pushing back against the censorship industrial complex. Maybe in 10 years, money and media will be less censored, not more. If that is the case, currency would remain a terrible investment and twitter would remain a public square. But the fact is, that bitcoin and Nostr will both still win in that environment because of their other characteristics. Bitcoin offers inviolable absolute scarcity, something that asset holders have never had access to in the history of humankind. The open-source internet technology that allows social graphs to travel with its users (Nostr) will win because the tech is better, and the user experience is better than its centralized competitors. Bitcoin and Nostr are freedom tech and they will almost certainly be a major factor in improving freedom around the world. But I believe that they will win because of their better user experience. Bitcoin offers a store of value that no one can violate. Nostr allows builders to capitalize on the advancements of every other builder in the space, meaning that if an open-source feature is rolled out on one client, all the clients will magically have access to that feature. We’re gonna win freaks. Stay humble, stack sats and zap notes. 871493