Oddbean

\> Making sure the money you lose goes to a good cause is very noble. However, if you want to get some extra accountability pick a foe or an anti-charity. Knowing that your money will go to a person or cause that you don’t like will push you to work extra hard to achieve your goal. This is is like self-flagellation. The ways we try to program ourselves is quite funny sometimes, I find the putting money at stake vs anti-charity approach more interesting though, but it would have to be a high enough amount that the person should care about losing. That makes things a bit tricky, and I guess the benefit of bitcoin is that it can be cheaper to move from/to your account. For the anti-charity one, thinking about it now I guess the reason to support both options is that someone might find their beliefs more important that the money they would loose. If you put 50$ at stake for if you complete your task but don't care about that 50$ it might just not get done. There could also maybe other types of non-monetary one like if it would automatically message someone you don't want to message could also be interesting to keep people motivated. Could be some interesting cryptographic stuff done there too. It in a way also acts as a deadmans' switch.

Some great points there. Did not think of sending someone you don't like a message... could be very effective indeed. The main part I am struggling with for this project idea is how to keep people honest. I used Beeminder for a while, but as it was easy to tell them to cancel the payments, I switched from honesty to finding excuses for not having done a certain task. Then I gave up using it as it was not doing what I needed. Best usecases for me were the ones where it was basically calling a third-party app to check if I had done the task, such as Strava or Google Fit to check if I had done a certain amount of steps. Even though one can still game those, i did not feel the need to.

Hi Johns. Thanks for the opening ceremony yesterday. I am the N L person who is hoping to find a full stack developer to get us started. I have academic coding experience (Python and Fortran), but nothing like what is needed for creating a NOSTR client. I think of myself as a fast learner so rather than wait to find someone with experience, I probably should just proceed myself. What stack would you suggest me to focus on to create an MVP during this hackathon for either of the two projects?

Hi Mtg. I attended the opening ceremony last night and your name came up as someone we'd might ask for advice on how to proceed. For either of my projects (sats4languages and sats4focus), I was hoping to find a full-stack developer with some experience in the field. I have academic coding experience, but nothing like what is needed for creating a NOSTR client. I think of myself as a fast learner so rather than wait to find someone with experience, I probably should just proceed myself. What stack would you suggest me to focus on to create an MVP during this hackathon for either of the two projects?

Hey there! The stack that you should go with of course depends on your projects' requirements. But if you don't have any previous experience with web technologies, then just proceed at first with the bare basics that is enough to get you an MVP. So for example, on the front-end, just learn the basics of HTML, CSS, & JavaScript. (Probably not a framework cause that will take some time). & you could also use some ready templates or use one of the apps that allows you to build a web page using no-code or low-code. (But since you need some nostr features, I think you will have to go with an option that allows you to write your own javascript) For the back-end, nodejs in my opinion can be learned quickly & used to build small apis in no time. If you have a good python knowledge though, you could also look into backend frameworks for Python like Django & Flask. Flask in particular is very easy to get started with. And yeah, that is my opinion. If you have any other questions, just shoot.

While we're on the topic here of giving money as a sort of ransom, I was thinking: imagine developing a language learning app, where you could give some sats ransom and get them returned as a reward for continuing your language studies. The reason why this might work is that the biggest problem with language learning is sticking with it. If anyone here has tried DuoLingo they'll know what I'm talking about. DuoLingo uses a reward system for continued learning. If we were able to do this with sats that would be awesome, and would probably help people learn the language. Let me know what you think. :)

Nice way of combining both project ideas ;) Gamification is key in Duolingo's business model. I've used it and benefited a lot from it. Entering some kind of monetized gamification could be the logical next step indeed. As you say, it has to be your own sats that you are able to recover. If it's the sats from the company, people will find ways to game it.

Happy to help with things related to payments. E.g. receiving payments from users or sending payments to users. Just hit me up at [moritz@getalby.com](mailto:moritz@getalby.com) or choose a slot at your convenience: [https://cal.com/getalby](https://cal.com/getalby) We can do some really cool stuff with integrating bitcoin.