Oddbean

While we have no proof of this, it makes absolute sense if you think about. Twitter had zero use cases. Most people are hands on learners. Talking about Bitcoin, saying the same things over and over again can only go so far. Real world, fun, stress free use cases will do wonders for education. I believe you're right.

My conclusion is based on anecdotal evidence for sure 😂 but I know that my experience on Twitter was that many of the bitcoiners I interacted with didn’t understand lightning and even when they joined nostr have asked about wallets, LNURL, lightning addresses, etc, because they simply never had used them enough before to know. Nostr has been powerful for onboarding and normalizing lightning.

Oh I understand this more than most I'd bet. Back in December 2022 through February 2023 the amount of Bitcoiners that didn't understand how to register a Nostr address with nostrplebs.com because they didn't know how to use Lightning still blows my mind. Many had never used Lightning, had a node with zero channels, or didn't know how to get on-chain to off-chain. I helped so many people open their first Lightning channels, setup their nodes, or recommend/install a wallet. And if I'm being honest, a lot of them I had assumed were in Bitcoin much longer than me. I'm fully convinced that 2021-2024 Bitcoiners were born into Lightning and use it much more so than Bitcoiners from previous cycles. On a related note, can you try a zap again? I think I fixed it. Thank you.

It sent 🥳 And 💯 a lot of those early months after joining nostr were spent explaining lightning to bitcoiners joining nostr. It blew my mind. I had previously done some games/contests on Twitter using lightning addresses and almost no one I encountered knew what they were or how to use them. Nostr ftw on LN adoption 🔥

Thank you. Okay, I see 100 sats and 42 sats recently came in, but they're not registered as Zaps. I wonder if that's broken in the latest lnurlp plugin? Speaking of Lightning. Self custody Lightning is a fucking pain in the dick. I don't have time to fuck with this all morning.

Having first discovered bitcoin in 2009, slept on it for awhile because I didn't have an account to move money in, and finally bought in in 2012 or so, I can definitely confirm that it's really easy to blink and miss eons of development in the Bitcoin ecosystem. It may feel slow to grow if you're staring at it all day, but look away for what feels like a second and the whole universe has changed.

I agree with the use case, but not with the "stress-free" experience. The average advice about Bitcoin on Nostr is: Buy dedicated hardware, self-host a full Bitcoin node + a Lightning node with a self-hosted Lightning address linked to your own domain, then open proper channels and make sure to rebalance them often so I can Zap you 21 sats for memes every once in a while. ¯\(ツ)/¯🙃