The funniest part of every picture and video we post, is that AI could fake it.
So then things become a question of, do we trust the person with the key who posted it?
Web of trust. Like the real world.
In the late 1960s, my mother went to Woodstock since she knew a doctor and pretended to be a nurse in his medical tent.
In the early 1970s, she went to travel Europe as a backpacker for over a year. And then, she traveled to Morocco through Gibraltar, and Morocco had a coup. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1971_Moroccan_coup_attempt
So my mom got stuck there with little money and few exits. There was a government agent named Mohamed that courted her for a while and would pay her daily; he wanted to marry her and leave. She eventually managed to escape that situation, by befriending a Canadian pot dealer. He was chill, and gave her funds and said to pay him back once she gets home. So she stabilized and was able to get a flight home.
My mother and I are opposite personalities. She mostly didn’t raise me; my father did. And yet in every picture, her right ear is visible but never her left. To this day, I get jokes online about never showing my left ear. Every picture. People say it might not exist.
It’s fun how that works. Maybe I’ll show my left ear only for Nostr.
https://m.primal.net/Jvbp.jpg
My husband always says I should pull my hair back.
But I dunno, my mother barely raised me and yet neither of us likes to pull our hair back, and instead likes to cover the same side.
Embrace destiny.
I’m too retarded for proper visual AI.
But more importantly, it’s a web of trust. My left ear never showed before online as far as I remember, to the point of it getting silly. But I attest that’s my left ear.
The joke is that for years, every appearance of me hides my left ear with hair. It’s almost a meme; parted hair covering my left side. And I noticed all of my mother’s pictures were the same. So for fun, I showed my left ear, but only on Nostr. The meme is done, for those that are here.
I get a metric fuckton of interview requests.
In my early days I said yes to a lot of things, but now it would take up all of my time so unfortunately I say no to 95% of them. We rate by both size and alignment for first interviews.
For recurring interviews though, it's almost entirely just a vibe check. If I like the interviewer, probably met them in person, and literally just enjoy hanging out with them, then I don't care much about metrics. You could be 1/10th the size of someone who gets ghosted and I'll be like, "yeah man let's do it."
One thing financial analysts tend to discount, is how much fiscal deficits feed into nominal GDP growth. It's a recursive destruction of the denominator that masks the issue.
For example Argentina's deficit as a share of GDP historically hasn't been that big, but that's because their large deficit inflates the denominator and brings nominal GDP up at a fast rate. The deficit relative to the GDP from a year or two ago, was indeed a big ratio, but not the deficit relative to the GDP in the year it happens.
Similarly, some financial analysts looked at the 1940s USA and saw that the Fed's purchases of Treasuries to fund the war deficit weren't that big of a share of GDP in any given yea. But my counter was, nominal GDP increased massively, due to the huge deficits and monetary base expansions. After a few years, the amount of Treasuries the Fed had purchased relative to the GDP of three years ago... was huge.
Honestly some of the most actionable and useful advice I've gotten online over the past year is @Steven Lubka saying to go in the sun and walk more, and categorizing all the science behind it.
I don't really remember most of what came across my way on Twitter over the year, mostly a bunch of macro bullshit, but now in the morning I immediately go and get some sun if it's out.
It’s going to change its name and be less bitcoin focused. Peter has been wanting to do that for a while. Less travel, less Bitcoin, more culture, but still Bitcoin-adjacent.
On Twitter, there's a GIF library I can look up for memes in-app, and post them. Sometimes I use it, and sometimes I don't.
As a memer, Twitter is easier than Nostr thus far. On Nostr, I have to be more conscious about it, and always upload an image or video. More friction.
I honestly can't tell good wine from mediocre wine despite being able to drop an arbitrary amount on any wine bottle and having tried them. Above a minimal threshold whether it's $20 or $200, I can't tell the difference.
I assume I'm retarded, I dunno.
The more experience I gain, the more I examine things through one main lens when it comes to really important things: only work with people that you’d be willing to go to war with.
Iterate towards those people.
I honestly don’t know which type of discovery algorithms I would prefer.
A large part of learning comes through iterations. Aka choice and trial.
I can imagine some ideas for algorithms, but until I experience them, try different ones, and provide feedback on my experiences, it’s hard to say what will work.
That’s why a marketplace of algorithms could be so powerful.
That iteration component is why I agree with @jack regarding choice of algorithm. Open source is hugely important, but trial and error is perhaps even more-so.
In response to the UK crackdowns for online speech, @preston is out there on Twitter absolutely dropping bodies in debates and promoting Nostr.
He’s going super saiyan basically. A sight to behold.
https://m.primal.net/JstF.jpg
The way that the UK is policing social media posts is insane.
Every time I see one of their news anchors or government officials talking about how even just reposting content could be a criminal offense I’m like:
https://m.primal.net/JscB.jpg
Great chat.
Listening to it, I was wondering from the start whether you were going to go the open source donation questioning route, or the medium of exchange questioning route, or both.
Sometimes tradfi people tell me that bitcoin is "captured" now that there are ETFs and such.
When that happens, I usually tell them to give me a lightning address and I'll send them some anon sats. None of them has ever taken me up on that offer. I gave this dude an opportunity for 1,234,567 sats or like $700 and he went dark.
I don't think they know how to use wallets. They are only think-bois.
https://m.primal.net/JqnI.png
Discrimination is a real issue. It sucks.
Most people complain about it when they are discriminated against. And to some extent, they should. They should tell their networks about people who are bad actors.
But you know what you should do most importantly? Be so fucking good at your job that nobody with a right mind can resist hiring you.
That's what. Pursue excellence.
It could take some time, but yeah.
If there are super high quality free agents, businesses would be disadvantaged if they don't' hire them. It doesn't matter their gender or race or sexual orientation/identity. Me and many others would try to scoop them up.
Social networks tend to build certain cultures. In this early stage, people here have a serious ability affect this culture if we ever go 10x or 100x or 1000x from here.
And you all have done an amazing job so far.
Imagine if Nostr can re-assert respect and kindness as normal online traits. You appreciate peoples' posts. You thank them. You agree or disagree politely. You treat people online similar to how you do offline.
You're not beholden to the algorithm. You're a real person, who uses algorithms for discovery. You're the master of your domain.
We still have that for the most part. Pura Vida is the unofficial motto here, which is awesome.
Keep it up.
To @primal and @miljan this person asks a question about the global feed.
Is the "latest" feed the global feed, or no?
In my experience, the latest feed is actually usable, whereas the global feed is retarded. But I guess if we want to see the retarded feed, it's nice to have an option for that. Is there a visible option for when we want to go there?
Such a good song.
Nostr Lyn would politely tell an aggressive person to go fuck themselves, and then ask them back to the table to sort this shit out and be friends.
Pura vida.
Go out of your way to give people positive feedback.
When someone makes you laugh or learn, tell them.
It's easy to assume they know, but they really might not.
One of my problems with my real-world friends and semi-online friends is that I'm viewed as cold and distant. Kind of on the spectrum, one might say.
I incorrectly assume that since I like their stuff, they must know I like their stuff, which isn't always the case. Instead they're more like, "wtf is Lyn thinking?" In other words, I'm semi-retarded at personal interactions. I'd like more people to know how much I like what they do.
Online or offline, whenever it's comfortable, tell people they're doing good work. Say hi. Tell them thanks. Give gratitude.
Nostr does this better than Twitter, from my experience. Keep it up, lads and lasses.
https://m.primal.net/JqhC.gif
Mark Cuban is not a fan of centralized social media algorithms, and has watched Jack's interview about user-chosen algorithms and Nostr.
https://m.primal.net/JqZU.png
Despite the launch of the Ethereum spot ETFs, the ETHBTC ratio has hit new lows for this cycle, taking out the prior May low.
https://m.primal.net/JqNh.jpg
I'm honestly sad to see Mutiny shut down.
Startups are super hard. Businesses targeted toward power-users are even harder.
From the outside, if there's something I think we can learn from this great work, I think there's a lesson in that. We need to know our customers. Most customers aren't power-users.
Mutiny was really growing on me in the past few months. I featured it heavily in my recent Nostr article. I was an active user. As a literal user I'm sad to see it shut down. What a great wallet it has been. Great work from the team.
The Nikkei is gearing up for a big drop today (their Monday morning). We'll see how it closes, but it's seemingly the largest 2-day drop in Nikkei history given what happened on Friday.
There's a lot of financial plumbing stuff going on currently. As Japan hikes rates from -0.10% to now 0.25%, they're disrupting the global carry trade, where a lot of global capital is borrowed from Japan and elsewhere in Asia and stuffed into U.S. large cap stonks.
Bitcoin caught up.
To Tucker's credit at least, I'll say that his opinion that the CIA created bitcoin seems to be a consistent view of his rather than for engagement.
I had a group dinner with Tucker in 2021 and talked to him person-to-person (don't ask; it just kind of came into place) and he said basically the same thing in that setting. He also asked technical details about how bitcoin could avoid capture, and was genuinely interested.
Since the finance sector of the economy (investing, lending, payment processing, etc) just enables other things we more directly care about, the more efficient it is the smaller share of economic activity it should be.
Ideally the financial sector should be a half or a quarter of its current share of GDP. It should slip into the background.
The financialization of everything is largely attributable to bad money and bad structural incentives.
It's true that USA tax receipts are tied to the stock market, yes.
It's not true that we can't afford a recession, but that recession is likely to have a more stagflationary aspect to it, because it would widen the deficit and likely result in more central bank accommodation of the deficit.
Primal can.
My understanding is that Damus can still zap posts with a roundabout way. Also even without a roundabout way, you can zap profiles directly, just not posts. And with any wallet you want.
The stainless steel side of that debate is more broadly about the broader view that stainless steel is a newer and better set of engineering trade-offs.
To the extent that titanium is a good pan material in practice, many stainless steel advocates would be supportive.
Most people who I know that think the CIA invented bitcoin, are not very familiar with the pre-history of Bitcoin including work by Back, Szabo, Finney, etc.
I'm not saying that certainly no intelligence agency created Bitcoin, but rather, I'm very skeptical of the certainty that many people have around that topic.
Because, when you are somewhat familiar with that pre-history and look at it from an engineering perspective, you can clearly see the pieces gradually falling into place. In the1980s there was work by Chaum about how to build a database run by mutually suspicious entities. In the 1990s there was work by Back for proof-of-work. As things moved into the 2000s, there was Szabo's Bit Gold, which is very similar to what Bitcoin ended up being, and Finney's Reusable Proof of Work "RPOW" tokens. Finney hadn't solved the centralization issue, and Szabo hadn't solved the issue of better computation causing supply inflation over time, but they were collectively within shooting range of the solution. Others as well. Meanwhile global bandwidth was getting better, encryption in general was getting better (and there we've got an actual intelligence agency contribution), etc.
And then Satoshi added to that work, including the difficulty adjustment in particular and many other details, with a full implementation.
Basically, if someone thinks that Bitcoin just kind of magically came out of nowhere, then it's pretty easy to see how they'd be inclined toward a conspiratorial assumption.
However, if one sees that, just like any other industry, there was a series of engineers building on each others' work until someone finally got it over the line, then it looks a lot more organic.
Long time fan from my side too!
To answer your question of why people might forgo this security if they can afford it, I think there are several reasons.
The main one is responsibility and convenience. If you're ultimately responsible for maintaining keys or similar cryptographic material, then that's a significant responsibility and not everyone wants it. Some people just want a bank to hold it, to insure it, to have someone to call or help them login or whatever the case might be. Especially when we're not talking about a huge amount of money.
Additionally, we can think of this for other areas.
-Some people would rather rent than own a home.
-Some people don't want to bother with knowing how their car works at all.
-Some people want to just buy a computer rather than assemble one themselves.
-Some people don't want to grow any of their own food.
There's generally a division of labor, prioritization of attention or concerns, etc. For many of us in this industry, we prioritize control over our money, our communication methods, etc. And we like to spread the importance of this to others, but for all we know we might only reach a similar % of people holding their own money as people growing their own food, for example. I'm not really sure.
If I think back to 15 years ago when I graduated college, had tons of student debt and a little bit of cash in the bank, monetary sovereignty was not my priority. The state coming to take my little checking account or my well-audited bank rugging my funds was not high on my list of concerns or likely scenarios. The version of me now takes that more seriously. But I wouldn't look back and say that the less financially well-off version of me was locked out of doing so; the benefits of doing so just weren't huge compared to everything else.
And in a world of tools like ecash and so forth, I think people across jurisdictions will have a lot more options in the future for how much privacy they want, how much security they want, what jurisdiction they want it in, etc.
Speaking of Blockstream, I was on the record back in 2022 saying we can't judge Liquid's attractiveness in a low-fee environment, in defense of Liquid when people criticized it for not being heavily used. There's clearly a useful trade-off there among multiple metrics, and in a low-fee environment it just wasn't a priority for a lot of people. It got a bit more attention and implementation amid these more recent fee-spikes.
And there are teams looking to make optimistic fraud proofs or other things to make federated trust models even better, without requiring more base layer expressivity per se.
You're orders of magnitude more technical than me of course, but my emphasis here is on the economics and incentives. Prior to fee spikes, there was all this design space just not being explored or funded as much. And when they were explored and funded, people didn't use them much, which didn't exactly encourage people to spend money or time on the next exploration. Necessity is the mother of invention, and so now there's a bunch of well-funded teams building all sorts of stuff. Fees and constraints tend to do that.
Which again is not to say I'm against expressive changes, but rather that there's still a lot of design space which can be accelerated in a high-fee environment, and there's still a lack of clarity on which solutions people will gravitate to or what percentage of people will value certain privacy or security details.
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