Gm.
It seems that it will be very hard for Brazil to identify and enforce the fines on VPN usage for Twitter/X. But it’s a powerful scare tactic.
When the United States banned gold ownership in the1930s (which lasted for four decades all the way into the 1970s btw), they didn’t really enforce it at the household level. They just had large prison terms that were rarely ever applied, which effectively dried up liquidity in the gold market.
Some people have pointed out that Nostr relays could be blocked by Brazilian internet providers if Nostr was big enough to matter. However, more relays could spin up, so they’d have to keep adding to the list.
Brazil’s government could then say it’s illegal to use VPNs for any Nostr app around internet censoring. The defense against that is to make Nostr as ubiquitous as possible. The more apps that tie into Nostr in some way, the harder it is to ever ban it in practice. Some people might not even know their favorite app uses Nostr. Imagine if everyone’s favorite short form app, long form app, podcasting app, reviews app, wallet app, recipes app, picture app, music app, and tons of other stuff are tied into Nostr, and how hard that would be to ban.
If Nostr becomes big enough to really matter, it’s because it’ll be tied into so many different things. That’s super powerful. And the devs keep building rapidly.
But that goes to my final point. Imagine in the future if normies used all sorts of apps that tie into Nostr. Like it just becomes normal, because the interoperability makes them better apps over time. It becomes very hard for a government like Brazil to ban something like that. Imagine countless popular apps and websites across multiple categories going dark at once.
But it’s not just one thing in that scenario. It’s a Gordian knot of a bunch of things using some particular communication protocol among many other communications protocols. Government bans work best on the public when they have one clear thing to propagandize. Like “cannabis is really really bad!” or “Musk isn’t above the law, so we will ban X until he complies to prevent disinformation!” It’s much harder to play perpetual whack-a-mole with a bunch of different things. The propaganda narrative becomes diffused and unclear, the cost to enforce goes up, people might not even know what underlying technologies different apps use, etc.
My husband and I got like a third of the way into Shogan since it was so well-rated, but we struggled with it a bit. There were a handful of frustrating things that seemed unrealistic. I keep meaning to get back into it.
One of the big macro questions is when will the US banking system run into the liquidity floor, requiring the Fed to end quantitative tightening? Due to current regulations and the "ample reserve" regime, banks generally have liquidity requirements relative to their overall size, and their overall size keeps growing nominally.
-Big banks ran into the liquidity floor in September 2019 at $1.5 trillion with the repo spike, and the Fed had to end quantitative tightening and resume mild quantitative easing (which was then overshadowed by the giga-liquidity-bazooka in 2020/2021).
-Smaller banks ran into the liquidity floor in March 2023 at $3.0 trillion (the new floor) with the regional bank crisis. Both the Fed and the Treasury provided liquidity in response, although the Fed has maintained quantitative tightening. Liquidity has been maintained above that level without being greatly elevated, which is probably what would have happened post-2019 if not for the pandemic/lockdown stuff thereafter.
The New York Fed thinks the liquidity floor will be reached sometime in 2025, and that they'll go back to gradual balance sheet expansion then. Andy Constan, formerly of Bridgewater, thinks it'll be late 2025. I debate him a bit on this since both of us cover this closely, and I generally think it'll be mid 2025, although there are enough moving variables that neither early 2025 or late 2025 would surprise me, so conservatively I say "by the end of 2025."
I was talking to a large institutional investor today, and he said that his contact who is a major repo operator at an investment bank, thinks the current floor is now $3.3 trillion, which is roughly where it is currently. That basically means any further quantitative tightening has to be offset by reverse repo drainage, or they'll have a repo issue and the Fed will need to end QT. My estimate is somewhere in the $3.1-$3.2 trillion range for the liquidity floor, meaning I think there's a bit more room than that repo operator. But either way it's pretty tight.
This is all kind of rambling but generally when that liquidity floor is reached and is responded to, it tends to be good for a lot of liquidity-driven assets, including bitcoin. And it'll probably be with a whimper more than a bang, kind of like the September 2019 repo crisis that nobody other than macro nerds remember.
https://m.primal.net/KURs.png
When the US does QE it generally weakens the dollar relative to other currencies for a period of time. Many countries have dollar-denominated debt, and so a weaker dollar improves their domestic liquidity conditions. Bitcoin’s strongest correlation is with global liquidity conditions, of which the US is the biggest variable, and China second.
No. Banks ironically had higher than normal reserve levels when reserve requirements were eliminated. Banks have all sorts of capital ratio requirements and liquidity requirements.
Broken Money was published a year ago this week
Thanks to everyone who read it, shared it, and reviewed it! 🙏
I resisted writing a book for years since it’s such a tedious process, until finally a book formed in my head that I felt needed to exist, and that was too distracting for me *not* to write. And then I poured everything I had into it.
https://m.primal.net/KTlY.jpg
If you intentionally go out looking for problems and drama, you’ll surely find them.
If you instead focus on constructive stuff, then some problems and drama will still find you because life is life, but usually way less.
I have another round of severe impersonators here on Nostr reaching out to credible people with scam opportunities.
Please ignore them. Always check the NIP-05 if available.
On my website sidebar, I link to my only valid social media profiles for verification.
For Nostr, the only one is the npub associated with primal.net/lyn, which is:
npub1a2cww4kn9wqte4ry70vyfwqyqvpswksna27rtxd8vty6c74era8sdcw83a
https://m.primal.net/KQsk.png
I appreciate your perspective.
And Tor is indeed the adjacent network that I think about critically and economically here as a first glance when I put my critical hat on for Nostr. Which is why, in multiple of my recent posts, I purposely brought to attention critical Nostr relay economics from Peter Todd and then quote-posted Odell about how questioning the economics is rational behavior.
I do think that Nostr has stronger ethical incentive mechanisms than Tor, as a starting point. Open socials and open data combined, is a stronger selling point than open data alone. I think the ecosystem needs to improve key management and some details, but assuming we hit product market fit and decent UX for big scaling, I think there's a lot of broad support here. Or if we fail, from whatever emerges better from our ashes could do decently.
Imo, unlike Tor, the biggest relays will be run by businesses as a loss-leader for their other business activities. In other words, data availability is a cost of doing business. It's more economic, given the broader audience.
Power-users of a given social app would indeed pay $10/month or $100/month or in some cases way more as a sizable business. Advertisements aside, they do so in order to reach an audience with minimal frictions of impersonators or data availability. This covers many free users.
I admittedly partly kept my post incomplete for a humor punchline, and commented elsewhere on my full thoughts. I don't just think "psychopath hobbyists" will run the relays. They are the relay runners of last resort. To the extent that Nostr grows users in any significant way (still a big "if"), I think businesses in multiple jurisdictions will run the big relays, and then there will be many smaller hobbyist ones to fill the gaps, as far as I can see currently based on how early this tech is.
If Nostr has trouble with relay economics and there is no better option on the market, I'd be willing to donate five figures per year in support assuming my own income-generating businesses are running well enough. And there are others that might be willing to 10x or 100x that kind of number. That number only increases as freedom is impaired by more jurisdictions.
When I was in my early twenties, not rich, overworked, and put like a thousand hours of voluntary work into that forum in my post that you referenced, I was earning like $40-$50/hr. That was like $40-$50k cumulative labor hours that I provided for free to a forum I liked in my early twenties. Like a psychopath. I earn multiples of that now, and am still a psychopath. Any ecosystem that gets a few whales on its team, and a few people that are willing to work for free part-time or work for scraps part-time, can keep a network running.
And as a partner in a venture capital firm that puts seven or eight figures into a company depending on its stage, including various freedom-tech if it's economical, I'd say we're indeed looking at Nostr for any economic angle should it materialize to our criteria, and all of us as partners support it conceptually.
Bitcoin itself is a combo of 1) voluntary donations to Core devs and its associations and 2) companies building on Bitcoin for expectations of economic gain. I expect Nostr to be similar. It relies on economics for big scaling, but donations for the cypherpunk margins, for which there are legion.
And these things tend to be responsive to input. If a network is running fine and everyone is engaging happily and without big pushback, people contribute less. If the network starts to be impaired by internal or external forces and there is no better solution available, people wake up and contribute more, and influencers wake up and convince people to contribute more.
For those of you who are still on Twitter, I had a long debate thread today with Parker Lewis about Nostr. I'm a big fan of Parker, so I figured I'd share it here for shared learning.
Here's the latest post. I'm not sure it'll be the last or not but it's the latest one as of this writing. You can scroll up to see the exchange from the start.
https://x.com/LynAldenContact/status/1828553130717442443
Linking to my own post in isolation is bad form and the thumbnail is awkward depending on what client you're using, so I'll also provide a pic of the start of the debate too, with two posts of his and one of mine.
I'd be open to any thoughts about this debate.
https://m.primal.net/KQga.png
Nearly a decade and a half ago, in my early twenties, I was an administrator for a small/medium online forum. This was before social media was super popular.
At first I just posted on the forum, and then the admins asked me to be a mod. And then as some admins left, they asked me to be one of the admins. So I did.
I did this for like five years, for free. I was working full time, going to grad school part time, running a dividend blog part time, and yet for some reason was also volunteering a lot of time to help run this forum. Because I liked it. After years eventually I left, and someone else stepped in to take my place. All the admins were just volunteering.
Anyway, that’s who runs the relays. The psychopaths.
I appreciate your perspective.
And Tor is indeed the adjacent network that I think about critically and economically here as a first glance when I put my critical hat on for Nostr. Which is why, in multiple of my recent posts, I purposely brought to attention critical Nostr relay economics from Peter Todd and then quote-posted Odell about how questioning the economics is rational behavior.
I do think that Nostr has stronger ethical incentive mechanisms than Tor, as a starting point. Open socials and open data combined, is a stronger selling point than open data alone. I think the ecosystem needs to improve key management and some details, but assuming we hit product market fit and decent UX for big scaling, I think there's a lot of broad support here. Or if we fail, from whatever emerges better from our ashes could do decently.
Imo, unlike Tor, the biggest relays will be run by businesses as a loss-leader for their other business activities. In other words, data availability is a cost of doing business. It's more economic, given the broader audience.
Power-users of a given social app would indeed pay $10/month or $100/month or in some cases way more as a sizable business. Advertisements aside, they do so in order to reach an audience with minimal frictions of impersonators or data availability. This covers many free users.
I admittedly partly kept my post incomplete for a humor punchline, and commented elsewhere on my full thoughts. I don't just think "psychopath hobbyists" will run the relays. They are the relay runners of last resort. To the extent that Nostr grows users in any significant way (still a big "if"), I think businesses in multiple jurisdictions will run the big relays, and then there will be many smaller hobbyist ones to fill the gaps, as far as I can see currently based on how early this tech is.
If Nostr has trouble with relay economics and there is no better option on the market, I'd be willing to donate five figures per year in support assuming my own income-generating businesses are running well enough. And there are others that might be willing to 10x or 100x that kind of number. That number only increases as freedom is impaired by more jurisdictions.
When I was in my early twenties, not rich, overworked, and put like a thousand hours of voluntary work into that forum in my post that you referenced, I was earning like $40-$50/hr. That was like $40-$50k cumulative labor hours that I provided for free to a forum I liked in my early twenties. Like a psychopath. I earn multiples of that now, and am still a psychopath. Any ecosystem that gets a few whales on its team, and a few people that are willing to work for free part-time or work for scraps part-time, can keep a network running.
And as a partner in a venture capital firm that puts seven or eight figures into a company depending on its stage, including various freedom-tech if it's economical, I'd say we're indeed looking at Nostr for any economic angle should it materialize to our criteria, and all of us as partners support it conceptually.
Bitcoin itself is a combo of 1) voluntary donations to Core devs and its associations and 2) companies building on Bitcoin for expectations of economic gain. I expect Nostr to be similar. It relies on economics for big scaling, but donations for the cypherpunk margins, for which there are legion.
And these things tend to be responsive to input. If a network is running fine and everyone is engaging happily and without big pushback, people contribute less. If the network starts to be impaired by internal or external forces and there is no better solution available, people wake up and contribute more, and influencers wake up and convince people to contribute more.
Small edit:
"And as a partner in a venture capital firm that puts seven or eight figures into a company depending on its stage"
We put low or high seven figures into a company. Not eight figures currently. Bad math while typing longform.
I think it’s important to analyze the questions. For an ecosystem to be successful, it has to be both technically sound and sufficiently incentivized, either economically or ethically.
In my opinion based on what I’ve seen and analyzed, Nostr relays will likely continue to be well-incentivized.
But I don’t fault people from exploring the questions as they seek to understand the protocol and potentially build a conviction about it. Instead I would only criticize those that start out with a negative conclusion before they explore the facts, and think in perpetually Malthusian ways about its prospects.
The fact that the protocol has bootstrapped to this significant degree for this significant duration, is already a rather positive sign. Too many people theorycraft rather than just observe what works, observe what fails, and keep iterating. Lean into what works. And so far, Nostr works.
nostr:note1u9kdxhaclm3m9e2rrnuc2lheudsha3c2f8vwhqvt46hqa5xn8jyq0nr478
There are big ones and small ones. The big ones are generally run by a business to better serve a client that they operate. I would happily pay them for premium performance. Not all would, but many frequent users would. Small ones are sometimes just run by people that like to host their own data and some other data. Because they like Nostr.
A lot of people use Highlighter for long-form content. It's part of the Nostr ecosystem. I haven't used it yet but I've read others' articles using it.
I agree. On my website I just point to my human readable Nostr identity.
But everyone sharing an npub at once on Twitter is a pretty powerful visual. Viral marketing.
The issue with this is that whenever Bitcoin does go up like 5x, a lot of sellers *do* materialize. So it takes a lot more DCAing that one might think.
Like when the ETFs were gobbling up a lot of bitcoin, much faster than it was being generated, and people assumed it must go to the moon soon. In reality, there was also a lot of sellers out of cold storage from people who bought years ago.
nostr:note19wxszw9nvsgr9hdxl4euk3va2ywgmhf3h5ywjsplmq8ahv73jl4svrukgs
Someone made a Japanese version of my Broken Money video, complete with brand new animations for that audience.
Looks pretty sweet:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0IsA7hZ5icQ
-Treat the arrest of the Telegram CEO as an emergency.
-Advocate for his freedom and for all freedom tech providers.
-Support and build things that function without a CEO, like some aspects of Nostr. When authoritarian Europe or the US arrests you, be able to say, “I literally can’t control it, it’s already out there, and we are legion.”
-Tell me and others, as capital providers, how to accelerate this.
The best way to say that Lyn is too bearish, is to go and tell all your friends that the Telegram CEO was just fucking arrested for allowing free encrypted speech, and to forge your new decentralized identity right now.
Anyway, good evening.
nostr:note1wlmgmsm2jgwn8nrra03vcvn2wa70dkfxsptznskq87jfsjtj9kws637er8
The ability to move your money and identity globally offers some protection due to escapism via Bitcoin and Nostr, in the really rough scenarios. Like Venezuela.
Locally, we should note that it’s not like Telegram users are arrested. That would be unworkable. Only the CEO was. The more individual a policy gets, the more expensive and unpopular it is to enforce. There is no CEO of Bitcoin or Nostr.
The1930s gold ban was brutal, but hardly ever enforced. Going after individuals was both expensive and unpopular. That applies today as well. And information travels faster now. We should use it.
Structural debasement requires obfuscation in order to secure unaware seigniorage from its public. The more that it’s brought to public awareness, the weaker it is.
What you can do: make money honest again.
Make them tell us our laws.
Make them tell us we can’t hold sound money.
Make them tell us we can’t transmit digital money to our friends like we would with cash. And then ask why.
Make them tell us they need to tax us, because they can’t quietly debase us.
Make it more transparent. Shine a light on it and ask people if it’s just.
Great fireside between @ODELL and @jack at Nostriga. I got a chance to listen to it now.
Regarding the question of whether Nostr will have more users than Twitter/X in five years (~500 million), my base case would be no, actually. And I say that as a huge Nostr fan and daily user.
In the long arc of time, Nostr's addressable market is nearly unlimited (basically everyone who uses the internet could be using Nostr in some form), but I expect somewhat of a slower burn. Infrastructure build-out type stuff. And breaching a network effect with a better solution is generally quite a long uphill climb.
To me, Nostr is successful once it starts serving tens of millions of people well. I expect it to be more of a quality over quantity thing for a while. Bitcoin is almost 16 years in and still isn't at 500 million users. But for many of those people, it was lifechanging.
I'd like to be surprised to the upside, but I also don't want people to think that if Nostr is "only" at tens of millions of people in five years, or 100+ million but still sub-Twitter, that it underachieved. It's tiny right now, and numbers anywhere approaching that would be a huge increase.
Nostr is a great improvement for everyone using it. But sometimes it takes people time to see why a given solution is better than what they have, or to realize they have a problem at all.
So in the meantime I monitor Nostr's success by the quality and quantity of developer activity, the capability of the protocol as a freedom tool or the shortcomings it still has for that use case, the quality of the conversations throughout the ecosystem, how many people consider it to be lifechanging tech compared to centralized social media, and in time, steady growth.
That’s not how I would personally think about marketshare. I would measure market share more along the lines of “what portion of identity-based applications can I log in with via my nsec?”
At the Bitcoin Conference, people could pay for photographs with politicians. Or pay more for a dinner with them.
So when you see an awkward pic with some bitcoiner next to a politician, there’s a good chance they paid for it.
I think most people know that, but for those that don’t, keep that in mind.
All else being equal, the more awkward the pic looks, the more likely they paid for it.
There’s kind of a bell curve. The smart move is to not pay. The mid curve (worst) move is to pay for the photo. That’s the trap option. An adult man pays to have an awkward photo with another man. The other smart move is to pay a comical amount for the dinner so you can inject the politician with a meme talking point. So that for example when Trump goes on stage and says verbatim “never sell your bitcoin” it’s not as though he thought of that line himself.
I resolved the situation by just not screwing it down for now, until I get the right screw. The M.2 drive is just kind of floating in there, connected on one side.
Didn’t want to close the case without at least partially completing my mission. Happily playing Baldur’s Gate 3 now that I have the storage for it.
nostr:note1xwl42chk0hj84rmjwtyqke885zql3qvl98p8x9yerg03n3l02hhsuktd9uhttps://m.primal.net/KKJS.jpg
I built my PC like 8 years ago or something, and kept all the boxes for the spare parts for like 7 years and never needed them, so eventually during spring cleaning I just chucked them out. I was like “this big box of boxes does not spark joy.”
And then… that’s when I finally need a spare part. Today I go to install a second M.2 drive and realize I have no spare motherboard screws on hand.
https://m.primal.net/KKCk.png
Eh, this was a ten minute change that’ll extend the computer’s life another 2 years. 8 years ago it was a super powerful computer so today it’s still solid. Built it myself and kind of attached to it. Once it needs a bigger fix I’ll replace it.
Been doing it at home. Literally just ice in the tub.
My shower is retarded in that there's only one dial that controls both pressure and temperature, so in order to get reasonable pressure, the water is at least lukewarm. Literally cannot take a cold shower unless I change my shower.
Plus I think I like the short-duration super-cold impact of icy immersion.
Some people here saw me do it for the first time in Norway. Best I have now is a picture of the icy tub before getting in.
https://m.primal.net/KIpz.jpg
It gives a shock to your system. An acute stressor, kind of like exercise. It then boosts dopamine and other neurotransmitters for hours so you feel more energetic and positive, and some studies indicate it’s good for metabolism, sleep, inflammation, etc.
In Cairo, they built a ton of elevated roadways throughout the city over the past 5-6 years to relieve traffic congestion, which was (and still is) among the worst in the world.
And they often put shops under those bridges. Cafes, fast food joints, etc. I think in most countries this would not be allowed due to safety codes, but I dunno. I just don’t really see it elsewhere.
This one is a little carnival under a bridge. Rides for kids.
https://m.primal.net/KImo.jpg
On one hand, any given presidential term seems short to me. Only 4 years.
But then I realize that bitcoin is only four presidential terms old. Each president was in power for a full quarter of its life.
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