Crazy timing. I just made this: https://github.com/machuPikacchuBTC/bitcoin


I put together a collection of notes to use as an introduction to Bitcoin [1]. It’s not finished but I wanted to get something out there for now.

I’ll be revising and extending it over time. Feel free to pass along to friends and family.

1. https://github.com/machuPikacchuBTC/bitcoin

#bitcoin #orangePill #onboarding #freedom


Play fiat games, win fiat prizes.

He’s doing for personal reasons obviously, but he’s probably also doing it to preserve the dollar a little longer.

This wave of liquidity injection will be massive and they need more pressure release valves or else bitcoin will absorb it all and the dollar is gone. It’ll help them with their strategic Bitcoin reserve too if plebs get suckered into shitcoins and sell their stack.


Reminder that AI has gotten really good at video and from this block height on you can’t trust ANY videos.

Especially those you agree with.


There’s at least two places I know of. One of them is sort of close to Coral Gables and does have outdoor seating. Not sure it’s close to a lot of shops though.


Miami has some really good Peruvian paella (arroz con mariscos) if you’re ever in the area. Can’t remember the name of the restaurant though 😓


Either we never venture further into space or mining asteroids becomes an inevitability.

nostr:note1ywm4xf4vcfzdypl39fqdvgduphzlr0kgj2jnu6nm6874zve40zcqpu93t4


Do your best not to tell anyone how well you're doing off Bitcoin, even family

Your cousin might go to some party and be like 'yeah my cousin is huge into Bitcoin!' not realizing how it endangers you

Probably safer to talk about as a nym on nostr than with friends and family in real life tbh


A phrase I often see online: “Bitcoin’s upside volatility will decrease over time”

This is the opposite of what to expect.

Fiat currencies have to debase at an accelerating rate. Thinking Bitcoin will stabilize in USD/EUR/JPY/CNY/etc terms implies either those currencies stabilize or Bitcoin adoption declines.

For the existing crop of currencies to stabilize they’ll have to peg to Bitcoin somehow which might actually happen one day but then you’d still expect purchasing power to increase as technology improves economic efficiency and in any case that still implies a couple orders of magnitude more purchasing power from here.

Bet wisely.


When the tech isn’t sufficient and you have to meme your way into relevance


Satoshi is Sweaty Steve Ballmer confirmed
https://m.primal.net/MBxx.jpg


#askNostr #forHire

nostr:note1smv2m7nvfpp5t3kzlk0vve2yxs0nrsx9vgh7krsur6l42psq8p6smutr5k


We need lightning over #LoRa and #meshtastic and #ham.

Another option: we crowd fund a small satellite constellation. Sounds crazy but as the price of bitcoin goes up it becomes more affordable for our community.


Payment Censorship in the Lightning Network Despite Encrypted Communication

The authors demonstrate how to detect LN messages by their deterministic sizes and packet flows. These methods allow a network-level adversary to identify and censor payments in the Lightning Network.

😱

https://nostrcheck.me/media/50d94fc2d8580c682b071a542f8b1e31a200b0508bab95a33bef0855df281d63/32a11e9b59778a425b831d31a3b07f8f63558e45241d39a32c51c974d9e091a6.webp

Paper: https://drops.dagstuhl.de/entities/document/10.4230/LIPIcs.AFT.2024.12


“I sold some”
… NGMI


I don’t know the exchange rate for the Norwegian Krone to USD or BTC but denominating in sats makes it easy to compare across borders and time.

A 9.3 BTC apartment is so much more relatable no matter where you are than messing around with currency conversion.


#TradFi has a lot to unlearn if they want to survive in a #bitcoin dominant world.

That Happy Gilmore style of play doesn’t work outside of fairy tale finance.


Gigi did the work so you don’t have to. Here’s a great essay to pass along to anyone who isn’t closed minded.

nostr:note1hnkycycvleq5sfgnfyea4aaf7a0lpamcx5v8qt7e3vf97064hlcqy85jyj


Imagine if the US decided to buy and distribute bitcoin for social security.

As inflation ticks up their liabilities would naturally shrink in real terms and the retired people, who are likely to pass it to the next generation relatively soon, would be protected somewhat from inflation.

This also sets up for an economic boom as the next generation inherits it. Seems like a much better system than the current one.

#bitcoin #inflation


This cycle feels different. If nations are truly embracing Bitcoin then what does that mean for us?

NGU of course. That’s fun right? But these are the groups with the militaries and 3LAs. If you’re anything more than a plankton just keep that in mind.


Each epoch the #bitcoin network recruits many new people from all walks of life to help improve the network.

People have more time to commit to open source work. Less time required to work the #fiat mines.

This relatively new crop of 🌽 hodlers feel the power of low time preference and it can show in their output.

Stay humble


For anyone who doesn’t know who Aaron Swartz is here’s a good starting point.

A fallen hero; he is missed.

nostr:note1wa0pv3sjxk2ctaznqtt6sdmfrnplehs04yeamlzczge8gk7dgpkq0hj8se


Copy/Pasting this conversation here since it seems important to understand how exactly a Strategic Bitcoin Reserve will be financed.

Bailey points out that Lummis' Bill notes that nothing in this Act shall be construed to authorize the gov to seize, confiscate, or otherwise impair any property right in the >>>lawfully acquired Bitcoin holdings<<< of any person.

To Lummis, as she lays out in both her amendment to the 24 NDAA and the Responsible Financial Innovation Act I cited in my previous post, lawfully acquired Bitcoin holdings are Bitcoin acquired in adherence to anti-money laundering and counter-terrorist financing laws and IRS compliance.

Lummis' Bill does not need to authorize the confiscation of Bitcoin as the confiscation of Bitcoin is governed just like the confiscation of any other asset, namely forfeiture law. This is how the government has acquired the Bitcoin it already owns.

Lummis' NDAA amendment plus her introduced Responsible Financial Innovation Act will greatly expand the Bitcoin the government is able to seize by increasing KYC/AML/OFAC requirements, codifying IRS compliance, and outlawing privacy, i.e. "combating anonymous crypto asset transactions."

Bailey also points out that Lummis plans to finance the reserve with the Fed's surplus fund. But the Fed's surplus fund only generates a surplus when the Fed buys securities. When the Fed buys securities, it expands the money supply. When the Fed expands the money supply, it increases inflation. When inflation increases, purchasing power sinks, resulting in an involuntary tax.

The secret ingredient to the Strategic Bitcoin Reserve continues to be ✨stealing✨.

https://m.primal.net/LxAK.png https://m.primal.net/LxAM.png


There may come a time when we all do VoIP facilitated by Nostr and regular messaging apps make use of this infrastructure.

Imagine your phone blocking all incoming calls and texts unless they’re from your WoT. No more solicitation. No more political texts. If you move out of country nothing changes.

If we’re right about bitcoin being the future of money then the whole world is about to have more incentive to standardize on communications infrastructure.


what have we become https://image.nostr.build/a174ff776ac855e968cdee68847177b281b983910c1a790f535d5ec5253b2329.png


For anyone looking for gift ideas.

nostr:note16588954ctjw795fpt8yd5nwz24st4yjnz6ufs75ucgskt5gqlw6sn3ju7l


What I've done in the past was write functions/tools [1] that can interface with the data and write a system prompt that guides the LLM in using it. This would be an agent setup where you have multiple back-and-forth requests to the LLM for each user prompt.

In my case I had parquet files on my network and wrote functions that used DuckDB to query them. Then I wrote documentation for the functions and passed them along to the LLM and let it figure out what args to pass. You can also add high-level instructions and advice.  LLMs are also decent at using Pandas and Numpy and Matplotlib so consider giving access to those tools as well.

I've found that it can be useful to create agents that specialize in different tasks too. For example, an agent that can formulate the queries and fetch the data (possibly storing it somewhere and returning a reference to that location) and then another that specializes in modeling.

1. https://ollama.com/blog/tool-support


nostr:npub1az9xj85cmxv8e9j9y80lvqp97crsqdu2fpu3srwthd99qfu9qsgstam8y8 heard you on Preston’s podcast asking for help with time series data? Any area in particular?

I’ve done some work with time series (single digit PiB range). Can’t say I’m an expert but happy to help where I can.


An interesting thing about this auditor is that over time it incentivizes the mints to open direct channels with each other to reduce fees.

From there we’ll have a sort of WoT-like situation between the mints. Opening a lightning channel with any one of them may reduce overall fees paid.

However, this might increase the odds of a rug as well. Might make sense to track capacity of the channels into and out of this network of mints as well as the inter-mint capacity?


Interesting. How does it compare to Ollama?


On this Election Day there’s only one candidate that can improve your life: Satoshi Nakamoto. Vote wisely!


To help anyone using @opentimestamps to timestamp data related to the US election, I've decreased the interval of timestamp txs to approximately one per block.

This will cost ~$300 at current fee rates. You can help out by donating with Lightning: https://geyser.fund/project/opentimestamps

Or on-chain, directly to the calendars I run:

https://alice.btc.calendar.opentimestamps.org/
https://bob.btc.calendar.opentimestamps.org/


Nature is healing. Mining template decentralization is making a comeback. If you’re a miner consider using Datum.

nostr:note1ad4a4nnhkm7h96vak89h2qh52ywd6qcgsvks9mdey69082zsdj0qhwkcyd


Cool design for the UI!

Bug: during the onboarding intro the word “undefined” appears at the end of the string every time.


What can game theory teach us in this new world of decentralized networks? It pays to cooperate [1].

According to Robert Axelrod [2] for players in an iterative prisoner's dilemma game [3] the following qualities are required for success: being nice, forgiving, retaliatory, and transparent.

In the context of a game: don't strike first. If your opponent strikes, then don't hold a grudge. Don't be a pushover though. And to some extent be open about your strategy or else others have to treat you as random and can't cooperate.

According to simulations a tit-for-tat approach (one where you cooperate by default and retaliate a single time for each time the others take action against you) is optimal in most cases but not all. For example, tit-for-tat loses miserably if everyone else is being nasty.

However, the interesting thing is that if you have a few participants cooperating tit-for-tat with each other they tend to outcompete all the nasties.

I think this is especially relevant for places like Nostr where webs of trust are being established. Webs of cooperation are more likely to produce economic prosperity, and to a greater extent, than random or adversarial interactions (like what you'd see on traditional social media).

"But Nostr isn't a game! There's no give and take here." Except there is! Zaps are monetary points in an economic game. Contributing to others' development efforts rather than deriding or sabotaging produces a better environment for everyone.

Consider "X" where whining, ridiculing, or saying things for shock value gets your content promoted and user timelines end up filled with ragebait. It takes a toll on morale and creates an adversarial environment where the community at large loses.

On Nostr, where users have control over their timelines, quality interactions get surfaced and builders can build.

1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mScpHTIi-kM
2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Axelrod_(political_scientist)
3. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prisoner%27s_dilemma#The_iterated_prisoner's_dilemma


FROST implementation might just change the cryptography game on nostr. If you’re a cryptographer able to audit this implementation - reach out!

nostr:npub1az9xj85cmxv8e9j9y80lvqp97crsqdu2fpu3srwthd99qfu9qsgstam8y8 and nostr:npub1mxrssnzg8y9zjr6a9g6xqwhxfa23xlvmftluakxqatsrp6ez9gjssu0htc  discuss nostr's FROST evolution, and the people making it happen in BR086.
https://m.primal.net/LpIo.mov


worth watching again.

https://cdn.satellite.earth/f1a29722734981f39fcdb449bcde32cc0069b4d1b41b996432f8b0149cd2f4b0.mp4


You may find this talk inspirational:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8S0FDjFBj8o


Agreed subkeys are another good solution.


Pubky coupled with something like NIP41 [1] would be a formidable stack. NIP41 allows for key rotation.

1. https://github.com/nostr-protocol/nips/pull/829


Alternatively a “Rick Me PIN” that Rick Rolls the attacker before bricking


Coastr: COffee And other Stuff Together with Refills

It’s a stretch 😂


Don’t use Grindr. That one is taken too.

Maybe CoinCafe?


A superior alternative to a Visa prepaid gift card. Gonna be doing this for tech illiterate relatives over the next few months.

nostr:note1flkda5u27zytqts4fdakvd9akkp8dxs2frpht4lmuaqhdumuewpq7puu5c


Periodic reminder to keep a max of 3 relays in your outbox and inbox relay lists.

There are too many people with 20+ relays in there. You are forcing all of your followers to connect to 20+ relays to see your posts (outbox) or 20 + relays to see your replies, likes, zaps to your posts (inbox). Zaps to you are massive.

And I am willing to bet many relays in your list don't even receive your posts. Which is even more wasteful for your followers.


No love for 58k?


That’s what she said


You must’ve found Christine Lagarde’s laptop 🤭


Ah makes sense. Love to see it!


Just tried with minibits on clear net and didn’t work


Great job and thanks to all who contributed 🫶


Anyone here read up on shielded CSV yet?
#asknostr


Are Cashu mints strictly better than FediMints? With Fedi you have the same exact custodial risk because there’s still a single operator for the lightning gateway, but you also have the group of guardians adding friction.

Seems like having all the guardians running their own Cashu mints and spreading your ecash between them all is preferable.

#ecash #cashu #fedi


**Security Update**

I've got some bad news for you guys. This morning, as I was adding error handling to flotilla, I discovered that Coracle has been sending user session objects to bugsnag when reporting errors.

Who is affected: Users who triggered an error in Coracle while signed in with their private key, since December 5th 2023.

What I've done:

- I immediately released a new version of Coracle, both to web and to zap.store
- I have deleted the affected apks from my releases
- I have deleted all my error data from bugsnag
- I have deleted my bugsnag project and rotated my api key, so lingering error reports will be dropped
- I have audited my code for use of the session object to ensure nothing else like this is happening

What you should do:

- If you're logged in with your private key, log out
- Hard refresh the page to ensure you have the latest version of Coracle

The bottom line is that if you signed in to Coracle with your private key, it has been shared with me and with bugsnag. In practical terms, your keys should still be secure, since they were sent over TLS, and have been deleted. But there is no guarantee I can offer that they are in fact gone.

I take my users' privacy seriously. My error reporting implementation doesn't record user IPs, it redacts identifying data, and it allows users to opt-out. I also warn the user when they attempt to enter an nsec into a text field. In this case, I simply screwed up, and I sincerely apologize. Reply to this note if you have any questions.


Entropy in social groups:

In pseuorandom number generators the output sequence is limited by the seed. If you have insufficient entropy when picking the seed then you land in a narrow band of output sequences.

A homogenous group can quickly reach consensus and is efficient for a given set of tasks but has a very narrow set of possible states (ie. good luck innovating). This is low entropy.

A diverse group has a hard time reaching consensus and can be slow to make progress, but has a much greater capacity to explore outcomes. Higher entropy.

TL;DR - avoid echo chambers.


Cellular automata [1] can be fascinating. Since the Bitcoin protocol is a collection of discrete UTXOs with rules for how they move around we can model the UTXO set with cellular automata.

Wonder what kind of recurring patterns we’d see if we did that.

Typically the rules for evolution are deterministic but spending UTXOs can be probabilistic. In that case each time you run the model you’ll see different outcomes but I’m willing to bet you’ll see themes.

1. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cellular_automaton


Great to see more silent payment adoption.

nostr:note1r4t8wlwk0gz2jx850jhp3jpujf8xcktl5a3vsdagf35fdrsw6usszcppd4


It feels like the angle Saylor is coming from is not helping banks and governments run off with your money but rather to kick as many people off the network as possible so he and his company have less competition for whatever their goals are. In either case, stay paranoid!


And the reason they didn’t kick in people’s doors and point guns for their gold is because it was extremely difficult to know who had gold and how much. With coinbase and social media they have a good idea of who to target and prioritize.

nostr:note1njda5u33l50n2y8fnf2g44pc6wlj0kzfks9996j5dtdev60x086qe8v2tr


Backup your full node folks!

In the (hopefully) unlikely event that a determined actor wipes out all the online nodes we need relatively up-to-date offline backups to restore from.

Look at the SolarWinds [1] attack or the XZ backdoor [2]. If an attacker can compromise enough nodes concurrently they can wipe them and force the whole network into a small surface area.

That doesn’t destroy the network but it would cause a major disruption and could make tor analysis easier among other things. It could perhaps also be used to wipe the last N blocks from the chain tip as part of a larger effort.

The more backups we have to restore from the less downtime the network might have.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_United_States_federal_government_data_breach#Background
2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XZ_Utils_backdoor


Bitcoin was born into an adversarial environment. It thrives there. It suffers under complacency and apathy.

Bring it on Suits.


Decentralized #lightning question:

is it possible to create a lightning node with an m-of-n UTXO where you have multiple nodes reachable only via Nostr and use FROST to sign the transactions?

Goal: running a decentralized #ecash mint. The idea is that you could have people in multiple jurisdictions all partially responsible for running the mint and if a minority of the group is offline the node still functions. Latency would be much higher but reliability and censorship resistance is greater.

#asknostr #bitcoin #cashu


The #ECB and the Minneapolis #Fed both put out a report recommending to curb bitcoin’s adoption at the same time Saylor, who borrowed billions from banks and institutional investors to buy bitcoin, is suggesting to trust the banks and government.

Nothing to see here.


My grandfather was a pharmacist in Cuba and he also started a little toy store.

The Cuban government took his toy store, pharmacy and middle of the road house that my entire family lived in and gave us an apartment. The house was given to a military official.

Self custodying words could have protected two generations worth of saved value. My family will never forget this and never trust a government to protect the value we store.


Bringing this back to the top again because I don’t think Saylor yet understands that “those crypto anarchists” are the ones that save Bitcoin……and by doing so, free the world from an extractive rent seeking system. nostr:note1t6urrtgqmg4xv6r95cgxex7c4jqpvjzdkcax5ds6m7kgc974ak5qq8llcd


Banksy should be on Nostr


Banks be like

nostr:note1tl60c8w7mmjt2gljgkmznamzly62wu9u4vmpudm3tp7qnq5fg24svac78v
https://m.primal.net/LcXx.jpg


Whenever I see statists like the ECB get upset about Bitcoin, or when I see more brazen regimes try and actually implement an all-out ban or crazy tax scheme, I turn to my favorite bit of writing anywhere on Bitcoin and remind myself that a ban is the Berlin Wall and that “fragments of any ban will one day become souvenirs of the folly”

Bitcoin is Ariadne by nostr:npub1sfhflz2msx45rfzjyf5tyj0x35pv4qtq3hh4v2jf8nhrtl79cavsl2ymqt

“Bitcoin is often framed as “competing” with fiat currency. This is true in a sense but I fear there is a rhetorical danger of invoking the wrong kind of “competition”. It is not a fight, for example. There is no conflict. Bitcoin is not trying to damage or sabotage its opponents, because it isn’t trying anything and it knows no opponents. It has no awareness whatsoever of who might oppose it or why. It is simply an alternative; an exit valve; an opt-out. It is competing only insofar as it is proving to be a far superior alternative. It is not a sword for Theseus to fight the Minotaur, but a thread to follow to exit the labyrinth. Bitcoin is Ariadne.

There will be tremendous value in normalizing this rhetoric amidst the likely growing chorus of opposition desperate to smear Bitcoin as inherently nefarious, or hostile, even. Opponents must be forced to explain what is wrong with people interacting freely, and why true goodness can only follow from coercion, in their understanding. Should those who have found a way out of the unbearable labyrinth of capital strip mining not take it? What do they owe the Minotaur?

Does anybody really believe that, having fully understood the choice they face, any individual would choose to save in a self-referentially mispriced toxic loan rather than a provably sound digital bearer asset? Or, more simply still, that they will think it makes less sense to hold money that is a pure asset than money that is literally defined as a liability? Why not opt into a financial system that is built on trustless verifiability rather than unverifiable trust?

… It is worth working through the optics of any decision to engage with Bitcoin in a truly hostile manner, because it is certainly coming. McNeill reminds us that, even some seven-hundred-or-so years ago, “the breakdown of established patterns of conduct always appears deplorable to a majority of those who witness it.” By no means do I have a utopian outlook on this subject — rather, it is something of an intellectual rite of passage to accept the nonzero utility of dystopian paranoia. Bitcoin will be banned, many times, in many places. But a ban is an open admission of practical and moral failure and is arguably the best advertisement of all. A ban is the Berlin Wall; fragments of any ban will one day become souvenirs of the folly and cruelty of repression. Bitcoin doesn’t force anybody to stay. They come, and then they stay, because they want to — because it is both practically and morally superior.”


Sadly Primal twice denied wallet activation and Nostur is connected to Phoenix but still not functioning.

After Samurai, Phoenix, and Mutiny pulled out of the market I’ve taken a break from my Lightning setup. I’ve been too lazy to get it going with Zeus and start up a lightning node again 😓


Bún bò Huế is another solid contender.


Every day can be leg day if you walk like you’re doing lunges.


The purpose is to convince everyone they’re too late and to support bans, confiscations, etc.

This is the pretense for an aggressive campaign against Bitcoin.


DATUM Gateway v0.2-beta Released

OCEAN has open-sourced DATUM Gateway source code, Linux binaries, and a package for StartOS node runners.

https://www.nobsbitcoin.com/datum-gateway-v0-2-beta/


In a new paper, the European Central Bank is essentially telling you to HFSP if you don't hold #Bitcoin 🤣
 https://image.nostr.build/4036aa709a0af067ebf78174e78129a9222da7a307e68d4bf37aa16c1538f192.jpg

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4985877


Bitcoin was created roughly as soon as it became possible to run it.

It couldn’t have been invented prior to the telegraph or before the ENIAC (1940s). Once computers began proliferating cryptography needed time to mature in the evolving environment so it couldn’t have lasted more than a decade or so if it was invented prior to, say, the 1980s.

It wasn’t until commodity hardware was capable of running long term viable cryptographically secure algorithms that Bitcoin could even last and that didn’t happen until 2001 at the earliest (when SHA256 was invented; SHA-1 was broken in the last decade).

#bitcoin #history


If you're looking for an opportunity work on the cutting edge of the Lightning Network, here's a golden opportunity.
https://bitcoinerjobs.com/job/1557119-backend-nodejs-developer-amboss-technologies


Bullish on the spankers 😂


“Be careful how you choose your enemy, for you will come to resemble him. The moment you adapt your enemy's methods your enemy has won. The rest is suffering and historical opera.”

- Michael Ventura

nostr:note13yn5hxfxsvz0unm5rkyqshrt3kgu22ktv0rtkq7rfucw2tfp77ysde0x5h


Thanks for raising awareness Efrat!

CBDC airdrops apparently work. Let’s onboard friends and family to Bitcoin ASAP maybe even using the same methods.

Have them download a Lightning wallet and send a few sats. Reward them for doing nice things. Zap them. Run a #cashu mint for your community so they don’t have to deal with channel liquidity issues. Let’s get ahead of this.


I started working on one but didn’t get far because… life.

The idea: you run this service that connects to a set of relays and streams all the notes from your web into Kafka. Then you have a consumer group for processing (e.g. sending to an LLM for classification, labeling, etc). Then publish to another topic and have 2 consumer groups listening: one that streams to websocket connections and another for storage.

I used Kafka so eventually you could have commercial relays doing this for many users. It was going to use langchain-go and Ollama by default but obviously can use ChatGPT or Claude if needed.

Another reason for using Kafka is that you can have so many concurrent processors. For example I planned to generate embeddings for each note and store it in a vector database so users could do search too.


Coffee is a make-you-shitcoin


Gotta watch out for the ColdCardashians 🙈


Spent many years on whiteboards, keyboards, and skateboards. Now it’s time to get into printed circuit boards (PCB).

Any ideas for trouble to get into with a Flipper Zero?

#askNostr


Suppose you earn 50,000 sats per hour. Your employer can run a mint and every hour send you a cashu token for 50k sats locked to your npub [1] and when you’re ready you can redeem all your ecash you earned in the last day or week in a single lightning payment to your node or spend the ecash directly.

It’s still early days for these protocols and the ecosystem is still evolving and experimenting but the foundation is there. Check out the cashu docs [2] for a better idea.

1. https://npub.cash/
2. https://docs.cashu.space/


If you’re “paid by the hour” then why not “receive by the hour”? #cashu can fix this.

Small to medium sized businesses can run their own mints and stream sats to their employees as they work. Why wait an arbitrary 2 weeks?

One day we’ll look back and wonder why we ever worked for days and weeks before getting paid.

#ecash #bitcoin


There’s also access to much more energy than here on earth which may entice the bitcoin mining industry in the long run.

If we ever manage to mine asteroids efficiently then we can expect very large solar arrays parked in a tighter orbit around the sun and used for bitcoin mining among other things. Hard to imagine a cheaper and more reliable energy source than that if we’re already out there.


For all those starting now with Lightning Network, I've updated an important guide:
Private Lightning Network Nodes - a must read.
https://darth-coin.github.io/nodes/private-ln-nodes-en.html


Time to add Lynx


Came to Nostr for tea and crumpets. Stayed for the revolution.


Great mission and best of luck to you guys!

Last year I worked on pulling data off of devices like Garmin watches, heart rate, and blood pressure monitors and writing parquet files for portability. With that you can do anomaly detection, plot graphs, etc. using standard python packages.

The goal was to build an open source system for preventative healthcare based on passively collected medical data. Pair it with a fine tuned LLM and a collection of tools for it to use and you might improve health outcomes for people who would otherwise not see a doctor.


Love this idea. Pair it with a roaming starlink terminal and you can take this service anywhere.


Now that you are your own bank, time to be your own comms network:

nostr:note1ru2cztplk0hk40zzrxgemy758563h86qt2fyh7dcca5ze4ugc04s78qh4u


"I'm more interested in what Satoshi represented: an antidote to today's norm of clout chasing. The way society continues trying to unmask them goes to show just how foreign this approach is to us."

https://www.jtwoodhouse.com/the-satoshi-example/


I'm happy to see Gordon Brander, a long-time "decentralized brain" buidler to finally arrive at Nostr. https://newsletter.squishy.computer/p/natures-many-attempts-to-evolve-a


The big AI players like OpenAI are building in personalized responses based on your prior chat history. It’s helpful but it leads to lock in. Imagine after using it for a year or two and it knows you well how likely are you to switch to another platform?

If you run your own bitcoin node you can run your own LLM infrastructure.

#AI #LLM


Worked hard for the last few months and now it’s time to play hard. I’ll be offline for the next 5 days to recharge the soul. See you all in a few days!


In other words, “true randomness” is relative to the observer. There’s a continuum between cryptographically secure randomness and “true” randomness. True randomness occurs when the Kolmogorov complexity [1] of the random process exceeds the maximum possible computational budget of the observer while cryptographically secure randomness occurs when the complexity exceeds the observer’s budget on a sufficiently long time scale.

1. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kolmogorov_complexity

nostr:note19mvz4jgyxwhcrjjkmczq353pqfg8z2kqvhjd934dnzklazpphhas3g3as8


Some thoughts on randomness and how it relates to computation.

Computation is the act of following rules to transform inputs into outputs.

Computational irreducibility is the idea that for some systems the output can’t be predicted from the input without performing the computation. For example the SHA256 of a string is deterministic and computable (therefore the output is not truly random) but there are no shortcuts for getting the output aside from doing all the steps.

The path a ball takes when you throw it on the other hand is computationally reducible since we have equations of motion and can predict where it goes before throwing it.

Computational irreducibility is a necessary component of true randomness but it’s not sufficient.
So then what does it mean to be truly random? In this context my best guess is that it’s a process whose compute requirements exceed what’s available to the observer. The observer (the person or system interacting with the “random” process) can’t run the algorithm needed to produce the apparent randomness.

Example: suppose you have a computer with only 7 bytes of memory. You can’t perform SHA256 since you need at least 8 bytes of memory for the registers alone and you obviously need a budget for storing the algorithm itself. The output of SHA256 would be forever appear random to your computer.


Yes, iOS!


Only tried commenting on Primal mobile. I couldn’t load the link on web at all when I tried on my laptop via the share link.


For what it’s worth I only see the single note and can’t seem to comment on it via Primal.

Thanks for sharing that bit of history by the way!


John von Neumann did something similar for general purpose computers. He widely circulated a report detailing the EDVAC design [1] for a full year before the others on the design team could file a patent and now we have the ubiquitous "von Neumann architecture" [2].

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_Draft_of_a_Report_on_the_EDVAC#Controversy
2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Von_Neumann_architecture


John von Neumann did something similar for general purpose computers by widely circulating the report on EDVAC [1] before the others on the design team could patent it. Because it was circulating publicly for a full year before a patent was filed, it could no longer be patented and we now have the prevalent “von Neumann” architecture.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_Draft_of_a_Report_on_the_EDVAC#Controversy


Digital artist Mazepah turned surfist Italo Ferreira braveries into Japanese-influenced art using AI.
https://m.primal.net/LJtm.mp4


we're looking for an experienced rust dev to join our work on a library for cashu wallets and mints (cashu dev kit, cdk). we're going to to use cdk to build a native cross-platform mobile wallet and a production-ready mint. we're thinking long-term.

free and open source. grants exist. it's a dream job.

✉ cashu-dev@pm.me


A Vulnerability was recently found in musig implementation of nBitcoin.Secp256k1.

The vulnerability was in the nBitcoin library which BTCPay Server uses (but is unlikely to affect users).

nostr:npub1emdtsxly9m68m00x206t574jttp65vk0c2m89ms038q047yz7ylqcac9aw , nostr:npub1hea99yd4xt5tjx8jmjvpfz2g5v7nurdqw7ydwst0ww6vw520prnq6fg9v2 , nostr:npub1u8lnhlw5usp3t9vmpz60ejpyt649z33hu82wc2hpv6m5xdqmuxhs46turz  and nostr:npub1az9xj85cmxv8e9j9y80lvqp97crsqdu2fpu3srwthd99qfu9qsgstam8y8  share their thoughts in BR076.
https://m.primal.net/LJAC.mov


The more depravity in the world out there, the more effort we should put to focus on what matters. Our own lives, how we live them, and all the good and opportunities around us.

Let the clown demons rage, don’t feed them your attention and morale more than necessary.


Long live StarCraft and “Command and Conquer”


Been putting off learning Rust?

Braiins just released an ebook that teaches Rust through writing your own node 👀

https://braiins.com/books/building-bitcoin-in-rust

#rust #btc #braiins


Cashu
Runs on
Everything
Around
Me

C.R.E.A.M.
#cashu

nostr:note1t54e4jthnxnywzm2k5lrtk4vkcqpna77s3k3lyn780nlmfjqfknqnvjxvt


Can confirm they do a great job limiting how much info they need to collect up front too. Would recommend.


As Jeff Booth says the price of goods falls to the marginal cost of production. So that $100 bill is falling to $0.094 in purchasing power eventually.


Still blows my mind. https://image.nostr.build/cb6905af4183bb984d8f4ec0ecb232504fdbef95ad51aed2b06d4bdff3ee0926.jpg
https://image.nostr.build/de1122f50f14f5ab0cc5efdca9e3970dcecf1b72e68c44452b9f146ba8388f69.jpg


In a monumental moment, BOLT12—originally proposed by  nostr:npub179e9tp4yqtqx4myp35283fz64gxuzmr6n3yxnktux5pnd5t03eps0elz4s in 2020 and pioneered on Core Lightning—has officially been merged into the Lightning Network spec.

Let's celebrate BOLT12 simplifying Lightning payment interactions and improving privacy!

nostr:note1k5qns68j5h4dra3gnjd3j8kfza70k0zmj0dtd22fkgymst47pteqyauund

Explore the integration details with  nostr:npub1hxjnw53mhghumt590kgd3fmqme8jzwwflyxesmm50nnapmqdzu7swqagw3.

nostr:note1apyfw3a8pgx4vmv9555ghhpk3fen3mfaxzkwhm0mrwmzxddwm8ys85vhng


Don’t forget the meat space infrastructure like #meshtastic and ham radio


Bitcoin is military grade money.


In this example the eCash is publicly known to be locked to Martti’s npub? Is it possible to make these similar to silent payments [1]?

1. https://bitcoinops.org/en/topics/silent-payments/


There are paid relays and other filtered relays out there. WoT can work as long as you’re not trusting Reply-guy types.

We’re lucky that Nostr is an open protocol and anybody is welcome to build their own clients and relays on top to filter out the spam. It’s easy to criticize but most of the devs are building and running this infrastructure in their spare time for free so we should be thankful it works at all honestly.


I’m not expecting anything. I’m saying we learn from each attack and the more notice we get the better.

The situation nostr:npub1utx00neqgqln72j22kej3ux7803c2k986henvvha4thuwfkper4s7r50e8 describes is strictly better than a scenario where nobody ever telegraphs the attacks in advance. It’s a common practice in cybersecurity called “red teaming” and helpful if well intentioned people attack before malicious ones do.


Wonder if we could use OpenTimestamps and on-chain keys as a second factor for Nostr authentication. For example you could sign a message attesting to your ownership of an npub with a key to one of your UTXOs and stamp it and then publish it on Nostr in your profile.

Use case: suppose your nsec becomes compromised and you want to inform your web of trust to swap out your npub for a new one. We need an independent and decentralized way to differentiate the correct npub from an attacker’s.

Seems better than NIP-05 which is DNS based.


If it can’t withstand deliberate attack then it won’t last in its current form and we might as well learn where it breaks before building critical systems on it.


Physical surveillance over wifi is an IEEE standard: 802.11 bf - WiFi sensing [1].

With gait analysis [2] you can determine who is in the area and with enough photos or videos of that person you can reconstruct an accurate video of them.

You can also reconstruct audio just from video and possibly even via 802.11bf or similar eventually [3].

The surveillance stack is deep.

1. https://www.nist.gov/publications/ieee-80211bf-enabling-widespread-adoption-wi-fi-sensing
2. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-022-18806-4
3. https://news.mit.edu/2014/algorithm-recovers-speech-from-vibrations-0804

#privacy #wifi


Time to introduce him to pi-hole [1] so he can block ads across all devices on the network. You can run it in Docker on any device; doesn’t have to be a R-Pi.

As for the windows… hopefully he’ll pick up Linux.

1. https://pi-hole.net/


This is a great introduction to #ecash and #cashu straight from the source. Well worth a listen!

nostr:note1qvcnv4yysyrt6ul9cn87vnzjamue50cn0lg8dvjtrg4r9hlgsz6sz79q5u


Switching to a meat and produce only diet (ie. avoiding most packaged things) and not drinking calories goes a long way. Add in at least 3k of walking or running each day and life is so much better.


Bitcoin is not return on capital, it's return OF capital.

Magic.


One useful metric for valuing a system or network is how much effort is required to defend it. In free markets there’s a selective pressure for stability and durability.

For example for a company to maintain or increase its value it must maintain demand for its products or services while competing against other providers but also fighting internal problems like bureaucracy, incompetence, corruption, etc.

A fiat currency is similar in that it must avoid depreciation relative to other currencies (competitors) as well as fraud (bank corruption, inflation, etc.). The sheer amount of people it takes to keep fiat rails working despite all the incentives for them to cheat combined with lack of transparency by design make it incredibly hard to defend.

Compare that with bitcoin that was designed to be transparent and incorruptible from the beginning. There’s an asymmetry between attacking and defending it so that corrupting the system is orders of magnitude harder than defending. It’s not perfect, but it’s better than the alternatives.


Very good book
https://www.rareskills.io/zk-book


Thanks for the rec! Going on the list to read right after finishing “Understanding Cryptography: A Textbook for Students and Practitioners”

https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-3-642-04101-3


The Fed lowering interest rates = fiat mining difficulty went down


If you worry about governments playing games with the fiat price of Bitcoin then it helps to realize those games are unsustainable and typically mean you get to stack sats cheaper in the short term.

Price controls just don’t work and have failed countless times in dramatic fashion. Focus on P2P exchange of Bitcoin among your friends and family and local merchants and the fiat price will eventually correct itself.


Bitcoinproblems.org


For anyone into taking notes try adding them to a vector database so you can query them with natural language rather than stuffing SEO keywords and labels into them for searchability.

You can use local models via something like Ollama [1] to generate the embeddings and store them in a DB. I’ve been playing around with Qdrant [2] running in Docker and found it easy to setup.

1. https://ollama.com/blog/embedding-models

2. https://github.com/qdrant/qdrant


Talk to your friends and family about the history of banks and why we needed Bitcoin in the first place.

There are so many self custody solutions out there that we don’t need banks to help anymore. You can even run a cashu mint and be an uncle Jim for your tech challenged family members. Don’t be lulled by the familiar siren song of “yield.”

nostr:note1vc7jlkyc36ne5cputm4wgcdzxsvthcjul8ry55natcu8ds8jfmasp09u9a


I think you underestimate how difficult it would be to kill bitcoin at this point. Nobody can take your properly secured self custodied bitcoin and there are too many people who plan to use it as money at this point. Sure there’s an unfortunate number of coins locked up in exchanges but there’s enough circulating in the wild to work out just fine.

Suppose they try to take over mining and effectively censor transactions. The network can implement workarounds like swapping out SHA256 to brick the ASICs and reset hash rate until it can figure out a long term solution. It could even, and I hate writing this, make a PoS layer 2 as a temporary solution until mining can decentralize again so that the people who actually want bitcoin to thrive can transact again.

Then suppose they make possession punishable by extreme measures. There are so many ways to embed Bitcoin transactions securely and covertly that it’s impossible to enforce. And on top of that, suppose your country does ban it. They have no control over the rest of the world who just might value a neutral reserve currency and continue to stack sats.

Bitcoin was designed from the beginning to resist attack and while it may not be perfect there is no second best.


With over 100 millions users already, and expanding more every day, Bitcoin's taproot identity (which powers nostr), with schnorr signatures, is spreading rapidlly.  It also has the possibility to be further integrated into web standards.  That would mean bitcoin and taproot have a chance to become the native payment infrastructure of the web.  If we dont mess it up!  Hopefully one step in the right direction is allowing single sign on, to any website, with Taproot Identity and Schnorr:

https://nostrcg.github.io/http-schnorr-auth/


Researchers found that they can use LLMs to induce false memories [1]. They showed participants a video of a crime and then had them interact with an LLM tasked with asking misleading questions that manipulate their recollection of events.

I’m sure lawyers are yawning at this but it’s significant because now it can be done at scale and with precision.

1. “Conversational AI powered by large language models amplifies false memories in witness interviews” - https://arxiv.org/html/2408.04681v1


🚨  Is the FCC coming after #meshtastic?

letter of opposition: https://cdn.shopify.com/s/files/1/0071/3772/files/Opposition_Letter.pdf?v=1725463027&mc_cid=6d9d8a9255

details: https://meshtastic.org/blog/meshtastic-opposition-to-nextnav-proposed-changes/?mc_cid=6d9d8a9255

submit comment in protest: https://www.fcc.gov/ecfs/filings/express?proceeding%5Bname%5D=24-240&mc_cid=6d9d8a9255


Great job 👏


It hinges on how we define violence. For example some people argue being put in jail is violence and there are likely analogous methods you could create for the digital world.


One censorship technique modern regimes have used is to flood the public discourse with so many variants of the truth and lies and everything in between that it becomes near impossible to fact check everything [1]. It makes the average person give up and defer to their favorite pundits.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firehose_of_falsehood (this page discusses Russian use, but honestly it’s done by all of the usual suspects)


nostr:npub1s05p3ha7en49dv8429tkk07nnfa9pcwczkf5x5qrdraqshxdje9sq6eyhe always hammers the point that prices fall to the marginal cost of production. Over time the vast majority of digital content and services will be provided by bots whose marginal cost is the energy it takes to run them.

And the cost of energy priced in bitcoin has been rapidly falling as more miners compete for fewer sats.

“It might make sense to get some…”
- Satoshi


The idea with all these impersonator accounts is that they can make it near impossible for newcomers to find the real accounts in a sea of fakes.

Imagine coming to Nostr for the first time and seeing your favorite bitcoiner’s name repeated 20 times with the same follower lists (different npubs of course) and replicated content. If you want to zap them, get advice, etc which npub do you choose?

WoT can still work if you can trust a subset of the npubs but it becomes tricky. Simple heuristics like the time that content is published can help but as bots get faster and older content drops off relays it becomes near impossible to tell the difference. The timestamp in Nostr events is truncated to the second (according to NIP-01) which is plenty of margin for a bot to act.

We’ll overcome, but we’ve got work to do.


Regardless if the allegations are true, having so many bitcoin under one roof is a problem.


Indubitably.


“Thanks for the ride, Bob!” yelled Alice while speeding off in her Uber driver’s car before he had a chance to put up the gas pump.

Bob learned a very important lesson that day: not your keys, not your car 🥁


Bitcoin is the best money we’ve got. If you want digital tokens then sats are the best we’ve come up with. If you want a decentralized app for whatever reason (e.g. censorship resistance) then you don’t need a blockchain for that.

P2P is all you need and for that we have Nostr, tor, etc. Make your app open source and if it’s needed then people will run it decentralized.

Decentralized finance is mostly a gimmick. Imagine borrowing money to buy a home and then years later you quit making payments. A DeFi token protocol can’t physically repossess the home and you don’t need it to facilitate communication or market making.

Don’t fall for shitcoins folks!


It’s the Bitcoin-stablecoin duality


Testing an old idea: NFC-based transient accounts: accounts that log off as soon as the app goes to the background, deleting all traces of the account from the phone.

It looks like this in debugging speeds: https://video.nostr.build/ef4274d150303fd28f5e7b6b02a7b0102176263dfb1b491969a0caab6b61e6ad.mp4

If you are an activist and if your phone is confiscated, they will never find anything on the phone. Not even your public key.

Walk around with Amethyst installed and an NFC tag hidden in your clothing. When you need to use Amethyst, tap the tag, insert your password and login. Lock the screen to delete everything.

The NFC has a NIP-49 password-encrypted nsec. If you need, destroy and dispose the NFC tag.


GN https://image.nostr.build/0ef0188cfb0c13cd6d2e300329912ae591f6acf4ffbb70ffef33cd86d12a5c68.jpg


It’s no coincidence the big surveillance ad network companies with large government contracts and political ties are blessed by the money printer. Governments crave control over the social sphere and don’t want to compete with other nations. This might be an arms race between nations over influence online regardless of productivity.


The internet has become a new frontline for war. Motivated actors will use bots to both promote their culture and ideologies as well as drown out or demoralize others.

That was always the case with propaganda but the tools and infrastructure we have today enables it at a scale none of us are prepared for. Webs of trust communicating over neutral networks like Nostr are part of the solution but we’ll need more.


Since AI models and agents scale better (in theory) than human teams the most motivated and productive among us will increasingly lean on them as part of their work. If in the future governments play their same traditional role then they'll necessarily rely on AI surrogates and proxies: digital diplomats.

Then it becomes a race to see who can digitize their culture and ideologies faster and deploy globally. We're seeing the early stages of this play out in chip manufacturing as well as data center deployment and open-weight LLMs. Expect this to accelerate.

I think this is why we're seeing the big tech companies in the largest economies who have large network effects and are known to have extensive ties to their governments aggressively pursuing an "AI at all costs" strategy.

So what comes next? We'll continue to see dominance by the countries with the best telecommunications/electrical/chip manufacturing infrastructure of course, and we can probably expect further erosion of social media networks since they're the "digital frontline" so-to-speak. But what else?

#ai #diplomacy #geopolitics #asknostr


Function signatures are more of a suggestion. You can call a function with any number of arguments and with arbitrary types. And you can add strings to ints but multiplication gives NaN. Lots of arbitrary design choices.


Part Cyborg, part honey badger. Good luck in Saudi, Cris!

nostr:note1dq8grhc3rgtwag4h94hqpx78ktew772afm6xqgw9g78fvt9eamkss8lhtv


The truly dedicated ones decorate their yard with zombie snowmen and reindeer to get a head start on Christmas while they’re at it.


Time to make it dead simple to make a LoRa repeater and drop them all around. Make it near impossible to enforce a ban or license restriction. Communication is a right.

nostr:note17vv9h0rxxaxs4z7vjfk4nel8678cr8syqvd4kwt4x0jmrtn36ztqvrsplx


With all of the focus on bitcoin as a strategic asset I think some technical developments and trends have been overlooked. Particularly in the realm of second layer privacy.

BOLT 12 is making progress and people are waking up to the power of ecash.

nostr:naddr1qvzqqqr4gupzq3e0gs8jnmued6f2rp4c6vs07xqvs4vs8zpwt82smcdch4txjvq7qqxnzdejx56rjvpjxg6r2wph7rvpay


You’re right; it will take more than just data prep and likely more than 4 years to mature.

For example we need an architecture that allows for versioning of components, auditability, benchmarking for regression testing, etc. It also needs verifiable outputs so we can prove the output was generated without tampering.

And there are supplementary components like vector data stores so that users can store context for long running tasks.


We also need a stable, scalable architecture for such a system. Sparse mixture of experts could be an option. Over time the network could add new “experts” and prune unused ones.

nostr:note12zcjle0vnv7tk4s8kuqjxvp6z3xslhrtjpcm07zja3cehxletv8q7n2v6m


There’s a new alternative to DiLoCo [1] for training large scale AI models over the internet called DisTro [2]. It enables low latency training on low bandwidth communication channels (ie. slow internet).

Methods like these are a crucial component for enabling a decentralized AI system that rivals the big tech companies and nation state actors.

The next step is to figure out monetary rewards for contributing to training and inference. The tricky part is to weed out bad training data in a decentralized way. Perhaps we could use something like a “mempool” for training data batches?

1. https://arxiv.org/abs/2311.08105

2. (PDF) https://github.com/NousResearch/DisTrO/blob/main/A_Preliminary_Report_on_DisTrO.pdf

#ai #llm


GM, we've created a Brazilian #Ditto server! We're still working on the name. We are looking for feedback, and to make connections with Brazilian influencers. This is our time to shine, Nostr!

https://verdade.us


Please contribute back to Cashu and the libraries you're using.

If you find something you don't like, fix it and open a PR. We welcome every little contribution.


Monkeys and other primates made it to space before humans.

Stay humble and stack sats.


“We’re taking back the internet” 👏

nostr:note1d5rp06r24vvsq7nmljgpvav79hxpzd4msl2ud9djngnzmep5jm8sx863rp


Good luck! Always great to see people follow their passion.


Great advice. I lost over 1 million sats once by sending to an old test wallet on accident long after deleting the seed phrase.


AI models are in some ways analogous to base layer bitcoin. They require proof of work to create and once they exist they provide value.

When you have the models interact with each other (e.g. acting as agents) they create a graph similar to a lightning network. The models are fixed just like the UTXOs in a lightning network but they can interact to move information around.

Is there an analogue here for #ecash? Am I stretching the analogy? Too many hits from the bong?


Might be time to get that Ham radio license

nostr:note1rkwtanl42fj4gk42tay7mdpfr3nnuyt7wrvpzk60kgvvt6lega3spsax4d


On top of that we have models that can generate game environments (ie. simulations) from images or video:

https://video2game.github.io/


I smell a new Nostr web service idea


The fiat system is becoming more fragile. In the US if you want to apply for any form of credit you just provide a dozen pieces of information about you and get approved or denied.

All that information for every person in the US becoming public over time. The amount of fraud in the system is only increasing. Bail outs will increase. Ultimately the currency will absorb all of that.

nostr:note1w02jqnk9mlzl5zlr49r7ffryermvdqjdn3x88335ap55yaae6e0smq867d


Simplicity is great. Thank you for the wallet and best of luck! I’ve enjoyed using it and appreciate the convenience


Would you be open to a PR to make that configurable? If I get time in the next few weeks I’d love to try and add that


Introducing eTips with Lightning on BoardwalkCash.com ⚡

Receive eCash directly on your Boardwalk profile page from any Bitcoin Lightning wallet.

Send eCash directly from  nostr:npub1cashappn03s3cl2ljsdntv0v28e2um5lgx4vjctqjt23pcwzjhsqmtdg5l  nostr:npub1ex7mdykw786qxvmtuls208uyxmn0hse95rfwsarvfde5yg6wy7jq6qvyt9  nostr:npub1getal6ykt05fsz5nqu4uld09nfj3y3qxmv8crys4aeut53unfvlqr80nfm  nostr:npub1xnf02f60r9v0e5kty33a404dm79zr7z2eepyrk5gsq3m7pwvsz2sazlpr5  nostr:npub148qm45zettnf6ekgkatnyfadunxwjpu8sy88mjdsgwc5f202d93qmejra7  nostr:npub1xkere5pd94672h8w8r77uf4ustcazhfujkqgqzcykrdzakm4zl4qeud0en

You don’t need an eCash wallet to send eCash 🤯

---

Share the eTip by dropping the link on any social media or messaging platform for the recipient to claim.

The eTip recipient will also get a notification directly in their Boardwalk app.

Send bitcoin instantly received as eCash.

Lightning 🤝 eCash

---

Try out sending eTips with Lightning now!

All tips to Boardwalk go to open-source eCash devs.

www.boardwalkcash.com/boardwalk

https://m.primal.net/JyUw.mov


Hey Bob, great work on Boardwalk.

Does the UI only support USD denomination or can we choose to show sats? I can’t seem to find that setting.


One of the greatest


Posting images that still have Exif geolocation headers is a privacy nightmare. Being able to delete them from relays after the fact would be really helpful even if a few people already received them.


This is a great listen for all the R-Pi maxis


The UN Cybercrime Treaty puts security researchers and journalists at risk of being criminally prosecuted. It is incompatible with basic human rights.

This dystopian treaty was passed on Thursday in a unanimous vote first put forward by Russia.

It must not be ratified. Read 👇

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2024/07/journalists-and-security-researchers-risk-why-you-should-hate-proposed-un

https://therecord.media/un-cybercrime-treaty-passes-unanimous

https://www.ccc.de/en/updates/2024/stopp-cybercrime-convention


Agreed!


It seems clear that any solution to the AI problem will likely require tying digital existence to human existence.

We stand to benefit from having widely available, powerful AI but a powerful AI doesn’t necessarily stand to benefit from us generally speaking. If those processes can continue independent of us they aren’t strictly motivated to keep us around.

#AI


My degree is in applied math so I’ve had to lazy load a CS degree over the years. I’ve been a backend engineer my whole career though. At times doing machine learning but these days it’s mostly “medium data” (2-3 PB) pipelines and storage solutions. No kernel work although I’d like to get my hands dirty with eBPF and the like.

I’ll definitely be reaching out as I’m playing with Pallas! My dream is to have something like this as the foundation for a decentralized AI model where, for example, anyone could download a binary and contribute to training and/or running a very large LLM running on Nostr. Perhaps a combination of OpenDiLoCo [1] and Pallas could work. The idea being that millions of people collaborating to train and run frontier models is likely a better world than one where only a couple companies can afford the compute.

1. https://github.com/PrimeIntellect-ai/OpenDiLoCo


The botnets will continue until morale improves


Doing as little as possible in the runtime makes a lot of sense. Less overhead, less to maintain, etc.

As for the freshness, I was originally thinking perhaps latency sensitive function calls might pose a problem if the process crashes and recovers seconds later and responds with data that’s no longer relevant. Given these are pure functions it makes total sense to just pass along the timestamp (or increment a counter) and these considerations are going to be app dependent anyway.

I’m really excited about this project and plan to experiment with it in the near future. The docs are well written too. Thank you for the work and the thoughtful response!


Thinking more in this: since functions treat memory and storage interchangeably and can be restarted at arbitrary points then does state have timestamps as a first class citizen? Meaning: if my function is sensitive to data freshness then can I easily discern fresh from stale?


Function* state


This is awesome! I’ll need to spend more time digging in later.

So you persist funding state, can send state over the wire to be continued elsewhere, and can run processes in parallel. So this can be a distributed runtime?

Decentralized HPC could work well with this design…


There are several docker images out there which lowers the barrier somewhat.

We could also create a dedicated raspberry pi distro.

We could also create scripts to set up VMs within cloud providers.

There are a lot of technically savvy people that we can lean on for this.


Sigh. It always rebounds by pay day 😞. The 52k sats were too good to last.


To all front end devs: if your product team wants you to put half a dozen modals on your landing page then please push back. We shouldn’t have to click several Xs just to read the content.


Every day I see the progress being made in our community is a reminder that I don’t have enough bitcoin.

Keep stacking y’all!


We need to align the incentives of relays with those of the consumers or we’ll have the same predatory models evolve here too.

Consumers are accustomed to getting “free” services. The relays who can cater to that habit by monetizing their consumption without charging them directly will have an economic advantage. We can fix this, and I’m optimistic, but not sure how to do it.


Discipline is under appreciated


Agreed it would be nice if there was an open version of obsidian. The silver lining is that at least we can keep the markdown files in git. Haven’t heard of zettlr before, but looks interesting!


+1 for zettlekastin. What do you use? I’ve been using obsidian for a few years now and enjoy it.


Just realized I responded to the wrong note 😅. Thank you ❤⚡


Someone beat me to my nym’s GitHub handle by 4 years. And here I thought I was original. Well played other Machu. Guess I’ll add the “BTC” suffix.


Mic check. Is this thing on? https://boardwalkcash.com/machupikacchu


Open source decentralized AI training. Coming soon to Nostr?

https://github.com/PrimeIntellect-ai/OpenDiloco


Hypothetically they could collect fees from the guardians periodically. Or if we can figure out how to federate the lightning node itself then each of the guardians could be partially responsible. Mints need to collect fees over time anyway or else they’re incentivized to rug and/or quit.


My understanding is that you can’t have multiple lightning nodes using the same key or you get unpredictable behavior. Maybe that’s just for routing nodes?

I wonder if we could somehow shard the private key using FROST so that outbound payments are still federated? I’m out of my depth on this one.


Who would manage the lightning gateway?


What role does she think stable channels will play in international trade.

Given the recent talks about a US bitcoin reserve it makes sense for the Fed and/or Treasury to set up stable channels, print dollars, and have sats flow to their side of the channel.


Planning to run LND since I’m comfortable with Go and hope to contribute in the near future.


Time to move up the stack and start running my own lightning node. I’ve only ever kept “coffee” money in my hot wallet and accepted the default UX from Phoenix and Mutiny but alas those days are behind us. It was a good run.


“The computer - a new form of life dedicated to pure thought… [people] will minister to its bodily needs with electricity and spare parts… We are the reproductive organs of the computer.”
- Robert Jastrow, 1981


Is it possible to replicate the features of opendime strictly with software?

Specifically: can you hand off a UTXO to someone, without going on chain, and provably transfer ownership so that it’s not possible for the previous owner to spend it?

I’m sure it would require some non-standard address, signing mechanism, or maybe even a soft fork?

This would give us many of the benefits of #ecash (privacy and avoiding transaction fees) while maintaining the security of layer one.

#askNostr #bitcoin #BTC


COLDCARD is excellent; thank you for your dedication to security.

Question: when someone buys a hardware wallet they provide a shipping address that can later be leaked. Ledger famously leaked customer emails and physical addresses for example. Any tips on mitigating that? Use an alias and ship to your employer’s address?


“There is no anti-memetics division” is a short read and interesting idea.

The writing isn’t great, but if you can get past that it’s fun to think about.

It’s set in a world where there are “ideas” and creatures that are impossible to remember after encountering them. Some of them wipe your memory while others destroy you and everyone else’s memory of you.


If you’re a big AI shop pushing open-weight models but not sharing the training data then you can easily introduce targeted blind spots.

What happens when nation state-backed labs push out state of the art open weight models so that people embed them in their applications with intentional weaknesses?

Reminder: if the service (or model) is free then you’re the “product”. Or in this case you’re the target.

#ai #LLM #cybersecurity


I wonder if we’ll see more wallet providers and LSPs choose the Fedimint model to reduce their risk. Spread the federation guardians across many jurisdictions.

If your jurisdiction labels you an unlicensed money transmitter you simply quit and your users won’t notice a difference. Funds still move.

If one guardian wants to retire then the mint can still function and lightning payments can still be routed.

Seems to be a more stable solution albeit you now have a custodian.


With all the lightning wallets shutting down it’s becoming more apparent we need decentralized lightning service providers.

I’ve spent most of my time on the base chain, but now it’s time to learn more about running a LN node and how routing works.


You provided a great service to the community and we were lucky to have your services. Good luck with your future endeavors!


Today’s AI is already  capable of learning animal language [1]. This implies we can create a universal translation system between not just various human languages but also bridge the gap between humans and animals.

We’re also developing more sophisticated brain-computer-interfaces [2] and trialing them in both animals and humans. It’s not only possible, but likely we’ll have high fidelity real time communication between humans and their pets in the coming decade or two. What a time to be alive.

Sources:
1. https://news.mit.edu/2024/csail-ceti-explores-sperm-whale-alphabet-0507

2. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41928-023-01041-8


The big AI shops have access to a lot of the internet’s content from the era before LLM proliferation. This is one motivating factor for why they release models publicly: more AI generated content on the internet creates a moat around their data.

By training and releasing these open source models they create a sort of fog of war for people that come after them since training on AI generated content distorts the output distribution of your model. They’re effectively polluting the digital environment or at least enabling others to do it because it benefits their business model.

Webs of trust are going to become even more important for us as they’ll reduce some of the noise. We need more solutions to this problem though.

#ai #llm


An interesting paper presented at Neurips ‘21 with code about cellular automata whose transition rules are learned:

https://github.com/danielegrattarola/GNCA

This could probably be used to simulate all sorts of things including an economy. Might also be useful in producing self-healing structures.


Does anyone have any recommendations for books on discrete spacetime?

I read “Three Roads To Quantum Gravity” by Smolin about 15 years ago and think he discusses the idea IIRC.

#askNostr


On black hole singularities. This is a long one!

My background is in applied math and computer science not physics! I’m certain I’m missing something here. This is just for fun.

During neutron star core collapse, the quark gluon plasma must be, as far as we know, locally constrained by the Uncertainty principle. As the core collapses the position of other particles is further constrained while being accelerated and therefore have higher uncertainty in momentum.

However, the uncertainty in momentum is bounded above by some finite multiple of c. Momentum can’t grow unbounded because that implies infinite energy. Acceleration is limited by the energy available locally which is that of itself, neighboring particles, and local vacuum energy: all finite.

How then can the quark gluon plasma degenerate into a singularity of infinitesimal size? Maybe they “fuse” and become a single “particle” (in quotes because particles are fuzzy objects to begin with) of nonzero “volume”? Maybe this is what the holographic principle is saying but I can’t make any sense of AdS-CFT correspondence 😩.

Once you have a single particle there’s no gravitational attraction to continue the collapse. Of course from afar other massive objects continue to feel gravitational attraction but locally you have a single particle.

Some might say “the uncertainty principle breaks down at these extremes. Our model isn’t valid in this regime” and fair enough! However, I would argue that that’s an artifact of the model (the commutator of specific linear operators on a Hilbert space). Maybe spacetime isn’t a complete vector space but at our observable scale it approximates one.

The uncertainty principle is just an approximation of what happens in reality. I’m not aware of any experiments proving it breaks down at the Planck scale. I argue that whatever quirk of nature that causes the uncertainty principle is the very thing that prevents black hole singularities from forming.

#physics #blackHoles  #gravity


My hero. Thank you!


Block hashes are a good form of entropy that we can all use to sync random number generators.

For example when doing experiments or training AI models. Maybe we can finally fix the reproducibility issue.


GRR Martin finishes all of the remaining GoT books


It was a play on a quote from “Clerks 2” 😅


Sometimes in the heat of the moment it’s ok to sudo a remote script blindly


Ledger has a history of security breaches and bad practices too


The Olympics: sponsored by Amazon prime


Free trade isn’t possible in a fiat economy. Over time only the people closest to the “money printer” are economically relevant.

You may have the illusion of free trade because you’re allowed to buy and sell goods with whomever but in aggregate your signal is drowned out and producers will make decisions independent of you.

Only when the economy uses a neutral currency can we return to free trade and rational economic behavior.

#economics #bitcoin


Wolfram, Hasabis, Sutskever, and Lecun


“If the fiat price doesn’t do what I want when a politician talks about it then we’ve failed!”

Somehow that doesn’t feel like Satoshi’s vibe.


In the first half of the 20th century the world had people like Hilbert, Bohr, Von Neumann, Einstein, Feynman, Fermi, Gödel, Noether, Oppenheimer, Erdos, Dirac, Poincaré, etc.

Where are these types of people today? We have Perelman and Wiles. Maybe Maldacena or Arkani-Hamed?

Was the early 20th century a unique period of fertile scientific ground just waiting to be uncovered by smart people or was there an unusually high supply of gifted scientists in that era?


Ray Kurzweil predicts that by 2029 we’ll have reached longevity escape velocity. Meaning if you’re alive in 2029 the advances in medicine will accelerate fast enough to allow you to live “forever” (assuming no accidents).

Has your money reached escape velocity yet, anon? Might make sense just to get some #bitcoin in case.


When you put ChatGPT in your protein powder.


We owe John von Neumann a debt of gratitude for his work to prevent patent trolling of early “stored-program” computers.

He circulated his EDVAC report widely so that the idea couldn’t be patented thus giving birth to the modern open computing industry.


If the BlackHat or DEFCON conferences are any indication then bringing a device at all makes you vulnerable. Consider leaving everything at home.


It’s not altruism. Companies like Meta and Google made their fortunes by processing data and curating it for their audience.

These open source models will be used in all sorts of applications and therefore Meta will continue to shape society with them. It also makes it nearly impossible for some startup to raise money to compete since these models are hard to compete with.

“Commoditize your complement” as Joel Spolsky calls it.


Life-pro-tip: at least once in your life train for an endurance race. A marathon, century ride, Iron Man, etc.

You'll learn many valuable life lessons during the endeavor. You'll learn patience, humility, perseverance, and time management. You'll learn about your own limits. You'll become healthier. You'll probably make friends along the way.

These events require discipline to even finish. You will better understand how food affects you and how meal timing can improve your performance. If you take it seriously you'll develop better sleep habits as well.

The skills you acquire when training for an endurance race also transfer well to other domains.

#fitness #marathon #LPT #health


They put ads in the operating system and force close applications for auto-install when you’re not looking too.

That operating system has been borderline hostile towards its users for over a decade.


In the near future we’ll have viral LLMs that infect all sorts of machines. They’ll use local resources to retrain and adapt to changing ecosystems. Many reasons for initial creation: cyberwarfare, economic subterfuge, push propaganda, lulz, etc.

You can imagine that in order to remain viable long term these things will learn to remove other LLM viruses so they can monopolize compute and defend themselves against removal. A sort of GAN.

This leads to a Darwinian evolution of viral LLMs that we should be prepared for or at least study. I’d be shocked if they don’t already exist in the wild.

#ai #llm #GAN


No matter the solution consumers will need to pay some portion or else we end up with the same perverse incentive structure as the advertisement model.

With ads the consumer isn’t the paying customer so the service provider’s incentives aren’t aligned with those of the consumer. That led to monetizing the consumer’s attention and a meteoric rise in essentially surveillance tech.

We need to align all interested parties.


Fed Cashu mint incoming 😂


Looking forward to VoIP on Nostr one day so we can have trust in caller ID and proper spam filtering.


Nice advertisement for Nostr Web Services. No DNS required.


In cybersecurity there’s the concept of tarpits: environments that slow down malicious actors in order to increase odds of detection or successful counter offensives.

Much of today’s social media feels like a tarpit for companies to slow people down long enough to target them with ads.

#grownostr


This lines up awfully close to the growth of the internet in American and European households. Likely unrelated but an interesting coincidence nonetheless.


The kilogram and the meter were first introduced in the late 18th century to standardize measurements. The joule was introduced in the 19th century.

International trade benefited massively from adopting these standards. Without these a merchant might need to know the local units for each country or region they did business in and further have to trust the methods of measurement which were often manipulated for profit.

We now use these units in textbooks, research papers, and specs all across the world and humanity has the benefit of being able to compare weights and lengths across the world and through generations.

Until 2009 we didn’t have a precise unit for economic measurement: local currencies introduce the same problems we had with weights and the global supply of gold isn’t auditable. With the introduction of Bitcoin we’ve set the stage for a new era of economic development and prosperity.

The world is still learning to live with this new unit though and there’s a real motivation for some people to slow adoption at all costs. We’re truly living in exciting times.

#bitcoin #history #standards #economics


When earlier humans discovered how to harness energy to cook food and outsource digestion we evolved into a new species. We consumed more energy to improve our biological processes in a way that allowed us to flourish.

In just the last 10-20 years as web search and then LLMs began proliferating, we began outsourcing mental “digestion” analogous to the leap we made with cooked food.

This most likely marks the subtle beginning of a new species. The transition won’t happen in a decade, but over the course of many generations as those who embrace technology will outcompete those who do not.

The difference this time is that we have the ability to record these changes with high fidelity in ways our ancestors couldn’t and therefore future generations will better understand this transition into yet another species.

Imagine having millions of hours of video of ancestral human species as they lived before the use of fire.

Assuming the above holds true, how does cyberwarfare play a role? Does polluting a group’s cyberspace have an impact analogous to limiting earlier humans access to fire? And how does bitcoin play a role given its pivotal role in digital commerce, savings, and cybersecurity?

#evolution #sapiens #ai #llm #energy #bitcoin #cybersecurity


If the average consumer has so much debt they won’t have excess liquidity for years to come then bitcoin at any price becomes unaffordable. They just need to keep rates high long enough to rack up sufficiently high debt before lowering them again.

Effectively blocking the exits without doing so explicitly.


A network’s value scales somewhere between n² (Metcalfe’s law) and  2^n (Reed’s law) where n is the number of users. There are tipping points and saturation points where the marginal value of each user is amplified or dampened (due to congestion) respectively.

Because Bitcoin’s model is simple and open and makes minimal assumptions about its users it can accommodate many independent networks: energy grids, monetary networks, social networks, cybersecurity, etc.

It can act as a bridge between all of these other large and valuable networks (Schelling Point). The lightning network alleviates congestion for some applications which in turn reduces dampening effects due to congestion. eCash does as well.

I’m excited to see what else we come up with to attract other networks.


I’ll take a look! I’ll be out the next several weeks but will pick it up in mid to late July


To summarize: many words bad. Few words better. Bitcoin best.


Gensler a closet anarchist?!


If you want more privacy in Bitcoin you might be interested in Silent Payments - https://bips.dev/352/


The name comes from Thailand but this particular sauce is exclusively made in the US.


For all of human history our societies were largely bound by geography. The average person’s wealth, generally speaking, was limited to the region they were born or settled in.

With the invention of the telegraph and the automobile and the airplane people became more mobile but at the same time our currencies failed and were captured by regional powers therefore again constraining our movement.

The consequences of having a secure and decentralized digital money are still very much under appreciated. In much the same degree the airplane changed civilization, bitcoin too will shape the direction of history.

#nomad #bitcoin


I didn’t get far yet and after seeing the work on NDS it’s probably better to swarm on that for now. I’d love to help in some capacity though!


nostr:npub12rv5lskctqxxs2c8rf2zlzc7xx3qpvzs3w4etgemauy9thegr43sf485vg do you know of any efforts to build escrow/collateral systems on top of Cashu so that the mint loses funds if they rug users?

I’m just learning about FROST. Wonder if that can be part of the solution. I’ve heard it can be used for making off-chain covenants?

Proof of reserves is reactive while escrow is proactive.

#ecash #covenants #cashu


Before going too crazy, try experimenting with mint inside a docker container. That way if you completely screw up your system packages you can reset without fear.


And while you’re at it you can sell recent purchases at a loss and buy back immediately. This way you realize a loss and you can write it off on your taxes.

Wash sale restrictions don’t apply to bitcoin.


PSA: wash sale rules don’t apply to Bitcoin so you can sell part of your stack and buy back immediately to realize a loss and claim that on your taxes.

This only applies to real Bitcoin and not the ETFs. This dip might be a good opportunity depending on your cost basis.


LLMs are effectively just functions. The prompt is an argument. You could build a stack frame from the prompt, LLM model, an HTTP endpoint as the return address, and a distributed vector DB for the heap.

With this in place you need a runtime. You could probably build the runtime on Nostr.

A system like this could be ran by millions of people in a decentralized way and although would have higher latencies than centralized models like ChatGPT it might be more powerful.

Prompts could be paid for with #bitcoin via #lightning or #ecash. Miners can supplement their revenue by providing access to high performance compute and still earn bitcoin.

#ai #mining


The first place you might see it is in cafes and hotels.

Eventually we might see communities deploy mesh networks to cover larger areas to earn sats this way. Imagine not needing a cell phone plan because you can pay as you go on these community networks.


Very excited to see this happening. I begrudgingly started on an OpenWRT package to do the same thing but pleased to see someone else get there first!


OpenAI is now being deployed to the Apple ecosystem, embedded in many Microsoft products, taking up massive amounts of compute in Azure and Oracle Cloud, and has a former leader from the NSA on their board so presumably they’ll pick up military and intelligence contracts.

This is a centralized system becoming more powerful at least partially because the economic incentives encourage that. Bitcoin has proven that a decentralized system can work and dominate if the incentives are right. We as a community need to work on this problem. Open source models aren’t a solution if they’re just being subsidized by VCs.

Many Bitcoin mining centers are adopting AI workloads for revenue diversity so maybe we can lean into that somehow. A tighter integration between AI and the Bitcoin economy feels like the right direction. Something to think about.

#ai #decentralized #chatGPT #bitcoin


LND Versions Prior to v0.17.0 Vulnerable to LND Onion Bomb DoS Attack

"If you are running an LND release older than this, your funds are at risk! Update to at least v0.17.0 to protect your node."

https://www.nobsbitcoin.com/lnd-versions-prior-to-v0-17-0-vulnerable-to-lnd-onion-bomb-dos-attack/


Beat me to it 😅


At some point due to bugs in Nostr clients or back doors built in to operating systems and hardware a lot of nprivs will be stolen. If the attacker is smart they’ll only compromise specific accounts to infiltrate target webs of trust.

We haven’t built the necessary defenses yet. Hardware signers are a good start but we need the UX to catch up. We need protocols for reliably communicating compromises.

That aside I’m bullish on Nostr!


Can we get some degree of covenants with FROST [1] implemented within wallets and coordinated over Nostr rather than requiring them on chain?

#askNostr #covenants #bitcoin

1. https://eprint.iacr.org/2020/852 - Flexible Round Optimized Schnorr Thresholds (FROST)


On this Father’s Day let us all celebrate the father of Nostr. Thank you nostr:npub180cvv07tjdrrgpa0j7j7tmnyl2yr6yr7l8j4s3evf6u64th6gkwsyjh6w6 !


Establishing a web of trust will be hard when you keep deleting your npubs. And if you telegraph your identity change to your web beforehand then it’s kind of unnecessary. Social graphs have their own fingerprint to deanonymize you.

Great for privacy and useful for OpSec though if you don’t reestablish connections.


The price consumers are willing to pay for a good or service is partially a function of transaction costs. People usually won’t pay more than 2-3% transaction fees.

When on chain fees regularly cost as much as a cup of coffee it doesn’t make sense to make small purchases with bitcoin.

Once we get the UX for 2nd and 3rd layers dialed in then we may find ourselves in a world where a cup of coffee can cost 20-30 sats.


Bitdeer is just another arm of Bitmain. Jihan Wu, the CEO of Bitdeer, is the cofounder and chairman of Bitmain. We really need an alternative to this guy.


Beware of Bitdeer. It’s just another face of Bitmain which already has a dangerous monopoly on ASICs. We can do better.


Doesn’t work like that anymore. iPhones (and I think Google Pixel phones) can be located even when off.

https://www.theverge.com/22697218/iphone-apple-ios-15-find-my-how-to


Check out BIP 352 - silent payments. You can share a single code and each payment made to it is to a new address. Great for privacy and also more convenient.

https://github.com/bitcoin/bips/blob/master/bip-0352.mediawiki


And don’t forget to finish with Listerine for a truly refreshing experience!

(don’t actually do that)


Whatever your opinion you should spend time hearing from others who have the opposite opinion. You’ll grow from that experience.

People often operate on assumptions that turn out incorrect or incomplete and we’re all guilty of that.


Reminder that pseudonyms aren’t sufficient for maintaining privacy against determined actors.

Your style of writing, your voice, the topics you choose to talk about, anything that differentiates you from anybody else can be used to identify you.

When you post on Nostr you broadcast your IP. The relays you choose to connect to reveal something about you.

Be careful out there!


Wait until he discovers hamsters running in wheels


ECash can be useful in high trust environments. Perhaps good for families to share a lightning node or for an online game of poker among friends. Or for use as credits on a platform where you have to pay up front anyway.


We need one that fits entire cars now. The amount of surveillance tech that comes standard in vehicles today is borderline criminal.


You can add infrared lights to the bill of a hat so that it blinds cameras but isn’t visible to the naked eye. There are videos online where people show off a proof of concept, but I’m not sure there’s enough of a market to justify a whole line though.


And further imagine something like a WiFi access point that charges you per minute or per GB. Cafes could earn sats by opening up their access points. People in densely populated areas of cities could provide extra access points as well.


How better to hide inflation than by creating as many release valves as possible?


That’s an interesting point but in either case they’re not a majority owned US company. The bill of rights doesn’t apply to them in this case.


One potential danger is that the “local” AI records all actions and when it comes across something of interest it phones home with an obfuscated payload.

These things can be trained to return a single plaintext vector that encodes what actions you took and then makes you a target. Unless you have the proper decoder network you won’t be able to decipher it. Doing it this way allows them to ship everything in just model weights.


ByteDance is a Chinese company…


The first amendment gives rights to citizens of the US not foreign controlled companies, right? Yes American citizens are posting on there but that doesn’t mean the company has a right to push their platform. Doesn’t feel like a violation IMHO but I’m not a lawyer 🤷


What’s your favorite thing to do when you get home from work?


More bitcoin software developers continue to drop.

"..not everyone on our team is in a position to risk continuing with the project. Thus the RoninDojo team has shrunk significantly in size.."

https://blog.ronindojo.io/always-rise-after-a-fall/


follow counts on a decentralized network are a lie and easily abused 👁

all you need to do is create millions of fake contact lists with your pubkey on it. nostr:note1sllq6tkqq5fmnxag5qdlk36sycpkvh4dkpneu70a7lyc05zpk0gsmgc2fm


Thankfully the community is starting to push back organically. A lot of us are no longer willing to use ad supported services that abuse us because of their bad incentives.

When a service uses ads for support, the person paying them is not the consumer but rather a disinterested third party. That creates very perverse incentives, but with a neutral censorship resistant digital money services can monetize without having to rely on ad revenue.

Here’s a great example:

https://blog.getalby.com/block-ads-and-pay-in-bitcoin-today/


Burned over 1 million sats by being lazy and copying the wrong address in a hurry. It’s a valid address but I think it’s for an old test wallet🤦♂

Anyway. Consider it a donation to the network.


US Senate Votes to Kill SEC Bitcoin Accounting Policy in a Historical Vote

President Biden now has ten working days to either sign or veto the bill.

https://www.nobsbitcoin.com/us-senate-votes-to-kill-sec-bitcoin-accounting-rule/


Setup a pihole on your network and add those domains to your blocklist. If you change anything on your OS itself then you risk it being thwarted on next update.


Are you sure? It seems to ask for an email verification…


Most of the private torrent communities require email for invite. If you run one of these sites consider supporting npubs!

#torrent #grownostr


Nostr feels like the early internet before it was commercialized to death. Regardless of stats we should celebrate this bastion of nerds and misfits while we have it ❤


Wonder if this will be used as partial justification by the SEC to (rightfully IMO) reject the ETH ETF in the US.


Another hack: designating a portion of each day away from technology. No phone, laptop, podcasts, car, etc.

An hour or two each day does wonders for your brain and you’ll be surprised by how your thoughts change over time.


Have you considered the Pine Phone? It has hardware switches for everything that can spy on you and even has a LoRa attachment available.

https://pine64.org/devices/pinephone/


There’s also btcd

https://github.com/btcsuite/btcd


European Central Bank president, Christine Lagarde, announces the launch of the EU's new CBDC—the digital euro—which will enable unelected technocrats to dictate how, when, where, on what and by whom it can be spent, including the imposition of social credit, carbon allowance and vaccine passport systems.

And despite the lie that "cash is here to stay", you can be absolutely certain that megalomaniacs like Lagarde have every intention of gradually phasing out cash altogether.

https://telegra.ph/file/d609b4e51c4dbd53e767e.mp4


We need to open up the physical access points for these networks we’re building. Bitcoin, Nostr, etc are all great for people who have access but what if you can’t connect? We need more projects focused on p2p physical device connection. Could be over #wifi or #LoRa or even #bluetooth


This would be especially helpful for travelers or people who don’t have steady housing.

#lightning #nomad #value


Nostr is great and all but how can we enable people who don’t have their own internet service provider subscription?

One idea is for average people to setup a pay-per-use WiFi hotspot from their home networks. Authentication and payment via lightning. We need maybe an OpenWRT package that people can install and configure to pay their wallet?

Imagine earning sats by renting out your bandwidth. Let me know if anyone is working on this. Would love to help out.


Soon we’ll be able to bring a burner phone across borders and once settled in we just enter 12 words into a setup script and be done.

We’ll have all our contacts and lightning wallet ready to go. Let the border agents steal the blank phone if they insist.

If we can get enough people to open up their WiFi to the public (and earn sats?!) then we won’t even need mobile data plans when traveling.


He’s coming for our spice!
https://m.primal.net/IGct.jpg


Any tips on how to avoid KYC on primal? A lightning wallet shouldn’t need a verified email.


No digital ID = No food in china… https://video.nostr.build/8a89dd86079840a9d13591f6d452f43842dc14f08945b7d087f9cd4578abee63.mp4


This is beautiful. Great job Calle! Thank you for all the hard work on Cashu!


“But we need inflation or else the economy dies!!”

Assume everyone’s income and savings keeps pace with inflation. Then there’s no reason to have inflation… It only works if on average it takes purchasing power away from the majority of people.


“If physical cash was invented today, it would probably be illegal.”

Learn about the past, present, and future of #Ecash with nostr:npub12rv5lskctqxxs2c8rf2zlzc7xx3qpvzs3w4etgemauy9thegr43sf485vg
#Titcoin
https://youtu.be/cit4-edRl70


If humans are still using Bitcoin after becoming multiplanetary then it’s likely mining infrastructure moves closer to the sun for abundant cheap energy. It would be an arms race to see who could capture more sunlight to power their rigs.

You might expect to see mining equipment in a tighter orbit around the sun so those machines have less latency between each other as well. This also lowers average latency for on chain transactions since planets are often on opposing sides of the sun so a lot of communication has to pass by there anyway.


The Samurai wallet indictment alleges the Samurai service is a money transmitter despite not meeting the definitions set forth by FinCEN. The service itself never took control of funds nor did it transmit the funds. If this case rules in favor of the DoJ then it sets a precedent that could be used to target mining in the US.

A miner takes transactions and includes them in a block and then broadcasts them out to the network. This process is not meaningfully different from what Samurai was doing if we go by the extremely loose definition of money transmitter the DoJ is proposing.

This means that all miners could eventually be forced to apply for a money transmitter license which can be denied or revoked on political grounds. It also drastically raises the barrier of entry and so pushes the industry into the hands of those companies and individuals who are politically connected or who can afford the lawyers to help them acquire the license.

Reminder that this is coming at a time where Antpool has almost 50% of the hashrate. If mining is jeopardized in the US then expect Antpool to have well over 50%. Now is the time to raise awareness and share your concerns with policymakers.


It would be great if it couldn’t even get to the inbox unless there’s a stamp.

Thanks for building this app!


Does it make sense to have a setting for receivers to require stamps too?

Use case: if someone outside of my contacts sends me a note then they have to pay me to read it.


Not sure it counts as a single page template but this engineer used traceroute to distribute his resume. That sells the candidate far better than any well formatted pdf in my opinion.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32609588


Does the samurai case open the door for requiring miners apply for money transmitting licenses 🤔

This effectively kills pleb mining in the US


This is a great theory. It does a great job explaining Russia’s motivation and their point of view. It discounts the US point of view though.

Do you remember the solar winds hack? Remember all the critical infrastructure that Russia has been probing and even the gas pipeline they hit with ransomware? They invested a lot of resources into their troll factories to sway public opinion in the west to whatever suits their needs. They are clearly hostile to the West and at some point a hot war was inevitable.


It’s likely they connect them even if by accident. For regulatory reasons they will at the very least be storing logs for a few years. Samurai leaked Xpubs despite explicitly being a privacy tool.


Yet another money transmitter taken offline 😩


Their whole foundation makes no sense. “The beurgeoisie have too much influence on society. Let’s replace them with a group called the State instead and codify their superiority in law. That will fix it!”

nostr:note1egwresn6lngsgy2d2pwnhxe8k25x8fx9zyvqrm2qgrm5398zs93ssx0wda


It’s inevitable. When there’s no friction for creating an account you’ll get spam. Paid relays can help but then you get relay centralization long term


Just wait until people start putting computers in their brains at scale.

https://www.reuters.com/technology/first-law-protecting-consumers-brainwaves-signed-by-colorado-governor-2024-04-18/


Little chance Russia is banning it. Their government will make it so they have a monopoly on mining within their borders. They’ll tightly control on and off ramps. They’ll set up their own lightning networks to control cross-border flows. Their oligarchs understand its utility and won’t give it up. It’s still early in this game.


Too many of y’all are greatly underestimating what’s ahead in terms of government attack against freedom tech in the U.S. (with global ramifications)

Too many of y’all are greatly underestimating what we can do about it as users, American citizens, and through our legal system.

Good. Day. 🇺🇸✊🏻


Modern day smoke signals!

On a related note, this guy has a project to transmit #ecash over Reticulum so it supports HAM and LoRa as well as WiFi:

https://github.com/jooray/nutband


I’m on the fence here. Initially I was against these shitcoin games but then I remembered steganography was a thing. Those clever bastards.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steganography


If Antpool does indeed control the block template for more than half the hashrate then they become a natural ally for the legacy system that wants to control payments.

Expect more developments there. The ECB and the US Fed would prefer maintaining some level of control over having none at all and will inevitably partner with any pool in that position.


In cybersecurity there’s the “zero trust” model. I wonder if collateralizing all network requests with eCash can be part of the model too?


Are people aware that any relay, nostr address or media server admin can see their IP? 😅😂

Always assume that you will be, at a least, registered in a DB. Act accordingly.


Thank you! At least I’ll get to have plenty of fun time on my boat with my seed backup between now and then


Is 1099-A retroactive? Meaning: do they require people to report transactions that happened before 2025?


As a community we shouldn’t strive for “no fees” because that implies the mints or LSPs aren’t providing value. Fewer fees is nice though.

The custodial aspect is a valid concern though. We need more alternatives.


It’s the year 2140. The sun has been partially covered by the unfinished Dyson sphere that powers the bitcoin mining industry. The plebs trading memes for #ecash on nostr relays in the Kuiper Belt hardly remember a time when they could shitpost from the beaches of Florida.


#MicroStrategy needs to help decentralize #mining if they want to spend their coins securely and sovereignly in the future.

The lightning network won’t matter if nobody can open a channel with them.


More is better but we need every country to participate if we want to avoid censorship


Almost certainly bots. It’s inevitable. Just remember there are many forms of censorship, but the most practical one in the digital world is to crowd out useful discussion.

This is guaranteed to occur in many ways unless there’s a prohibitive cost to posting. The next phase will be to make it impossible to discover new quality accounts to follow. Then the popular accounts of today will be targets.