“Though we do not wholly believe it yet, the interior life is a real life, and the intangible dreams of people have a tangible effect on the world”
As I reflect on spending three days with some of the world’s most innovative, persistent, and creative Bitcoiners, this quote from James Baldwin really resonates
Through a mix of code and action people are quite literally (to borrow a term from @Jeff Booth) **bending** the world in a new direction
There is a lot of darkness, but let’s not loose track of the light. It’s there, and it’s real
Onwards! 🫡
Lots of debate about the Saylor / Saifedean conversation
I thought it was really interesting
No one really knows what credit will look like in a Bitcoin Standard
They both make good points
I tend to think that (young, less capitalized, etc) people will of course still borrow to buy a car or or a home, to Michael's point
But I also agree with some of Saifdean's points about the inevitable decline in value of government debt
People seemed to hyperlock onto a short clip of it on X and spit takes instead of listening to the whole thing which is unfortunate
There's way too much 100% agreement in this space so a 2-hour animated conversation with two people who do share a lot in common but really disagree strongly on some stuff and aren't afraid to push back is very refreshing
"We can't entrust our primary communications network to a handful of corruptible humans. And now we don't have to."
I had the pleasure to work with Reason on this Nostr explainer video this summer
Happy to see it in the wild!
https://m.primal.net/KsvE.mov
Surfed this morning, 3 dolphins came right into the line up and caught waves and played around (literally swimming right under/next to you) for 5 minutes, was incredible, nature is amazing 🐬 🤙
I had the honor to interview María Corina Machado, the leader of the Venezuelan opposition, about how fiat money was weaponized against the Venezuelan people by the Chávez and Maduro regimes
She says Bitcoin is a "lifeline" and "vital means of resistance" and said that a future democratic Venezuelan government will use Bitcoin to rebuild the national reserves that the Chávistas stole and put Venezuela back on a path to peace and prosperity
I've put out a lot of content in the past few years but I think this is the most important thing I've done -- the implications are vast considering a) Venezuela is one of the world's largest energy exporters with some of the world's largest oil reserves and b) María Corina Machado is not some rogue leader or dictator but a US ally
I hope you can watch 🇻🇪
https://m.primal.net/KfiC.mov
Maduro is a horrible horrible murderous corrupt socialist criminal who has helped destroy Venezuela
did you know that the once-proud country is the cause the world’s largest refugee crisis?
https://m.primal.net/KdMI.png
Started using Nostr to collect fantasy football dues for the 6th annual SatBowl
10/10, no notes
In the near future there will be fantasy football apps entirely built on nostr, looking forward to that
P.S. before you jest, remember that close to 70 million (!) Americans play fantasy sports, all together sending billions of small transactions every year
I would strongly recommend this book
It hasn't gotten a lot of attention but is definitely worth it
The thesis is simple
Just as the dollar moved from being based on gold to being based on oil (the petrodollar), it is today in the process of moving to a new base of Bitcoin, with the help of stablecoins
But thankfully the book doesn't end there with that dark outcome
It heavily implies that through proper engineering and layering and technologies like ecash, we can defeat the fiat system
https://store.bitcoinmagazine.com/products/the-bitcoin-dollar-book
Here's my profile for Reason on Nostr and why it could very well change the world
Pasting a few paragraphs here, you can find the rest at the link
Feel free to spread far and wide 😉
*************
Can Nostr Make Twitter's Dreams Come True?
Twitter's founder says Nostr is “100 percent what we wanted”—an open, ownerless network
Alex Gladstein | 8.13.2024
Virtually everyone agrees that social media is broken. On Facebook, X, Instagram, and TikTok, people fear out-of-control algorithms, fake news, state actor censorship, and propaganda. Google and Meta collect vast troves of personal information on their users and receive hundreds of thousands of requests every year from governments around the world to access that data. YouTube has become arguably "the most powerful media platform in the history of humanity," yet its algorithm is an ever-changing black box to the creators that populate the platform with videos. During the pandemic, federal officials were in contact with every major social media platform, coercing them to remove content.
The problem is centralized control. We can't trust companies to run our primary communications infrastructure. Government regulation only makes matters worse because it creates new legal barriers to entering the industry, which protects incumbent players and stifles innovation.
What if there were an alternative, not owned by Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, or the Chinese Communist Party? What if there were a way to control your own data to prevent companies from harvesting and monetizing it? What if you had granular control over what you see in your feed, with the freedom to choose your own algorithms? What if you owned your identity, which could be accessed seamlessly across different clients? That way, if you disapprove of the changes that Elon Musk brought to X, instead of closing your account you could take your handle and followers elsewhere.
That alternative exists. It's called "Notes and Other Stuff Transmitted by Relays"—or Nostr.
The Decentralized Solution
Invented by a pseudonymous programmer and overwhelmingly funded by grants from non-profit foundations, this decentralized, free, and open-source protocol has been quietly evolving for the past three years. Like bitcoin, Nostr is a community-run digital network highly resistant to censorship and corruption. It has 40,000 weekly active users and a growing ecosystem of clients and applications ranging from social media to long-form publishing to payments.
Nostr is only necessary because our existing internet is so broken.
Fifteen years ago, social media seemed destined to decentralize the world and give power back to the people. In 2009, we watched as Arab Spring activists used Twitter and Facebook to organize, coordinate, and help topple several long-standing dictatorships. The promise was that these new social platforms, designed by Silicon Valley entrepreneurs, could help liberate the masses.
It was intoxicating—but turned out to be a mirage. The Arab revolutions stalled out when brutal military regimes cracked down. These platforms became tools for spying and censoring their users. X and Facebook have helped journalists and human rights activists reach bigger audiences, but they haven't fulfilled their revolutionary promise.
Jack Dorsey's Shift from Bluesky to Nostr
This was a major theme at the 2024 Oslo Freedom Forum, which is put on annually by the Human Rights Foundation, where I serve as chief strategy officer. At this conference for democracy and human rights, Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey told the audience that the problem was, actually, guys like him: The very fact that Twitter, now X, has a CEO makes it a single point of failure. Governments routinely pressured Dorsey to censor content; once the company's offices in India were raided. Dorsey says that under the new Musk regime X complies with whatever governments want.
The X network is proprietary. Known as a "silo," this construct traps a user's identity, followers, and data. X also has the power to evict anyone from the platform and delete what they've written. Several years ago, when he was still running the company, Dorsey became convinced that Twitter should become an application instead, where users could post content to an open, ownerless network. This would make it similar to how bitcoin works, where you use an application called a wallet to interact with the network, but the network itself is neutral and open.
Building a non-proprietary architecture was Dorsey's original vision for Twitter, but over time the need to maximize revenue to build a business and serve shareholders undermined that goal.
Nevertheless, in 2021, Dorsey encouraged the creation of Bluesky—an initiative bootstrapped in-house to create that open neutral base layer. But after Musk bought the company, the managers of Bluesky were afraid they would run out of money and started raising funds from venture capitalists, which undermined the vision of building an open platform. Dorsey grew disenchanted and left the Bluesky board.
At the conference in Oslo, Dorsey explained what happened next:
I asked a question: What open source initiatives should I be funding that would be helpful to the public internet? And people kept tweeting at me that I should be looking at Nostr. I found the GitHub that described it and it was 100 percent what we wanted from Bluesky, but it wasn't developed from a company. It was completely independent. Its paper diagnosed every single problem we saw and had. But did it in a grassroots and dead simple way, that felt like the early Twitter where any developer could get on and really feel it.
Escaping the 'Golden Prisons'
Nostr was created in 2020 by the pseudonymous Brazilian programmer fiatjaf, who describes it as "the simplest open protocol that is able to create a censorship-resistant global 'social' network once and for all."
Though nobody is in charge, Nostr works as promised and is thriving. "It is the solution we've all been looking for," says Miljan Braticevic, founder of Primal, one of the two dozen plus clients now available for the Nostr protocol. "Nostr is not a Twitter competitor or a Mastodon competitor. This is the biggest misconception at the moment. That's just the tip of the iceberg. Nostr is nothing less than the foundation for the new internet. Meaning almost every conceivable app we have today will be built on Nostr."
Braticevic's prediction is echoed by at least a dozen other prominent developers. Martti Malmi, the first coder to work on bitcoin alongside Satoshi Nakamoto, is now a Nostr developer. In a recent talk, he said he had started to work on similar ideas around decentralized identity in 2019, only to come close to giving up. But then he found fiatjaf's invention, which he called a "godsend."
"Bitcoin is freedom of money, and Nostr is freedom of everything else," Malmi said. "I was there" in the earliest days of bitcoin, "and Nostr is even more intense."
For something that could be world-changing, Nostr is quite simple. To join, you sign up with a mobile or desktop client, which helps you to create a public and private key pair. The public key (or "npub") is used as your identifier, and you share it with clients and other users so that people can find your posts or pay you for your content. The private key ("nsec") is hidden by the user, stored safely (just like a bitcoin seed phrase), and is your way to log in to different services. Unlike platforms like X or Facebook, no other information is required to set up and use Nostr.
This gives users a powerful range of sovereignty. You can use a client, for example, that has strong hate speech controls. Or you can choose one that doesn't have any at all. You can use a client with aggressive algorithms, just like the ones X uses today. Or you can use one without any algorithm at all. Today, when you log in to an app like Primal, you can sort your feed by what's the latest, by what's most popular, by what's most zapped, or by customized keywords. It's up to you.
Last month, the macroeconomist Lyn Alden, author of one of the best books on bitcoin, published a long essay about Nostr's potential:
[Nostr] is a simple set of foundational building blocks that, if widely adopted, could gradually reshape "the Web" as we know it. Instead of a separate set of siloed social ecosystems, we could gravitate toward a more interoperable set of ecosystems, with more of the power dispersed to the content creators and to the audience, and away from the middlemen corporations.
The Nostr network is constructed like a spider web that can morph and regenerate, making it almost impossible to censor. When you set up a client on Nostr (perhaps, Primal or Damus on iOS; Amethyst on Android; or Coracle on the web), you choose from a variety of relays to connect to. This architecture ensures no single point of failure: If you are connected to seven or eight relays, and half of them choose to censor posts, your feed remains censorship-free, as your app will display the net sum of everything broadcast from each relay. If the Chinese government decides to attack your relays—as it did in 2023 when Damus launched on the Hong Kong and mainland app store—then more can be spun up. "The enemy," said Damus creator Will Casarin, "is too numerous."
Prominent bitcoin developer and educator Gigi—who switched to Nostr and deleted his X account—says that what helped it become so resilient is that it has zero exit cost. If the Chinese Communist Party bans YouTube, its domestic users lose everything. There's no way to get back their profiles and followers. The same is true if a user voluntarily closes an account.
Gigi calls these corporate silos "golden prisons" with no escape. Nostr's spider-like architecture makes escaping easy. If one client goes down, or you fail to connect to one relay, you just find another client or connect to another relay. You keep your posts, photos, preferences, contacts, and even algorithms of choice. If you use X, you are an X creator. But if you use Primal, you aren't a Primal creator, you are a Nostr creator.
https://reason.com/2024/08/13/can-nostr-make-twitters-dreams-come-true/
Ahmed is an amazing person and I am very proud that we could host him in Oslo. I don’t think we watched the same talk. Did you see the part where he walked through person by person all of his family that Israel killed?
Mustafa Barghouti also spoke, which you might be interested in. Video below.
Just FYI the suffering in Gaza received more stage time and focus at HRF’s annual event than any other topic this year (more than China, Russia, etc)
https://oslofreedomforum.com/talk/gaza-what-happens-next/
Honored to be able to help bring the Finney Freedom Prize into the world today
Hal was such an important figure, for so many reasons. We hope the prize can inspire many future Hals, as we move through the next 100+ years, where the fight for digital privacy and financial freedom will be so critical for the success of civilization and the open society
All details at finneyprize.org — be sure to watch the video about Hal’s life :)
Oddbean new post about login | logout
Notes by gladstein | export
Here's my profile for Reason on Nostr and why it could very well change the world Pasting a few paragraphs here, you can find the rest at the link Feel free to spread far and wide 😉 ************* Can Nostr Make Twitter's Dreams Come True? Twitter's founder says Nostr is “100 percent what we wanted”—an open, ownerless network Alex Gladstein | 8.13.2024 Virtually everyone agrees that social media is broken. On Facebook, X, Instagram, and TikTok, people fear out-of-control algorithms, fake news, state actor censorship, and propaganda. Google and Meta collect vast troves of personal information on their users and receive hundreds of thousands of requests every year from governments around the world to access that data. YouTube has become arguably "the most powerful media platform in the history of humanity," yet its algorithm is an ever-changing black box to the creators that populate the platform with videos. During the pandemic, federal officials were in contact with every major social media platform, coercing them to remove content. The problem is centralized control. We can't trust companies to run our primary communications infrastructure. Government regulation only makes matters worse because it creates new legal barriers to entering the industry, which protects incumbent players and stifles innovation. What if there were an alternative, not owned by Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, or the Chinese Communist Party? What if there were a way to control your own data to prevent companies from harvesting and monetizing it? What if you had granular control over what you see in your feed, with the freedom to choose your own algorithms? What if you owned your identity, which could be accessed seamlessly across different clients? That way, if you disapprove of the changes that Elon Musk brought to X, instead of closing your account you could take your handle and followers elsewhere. That alternative exists. It's called "Notes and Other Stuff Transmitted by Relays"—or Nostr. The Decentralized Solution Invented by a pseudonymous programmer and overwhelmingly funded by grants from non-profit foundations, this decentralized, free, and open-source protocol has been quietly evolving for the past three years. Like bitcoin, Nostr is a community-run digital network highly resistant to censorship and corruption. It has 40,000 weekly active users and a growing ecosystem of clients and applications ranging from social media to long-form publishing to payments. Nostr is only necessary because our existing internet is so broken. Fifteen years ago, social media seemed destined to decentralize the world and give power back to the people. In 2009, we watched as Arab Spring activists used Twitter and Facebook to organize, coordinate, and help topple several long-standing dictatorships. The promise was that these new social platforms, designed by Silicon Valley entrepreneurs, could help liberate the masses. It was intoxicating—but turned out to be a mirage. The Arab revolutions stalled out when brutal military regimes cracked down. These platforms became tools for spying and censoring their users. X and Facebook have helped journalists and human rights activists reach bigger audiences, but they haven't fulfilled their revolutionary promise. Jack Dorsey's Shift from Bluesky to Nostr This was a major theme at the 2024 Oslo Freedom Forum, which is put on annually by the Human Rights Foundation, where I serve as chief strategy officer. At this conference for democracy and human rights, Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey told the audience that the problem was, actually, guys like him: The very fact that Twitter, now X, has a CEO makes it a single point of failure. Governments routinely pressured Dorsey to censor content; once the company's offices in India were raided. Dorsey says that under the new Musk regime X complies with whatever governments want. The X network is proprietary. Known as a "silo," this construct traps a user's identity, followers, and data. X also has the power to evict anyone from the platform and delete what they've written. Several years ago, when he was still running the company, Dorsey became convinced that Twitter should become an application instead, where users could post content to an open, ownerless network. This would make it similar to how bitcoin works, where you use an application called a wallet to interact with the network, but the network itself is neutral and open. Building a non-proprietary architecture was Dorsey's original vision for Twitter, but over time the need to maximize revenue to build a business and serve shareholders undermined that goal. Nevertheless, in 2021, Dorsey encouraged the creation of Bluesky—an initiative bootstrapped in-house to create that open neutral base layer. But after Musk bought the company, the managers of Bluesky were afraid they would run out of money and started raising funds from venture capitalists, which undermined the vision of building an open platform. Dorsey grew disenchanted and left the Bluesky board. At the conference in Oslo, Dorsey explained what happened next: I asked a question: What open source initiatives should I be funding that would be helpful to the public internet? And people kept tweeting at me that I should be looking at Nostr. I found the GitHub that described it and it was 100 percent what we wanted from Bluesky, but it wasn't developed from a company. It was completely independent. Its paper diagnosed every single problem we saw and had. But did it in a grassroots and dead simple way, that felt like the early Twitter where any developer could get on and really feel it. Escaping the 'Golden Prisons' Nostr was created in 2020 by the pseudonymous Brazilian programmer fiatjaf, who describes it as "the simplest open protocol that is able to create a censorship-resistant global 'social' network once and for all." Though nobody is in charge, Nostr works as promised and is thriving. "It is the solution we've all been looking for," says Miljan Braticevic, founder of Primal, one of the two dozen plus clients now available for the Nostr protocol. "Nostr is not a Twitter competitor or a Mastodon competitor. This is the biggest misconception at the moment. That's just the tip of the iceberg. Nostr is nothing less than the foundation for the new internet. Meaning almost every conceivable app we have today will be built on Nostr." Braticevic's prediction is echoed by at least a dozen other prominent developers. Martti Malmi, the first coder to work on bitcoin alongside Satoshi Nakamoto, is now a Nostr developer. In a recent talk, he said he had started to work on similar ideas around decentralized identity in 2019, only to come close to giving up. But then he found fiatjaf's invention, which he called a "godsend." "Bitcoin is freedom of money, and Nostr is freedom of everything else," Malmi said. "I was there" in the earliest days of bitcoin, "and Nostr is even more intense." For something that could be world-changing, Nostr is quite simple. To join, you sign up with a mobile or desktop client, which helps you to create a public and private key pair. The public key (or "npub") is used as your identifier, and you share it with clients and other users so that people can find your posts or pay you for your content. The private key ("nsec") is hidden by the user, stored safely (just like a bitcoin seed phrase), and is your way to log in to different services. Unlike platforms like X or Facebook, no other information is required to set up and use Nostr. This gives users a powerful range of sovereignty. You can use a client, for example, that has strong hate speech controls. Or you can choose one that doesn't have any at all. You can use a client with aggressive algorithms, just like the ones X uses today. Or you can use one without any algorithm at all. Today, when you log in to an app like Primal, you can sort your feed by what's the latest, by what's most popular, by what's most zapped, or by customized keywords. It's up to you. Last month, the macroeconomist Lyn Alden, author of one of the best books on bitcoin, published a long essay about Nostr's potential: [Nostr] is a simple set of foundational building blocks that, if widely adopted, could gradually reshape "the Web" as we know it. Instead of a separate set of siloed social ecosystems, we could gravitate toward a more interoperable set of ecosystems, with more of the power dispersed to the content creators and to the audience, and away from the middlemen corporations. The Nostr network is constructed like a spider web that can morph and regenerate, making it almost impossible to censor. When you set up a client on Nostr (perhaps, Primal or Damus on iOS; Amethyst on Android; or Coracle on the web), you choose from a variety of relays to connect to. This architecture ensures no single point of failure: If you are connected to seven or eight relays, and half of them choose to censor posts, your feed remains censorship-free, as your app will display the net sum of everything broadcast from each relay. If the Chinese government decides to attack your relays—as it did in 2023 when Damus launched on the Hong Kong and mainland app store—then more can be spun up. "The enemy," said Damus creator Will Casarin, "is too numerous." Prominent bitcoin developer and educator Gigi—who switched to Nostr and deleted his X account—says that what helped it become so resilient is that it has zero exit cost. If the Chinese Communist Party bans YouTube, its domestic users lose everything. There's no way to get back their profiles and followers. The same is true if a user voluntarily closes an account. Gigi calls these corporate silos "golden prisons" with no escape. Nostr's spider-like architecture makes escaping easy. If one client goes down, or you fail to connect to one relay, you just find another client or connect to another relay. You keep your posts, photos, preferences, contacts, and even algorithms of choice. If you use X, you are an X creator. But if you use Primal, you aren't a Primal creator, you are a Nostr creator. https://reason.com/2024/08/13/can-nostr-make-twitters-dreams-come-true/