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The messages can wait. The notifications can accumulate. And in that breathing room, that space between stimulus and response, we might rediscover what it actually feels like to be fully here, fully present, fully human.

Scattered across these apps are echoes of past versions of me. Thoughts that existed for only a moment before being tucked away in the Obsidian vault or synced to the cloud, never to be seen.

Bitcoin is more than just code; it's a set of values made manifest. It’s about decentralization, censorship-resistance, and individual empowerment. It’s about creating systems that are transparent, auditable, and antifragile.

What does it mean to build something "in the spirit of Bitcoin?" It’s a question we return to again and again. It’s a philosophical touchstone, a guiding principle. It's about building things right.

I'm also trying to move myself away from the** sustained-thought atrophy of the Twitter format**.. where half of each tweet is like half headline.

Our attention is all we have, and where we choose to direct it is ultimately how we spend our lives. It’s not that we are choosing incorrectly by looking at screens; it is that we are not choosing at all. We have surrendered these choices to others

Source: www.thefp.com

One day, I would like to delete my social media accounts. This should be an option for everyone, even those, like me, who still rely on an internet audience to sell their work. For this to happen, we will need to build and strengthen real-world networks. But first, we will need to stop spending our attention online.

Source: www.thefp.com

the inconveniences of low-tech living are nothing compared with the ravages of tech addiction.

Source: www.thefp.com

Turning my phone off at 24 was the most radical life change I had made since receiving my first smartphone. My entire adult life had centered on an object that was now locked in a drawer, out of sight. I felt purposeless, adrift, with nothing to reach for in moments of boredom or distress except my own thoughts, which were dull and shapeless from neglect.

Source: www.thefp.com

One consistently effective strategy was being vulnerable. Regardless of what I drew, regardless of how good it was, I would get more likes and comments on my art when I paired it with an emotional disclosure, ideally of the tragic variety

Source: www.thefp.com

because the algorithm was constantly changing, I had to change with it. I was constantly adapting my visual and verbal style to keep up with trends.

Source: www.thefp.com

Why bother trying to make real people like me when people on the internet already did?

Source: www.thefp.com

I posted the crying selfie, which I hoped would tastefully walk the line between tragic and attractive. I refreshed my inbox for sympathy, and I got it. But I was still alone on the kitchen floor. These strangers were my whole world, but to them, I was just one tear-soaked face in an endless stream of images. I stood up and, before the impulse could leave me, I disabled my Instagram account. I had 170,000 followers and no one to call.

Source: www.thefp.com

This blog post is designed to address that - below is a soup to nuts (no nutzaps though) guide to building a DVM flow, both from the client and the server side.

If I had to choose a single NIP that represents the mindset behind this kind of app, it would be NIP 89 A.K.A. "Recommended Application Handlers", which states:

Since DVMs were introduced to Nostr in July 2023, we've witnessed remarkable growth - over 2.5 million DVM events (Kinds 5000-7000) and counting. Last fall, when Primal added custom feeds (Kind 5300 DVMs), we saw a 10x surge in DVM activity. To handle this growth, I've spent the last few months completely rewriting DVMDash.

Nstart is a new tool that simplifies onboarding to Nostr, a decentralized and censorship-resistant social network protocol. It guides first-time users through creating an account and securely backing up their private key (the password to their account). Additionally, users can set up a multi-signer bunker, which splits their private key into multiple pieces stored with trusted signers. This feature enhances security by protecting users’ identities even if one piece is compromised. These capabilities make Nstart an invaluable tool for activists and organizations operating under authoritarian environments, offering straightforward access to decentralized and uncensorable communications. To explore Nostr, start here: https://start.njump.me.

Adoption and Migration: Inspired by early pioneers like Fountain and Orange Pill App, more platforms will adopt Nostr for authentication, login, and social systems. In 2025, a significant migration from a high-profile application platform with hundreds of thousands of users will transpire, doubling Nostr’s daily activity and establishing it as a cornerstone of decentralized technologies.

  1. Modern leftish philosophers tend to dismiss reason, science, objective reality and to insist that everything is culturally relative. It is true that one can ask serious questions about the foundations of scientific knowledge and about how, if at all, the concept of objective reality can be defined. But it is obvious that modern leftish philosophers are not simply cool-headed logicians systematically analyzing the foundations of knowledge. They are deeply involved emotionally in their attack on truth and reality. They attack these concepts because of their own psychological needs. For one thing, their attack is an outlet for hostility, and, to the extent that it is successful, it satisfies the drive for power. More importantly, the leftist hates science and rationality because they classify certain beliefs as true (i.e., successful, superior) and other beliefs as false (i.e., failed, inferior). The leftist's feelings of inferiority run so deep that he cannot tolerate any classification of some things as successful or superior and other things as failed or inferior. This also underlies the rejection by many leftists of the concept of mental illness and of the utility of IQ tests. Leftists are antagonistic to genetic explanations of human abilities or behavior because such explanations tend to make some persons appear superior or inferior to others. Leftists prefer to give society the credit or blame for an individual's ability or lack of it. Thus if a person is "inferior" it is not his fault, but society's, because he has not been brought up properly.
  1. Feminists are desperately anxious to prove that women are as strong and as capable as men. Clearly they are nagged by a fear that women may NOT be as strong and as capable as men.

This has profound implications because it makes you not only responsible for how you act upon the world but also for how the world acts upon you. There is nothing to fear from what might happen because you yourself created the conditions, consciously or by default. And while there might be great suffering, real horrors and unspeakable cruelty, those episodes are all mutually brought into being.

And so you wind up with an identity that’s full of beliefs about yourself, your plans and your history, and those notions solidify themselves in your body in terms of stress, tension, etc. via biochemistry, and that biochemistry feeds your thoughts which in turn feed more biochemistry, and you become habituated to your patterns, your history, your identity and cut yourself off from new choices and possibilities. As I said, a bit self-helpy for me (and maybe I’m missing something in my paraphrasing), but an interesting way to conceptualize it.

For six full years I've been updating and commenting on the status of global central bank money on Twitter. As the seventh year of my research commences, for 2024 Q2, it's about time to bring it home to the better bird protocol. This is a much more philosophically aligned place to focus in on the signal when it comes to our money, and I'm happy to finally convert these posts to long-form here.

Don't be shy. Create bold clients that will catch people's eye. A logo can be poorly hand drawn, posts in a feed can be stylized as Macintosh windows, user profile can look like an inventory from a forgotten game — let your client be weird, funky, old school, wild, fancy. We're here to have fun, aren't we?

NIP66 will be an ABSOLUTE GAMECHANGER for clients in finding of their relays. This was always a vision for relay.tools and I am honored to be working with @sandwich on what is a pretty amazing solution. We are now in a phase of client outreach, to gather client feedback and help them implement/understand the overall goal of the NIP.

#Zapathon is not dead. it's a sleeping giant. Until then, I hope you enjoyed the brief history lesson.

As we sprint toward the 2024 US Presidential election the case for using bitcoin as an asset to store value for the long term has never been stronger. The insanity of the incumbent power structure is being laid bare and it is becoming impossible to ignore the headwinds that the Borg faces moving forward.

Keep the f-ing door closed (which was the working title of this article). Once you leave, don’t come back inside moments later. Doing so disturbs your fellow sauna users, lets out the all-important steam, and prevents the sauna from reaching an appropriate temperature.

Super apps will try to do everything, but can't really do most things super well. Regular-sized Clients will try to manage most of a given domain but are likely to centralize users on themselves, an unwanted effect inside of Nostr. If we want Nostr to grow in a decentralized fashion, we have to start betting on and using more Mini and Micro clients.

Super apps will try to do everything, but can't really do most things super well. Regular-sized Clients will try to manage most of a given domain but are likely to centralize users on themselves, an unwanted effect inside of Nostr. If we want Nostr to grow in a decentralized fashion, we have to start betting on and using more Mini and Micro clients.

I’m not sure why it shocked my conscience. Lord knows, there were many prior examples of indifference to human suffering at unimaginable scale. The release of viruses, bioweapons disguised as vaccines, bombs dropped on ordinary families while they slept.

Swan is alleging that its former employees, in the weeks leading up to their resignation, “cloned and exfiltrated highly proprietary code from Swan’s Bitcoin mining monitoring software” from Swan’s GitHub. Swan refers to these documents and codes as the “crowned jewels” of its mining business.

Source: blockspace.media

Swan has filed the suit against the company’s former Investment Director, Patrick Furlong; former Head of Business Development, Michael Holmes; former Investment Analyst, Rafael Monteleone; former Investment Director, Santhiran Naidoo; former Junior Investment analyst, Enrique Romualdez; former Software Engineer, Lucas Vasconcelos; and two companies allegedly connected to the defendants, Proton Management and Ilios Corporation.

Source: blockspace.media

"Bitcoin is freedom of money, and Nostr is freedom of everything else," Martti said during a recent bitcoin conference in Prague.

Source: www.yahoo.com

The people in power within the federal government and the Federal Reserve system are actively targeting the bitcoin and digital asset industry, acting extrajudicially and making a mockery of the rule of law in the United States. They are completely out of control and it is important that everyone who cares about the future of bitcoin in the United States and the future of the United States more broadly (even if you don't like bitcoin) speaks out and fights against these totalitarians as vehemently as possible. What they are doing is wrong. It's unconstitutional. And it is putting the future of our country at risk.

The problem that has existed to date is that you don't need a blockchain for all of these things. In fact, having a blockchain for these things proves to be detrimental to their ultimate goals. Instead, what people really need is a protocol that gives you the granular control, privacy, instantaneous transactions and UX that anchors to bitcoin. This is exactly what Chaumian Mints bring to the bitcoin stack.

I'm 31 today, and my refusal to be bored has led to an interesting life so far. One that my 18 year old self would mostly approve of. Which is quite the measure of success according to Taleb.

Narrative aside, the _reality _of 99% of these projects is that they are private execution environments tied to multisigs custodying user deposits. Which is to say, on the one hand, that they are cargo culting "crypto R&D" from Ethereum that isn't technically possible in Bitcoin in order to feign technical merit, and on the other, that _they aren't layer twos at all. _Once again, they may as well be Chaumian eCash mints, except for the fact that this would make the intended token scam all but impossible to pull off.

Thirdly, however, regardless of whatever refinement they’ve come up with, the consequence of the new “narrative” is always, “buy my token”.

But in real life we deal with unknowns, and it is therefore impossible do a rigorous accounting of harms and benefits as imagined by the hypotheticals. The “five vs one,” stated as though the event had already happened, is a conceit conjured from an overly simplistic model.

And yet this simplified model, kill one to save five, is then transposed onto real-world scenarios, e.g., mandate an emergency-use vaccine that might have rare side effects because it will save more lives than it costs. The credulous go along, and then reality turns out to be more complex than the hypothetical — as it always is.

The fact Tron is the most heavily used for stablecoins, in terms of settling the most value, is a testament to this point: it is barely even pretending not to be a database. This works as regulatory arbitrage given regulators think this is “innovation” because they are stupid.

We are making a big, beautiful library... and you are going to build it for us. Anyone, anywhere can therefore publish or republish any document they wish, with Nostr, and store it wherever they have a relay, and view it on any client willing to display it.

So, we at GitCitadel have decided to move Project Gutenberg to Nostr and house it in the most distributed way possible: on relays. Specifically, our new, public Citadel relay for out-of-print books (and other documents), but also on any relay, anywhere.

You set your relay as the default option in the client and let things happen. Your relay is like your "website" and people are free to connect to it or not. You don't own the network, you're just competing against other websites on a leveled playing field, so you're not responsible for it. Users get seamless browsing across multiple websites, unified identities, a unified interface (that could be different in a different client) and social interaction capabilities that work in the same way for all, and they do not depend on you, therefore they're more likely to trust you.

If it's a music sharing thing, then the client will have a way to play the audio and so on; if it's a restaurant sharing it will have maps with the locations of the restaurants or whatever, you get the idea. Hopefully there will be a NIP or a NUD specifying how to create and interact with events relating to this niche, or you will write or contribute with the creation of one, because without interoperability none of this matters much.

The outsourcing almost by default of fundamental things like the electrical power to your home, the server on which your most personal information is stored and your life savings to a bank or brokerage firm is anomalous by historical standards. One’s personal information, wealth and power were largely in one’s own hands, and it is only recently, due to technological progress and convenience that we have adopted such tradeoffs.

I'm only writing for the sort of person who prefers human art. Writing can be an expression of the self and a window to the soul. Read what I write because you want to know what I really thought.

Don't bother telling me that AI makes human writing obsolete. It rather makes it a more-exclusive endeavor, by reducing the scope of the content to something more reflective of the person writing.

The last thing these devs want to do is write software documentation. But documentation is actually one of their most important forms of marketing to new users and documentation writing and maintenance often inadvertently uncovers bugs and workflows that need to be redesigned.