Just commented on a post by @HoloKat asking if/why new music is bad. My take: 1. Too many cooks spoiling the broth. Some pop hits have 10-12 credits! You can’t produce anything memorable when you’re focused on pleasing ten or twelve people. You get the lowest common denominator. 2. Pop and rock songs from the 60s and into the 80s (90s in some cases) had key changes, wide dynamics, interesting harmonic structure including borrowed chords and other non diatonic elements, tempo changes, and interesting lyrics. All this led to more interesting melodies and emotional content. 3. Most of the classic rock musicians grew up in households hearing jazz and classical music. They knew the Great American Songbook and could play many of the tunes. 4. Heavy jazz, blues, folk, and classical influences.

To all the admirers of dictatorship and authoritarian regimes, haven’t you noticed that Bitcoin, Nostr and other freedom technologies are the product of freedom and democracy, leveraged by efficient and effective private capital markets and free enterprise. Just saying.

Democracy isn’t perfect, but, as Churchill said, it’s the least bad form of government. Ludwig von Mises clearly articulated the key advantage of liberalism and democracy. They enable the orderly change of government and a peaceful transfer of power within the rule of law. Most Bitcoin maxis are engineers and entrepreneur. They hold caricatured understanding of politics and economics.

Just watched the first 15 minutes of the latest BTC Sessions video on YouTube, featuring Alex Svetski, Seb Bunney and Francis Pouliot. They are all in favour of authoritarian rule. They think democracy is the worst form of government. Really? Have these guys read any history at all? The lesson of history is that authoritarian regimes end up oppressing their populations and starting wars.

The signature in Nostr and Bitcoin is a parasovereign act of individual autonomy, made legible to the protocol. It is the moment when intention becomes action, not through appeal to any state, institution, or platform, but by direct expression through cryptographic proof. The protocol accepts or rejects only the technical validity of the act, not the identity or legitimacy of the actor. This is what makes the system both trustless and radically free.

As humans we NEED to express ourselves, even if no one is listening. 📣

Nostr is not a truth machine. It is a topology for symbolic freedom. It does not promise accuracy. It does not require consensus. It does not resolve contradiction. It simply creates the possibility of utterance without prior permission, and leaves filtering, trust, and interpretation up to relays, clients, and individuals.

Nostr enacts the freedom to speak, not the requirement to be right. It is not a system of judgment. It is a field of utterance.

Is someone working on an app to generate our own algorithms, a kind of algostr? #asknostr

The Bitcoin blockchain is not a ledger of account balances—it is a journal of irreversible acts. Each block appends a cryptographically sealed set of digital transactions, capturing not who holds what, but what has been done. Balances are derived, but the essence of Bitcoin is in the recording of intentional acts—secured, sequenced, and preserved without a sovereign overseer.

From Barabàsi, Network Science, 2026, pp. 34-35