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fiatjaf
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npub180cv...h6w6
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fiatjaf 2 days ago
Some generations ago I wrote this: It requires a live bunker that it uses to sign scrobbles on behalf of the users. Disregard the fact that its usefulness is severely limited by Spotify and that we don't have live bunkers. What other similar use cases would fit this same server-side Nostr service paradigm? View quoted note →
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fiatjaf 2 days ago
I was trying to scrape a website briefly for research purposes. Fetching the HTML with curl using the correct combination of headers worked fine, but when I tried to do it from inside my program it returned an error 403, exact same headers, same IP, same URL. Eventually I found out that the website had Cloudflare in front and Cloudflare did client fingerprinting based on the TLS algorithms advertised or something like that, such that curl and browsers were allowed but not anything else. It worked when I switched my code to using libcurl. This is both stupid and dystopic. How did we get to this situation?
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fiatjaf 3 days ago
This is good. Clients should make different choices and be opinionated instead of trying to please everybody. View quoted note → As long as they all talk the same protocol.
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fiatjaf 3 days ago
Two immediate use-cases that came to my mind now are @npub1v0lx...qj49's zap.stream server publishing stream announcements on behalf of users, and @npub15qyd...yejr's git servers that can be controlled directly via ssh and still get repository announcements published under the correct user. View quoted note →
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fiatjaf 3 days ago
If we had server-side Nostr services that could seamlessly and safely sign stuff on behalf of users what are some useful things that could be built?
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fiatjaf 4 days ago
Why are all Nostr clients trying to copy X, and yet they have a thousand emojis to select reactions from when X only has 1? Who decided that more is always better than 1 and making the user choose is always better than simplifying things?
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fiatjaf 5 days ago
I wonder if there isn't a big mismatch in the world of Bitcoin funding: too much dedicated to experimental wallets, niche technologies, Bitcoin Core fuzz testing and failed startups that market themselves to existing Bitcoiners; too little dedicated to producing useful stuff that non-Bitcoiners want, or straight-up buying existing businesses and turning them into Bitcoin companies. View quoted note →
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fiatjaf 5 days ago
This is the best news I've seen for Bitcoin in a long time: View quoted note → What other cases there are of services with real customers selling something that isn't "for bitcoiners" that stopped taking fiat payments? My expectation and hope was always that a percentage of customers would bite the bullet and figure out how to get some coins in order to buy the thing. Most of them would find out it wasn't that hard anyway. Now imagine if more services did this. Or imagine a world in which bitcoiners produced things that the external world wanted to buy, but was only being sold for Bitcoin?
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fiatjaf 5 days ago
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fiatjaf 1 week ago
This is surprisingly a pretty good episode: View article → I didn't expect @npub1zxu6...cx2y to be such an idealist, he used to give me the impression of a skeptic pragmatist who had lost all his early vision of a better world, but was pleasantly surprised he is still delusional. Of course at this point he has probably already abandoned https://github.com/justinmoon/shadow, but that really sounded like a good plan and very grounded, it's still worth a listen. Also good points in the end about how Marmot is a bad idea.
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fiatjaf 1 week ago
The @npub107jk...ncxg exit shows how important @npub1l3cg...6vs2's is. Soon some of the best clients of Nostr -- https://grimoire.rocks, https://habla.news and https://chachi.chat -- will be down and there is nothing we can do about that. In an environment where these apps were published as fully static HTML/JS assets and used through an app like 44billion they could live forever. Better than that: if it's easy to browse and recommend new maintainers that will incentivize new developers to continue maintaining forks of these codebases, as they wouldn't have to go looking for users and begging them to switch to a new URL. That means these apps can continue to live and users can continue to receive updates and everybody wins.
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fiatjaf 1 week ago
I want Nostr to improve the status of online communication and publication in many ways. I want to see if it will really work in reality as it does in theory. I think Nostr has tons of potentially very interesting features hidden in it that will only make sense once more people are using it. I really want to see all of this in action. View quoted note →
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fiatjaf 1 week ago
Nostr might not be winning against X, but at least it is winning against Postel's Law, which is a much worse enemy. View quoted note →
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fiatjaf 1 week ago
Some people think Bitcoin doesn't have to scale and get adopted enough to become money, it can just be a "store of value" forever. The first thing is that these people don't really believe in "storing" anything, they want their "value" to go up, not to be stored, so the discourse is already skewed from the start. Meanwhile all the value Bitcoin has today and all its price growth came from the expectation that it would be used as money (i.e. means of payment etc) at some point. Because random pubkeys stored on blockchains are just worthless bytes, if we stop making moves towards the only real goal (commerce adoption), then eventually markets notice and all the side "store of value" and related discourses are exposed to reality. Remember those people that used to say Bitcoin was a ponzi scheme -- I don't know, Peter Schiff, Jorge Stolfi? Their takes were nonsense to me at first because I had in my mind that everybody believed that Bitcoin would eventually become money, so there was no way this was a game of the greater fool, everybody would benefit, even the last person to buy Bitcoin on Earth would benefit from it. But no, these people just assumed Bitcoin would never become money, and with that assumption their reasoning makes perfect sense: if Bitcoin doesn't become money then it is nothing but a ponzi scheme -- as most of the shitcoins clearly are. And now we have all these self-described Bitcoiners who think the same, don't be one of them. And please make them wrong again.