I BET YOU DIDN'T KNOW THIS
Since the 90s the US government equated the use of cryptography with supporting terrorism. After 9/11, some cypherpunks maintained the mailing list on the provocative domain al-qaeda.net as a form of satire against that criminalization. Bitcoin was born directly out of that mailing list.
So if you support cryptography and private bitcoin use, you’re a terrorist according to the US government.
NOSTR is NOT dead
The question isn't "how many people are posting notes on Damus or Primal right now?" — it's "what is being built on top of this protocol?"
And the answer is: a surprising amount.
The protocol is maturing from "decentralized Twitter" into a general-purpose coordination and identity layer. The social media use case (kind 1 notes) is just one application among many now.
The protocol is diversifying vertically into infrastructure. The pattern is:
Identity layer: Your NOSTR keypair is your sovereign identity across all applications — social, commerce, development, AI, etc. No platform owns it.
Event fabric: Signed, relayed events become the transport for everything — not just notes, but marketplace orders, git commits, AI requests, etc.
Payment rails: Lightning and Cashu integration is native, not bolted on. Value transfer is a first-class protocol action.
The critique about small user numbers misses that NOSTR is following a trajectory closer to TCP/IP or SMTP than to Instagram. These protocols weren't judged by "daily active users" — they were judged by what got built on top of them. Email was an application that emerged from a protocol.
The architecture is sovereignty-preserving by design, instead of by policy.
Cypherpunks write code; and it was never so easy as it is right now.
Time is money
Money is not time
Why?
GN
Many people claim that Bitcoin was created by the intelligence agencies.
To me, it’s clear that the opposite is most likely true: the cypherpunks created Bitcoin as a tool for self-defense against Big Brother.
Cryptography is the greatest tool of defense. That's why it was consider a military weapon.
Bitcoin democratizes access to military technology to protect your money from governments, banks and wall street a.k.a. white-collar thieves.
What is true and has been proven is that the Internet was created by U.S. government intelligence agencies for mass surveillance
And again, cryptography and FOSS are the greatest tools we have to defende ourselves.
Cypherpunks are the founding fathers of our age.
We need to reclaim our independence in cyberspace, but not just against the government but against big tech companies that are in bed with the government and wall street.
This are our enemies.
Few understand this but iykyk
Social media is fiat food for your mind and it’s crushing our souls
Social media is a weapon of mass distraction and of mass disconnection
Designed to reduce our capacity to focus, to create and to act
It drains our mental capacity and will
It’s probably the most sophisticated weapon of our time
And it comes with a colorful UI and a great UX
GM
BE AWARE OF THE CATS AND THEIR TACTICS TO TAKE YOUR CHEESE
Accurate