The proof! It may take a while before a cool fancy app results from this. But i wanted to get this part done and tested (the price is i have 3 hours of sleep time left for what will probably be a 13 hour work day tomorrow but it is what it is). View quoted note →

In light of the coldcard thing, allow me to zoom out for a second. I have always considered the 'adoption' of cryptographic key-pairs in the hands of users, to be an intergenerational affair. Its not particularly hard or mystical (the actual cryptography perhaps is, but the bottom line of a secret random number is not), but it does require 'ritualization' in order to facilitate the masses. Creating your own key-pair is very much like a rite of passage, and ''we'' all did it by ourselves, on our desk, perhaps while watching some youtube tutorial. We already has the first wave of parents the taught their children. And i guess in some schools, among some teachers, they had a little lesson about this stuff as well. But, albeit implicitly or perhaps you were not even really conscious of it, ''we'' are proposing that society as a whole starts to operate based on the fact that people hold their keys, be that with Bitcoin for money, or now with Nostr for...well...everything else (lol). And, this, albeit you might not be aware of it, implies rituals. Known, understood procedures with a particular cultural flavor to convey meaning, understanding and correct behavior. Now i am all for chanting cypher monks and getting entropy from smoke and lasers, but the point is not what shape of form this stuff takes, and it can take many different shapes and forms, and will probably evolve over time anyway. The point is that someone like @BTC Sessions in this frame, is like a priest. He preaches to you, and facilitates the rituals for the common pivotal points in life. Sure sure, he wont batiste you as a baby, conduct your marriage, batiste your own kids, and will guide your loved ones in the process shortly after your death....but he does something similar with this ''new'' thing we are injecting in into the set of ''common pivotal points''. You can't do this stuff without ceremony, the anxiety that comes with the process of key-creation requires some re-assurance you are actually doing things correctly. It requires some training leading up to the point to give you a sense of competency. All of this is covered by ritual ceremony. I know there are some programs in Africa, and El Salvador and whatever, that teach classes and make them 'graduate'. This is good, excellent even. If the future is one of holding key-pairs; that future is not for the uninitiated.

One can wonder if the bricking of coldcards is more of a feature than a bug. View quoted note →

Btw, tip for everyone that got their Bitcoin stolen: I bought a forest in order to deal with the potential consequences of keypair-based-systems, so at the end of the day, i always have a place of my own to go to and cry. Luckily for me my funds are safu....today atleast. Here are some more forest pictures of today

For some reason, every time i pick this thing up, Mick Gorden starts playing in the background

So i had this issue: Dead fallen oak, stuck in another tree. This has been the situation for about 2 years, because its this whole thing and blablabla. So this week i decided i was just going fix it.

tldr in caps at the bottom. Everyone has this list of demands that can never all be true as far as 'groups' are concerned. The most sensible straightforward, ensured to just work now, and in the future, thing is NIP29. But in the long list is demands, NIP29 does not comply because it is tied to a specific relay, and it is not encrypted. Now is that a problem? Not really, you can migrate to another relay if there are any issues with the relay you happen to use. Relays are also one of the easiest type of server to run, so its the lowest threshold thing we can offer the world in terms of infrastructure requirements. If you want privacy, use a relay you trust for some reason, which is probably the least of your worries anyway because you also need to trust every participant not to leak stuff. Its already better than everything else we use, be that telegram, or discord or whatever in terms of being able to use whatever server/relay you want, use whatever software/client you want and those clients can interface with whatever group, regardless of what relay they happen to run at. All of it better than what is already out there in the world. But again, this impossible list of demands... So people much rather just chase their own tail going in circles and circles, coming up with "new" things, in a domain of known trade-offs. that are bound to break at some point, or at best end up working shitty; but you won't notice that directly because any silly system works at small scale in a low complexity environment. By the time things do break down, or start to stutter, people won't understand why, because it is obscured with all these bells and whissles. And to fix or patch them, you are bound to move closer to what would ultimately look like NIP29 anyway. Underneath it all is actually a fundamental misunderstanding concerning Nostr...or lack of complete understanding rather. This lack of comprehension is exemplified by the 'Nostr is the identity layer' crowd; they understand they key/signature part of Nostr, they ignore the Relay part of Nostr. Don't get me wrong, I am not trying to diss anyone here, it took me a long time before i got it myself: The point of Nostr was never to get rid of servers; the point of Nostr is to be free again to leverage them for what they are good for. "Platforms" conflated purposes, also taking responsibility for identity and by extension the social graph, resulting in the capture of the user. In that model, users and the network-effect-value they bring is locked in and tied to a particular server. And because those users are stuck, the server can force feed them any algo it wants. The whole point of the keys is that users themselves are able to generate them, subsequently sign their publications making them tamper-proof, which in turn reduces the trust-relationship and purpose of servers into simply relaying those publications, giving control back to users as to what they get to see. The point of Nostr was to shift our relationship to servers, using this 'trick'. But that also means a shift in the relationship between servers and their users. It free's servers, just as much as it did the users, no longer being beholdend to juggle the impossible combination of interests. All of this opens up an entirely new landscape, and the implications create a spectrum that runs with that twofold liberation of both the user and the server on either end. On the one end the server/relay is general and non-specific; and on the other the server/relay is particular and specific. Outbox-model on one extreme, NIP-29 on the other; and all the flexibility in between. We are all figuring this out as we go, especially because most of it was/is stuck inside of the head of some mumbling guy with a silly accent that just assumed all the implications would be obvious to everyone from the get-go. But mostly because its all new, and we are all a bunch of uncoordinateable cats tinkering in decentralized chaos. These posts always escalate to the point where they were probably better done as a long-form post with some care to remove the typo's and things...but i got to go, so it is what it is. The take-away: USE RELAYS FOR WHAT THEY ARE GOOD FOR WHICH IS CURATION AND ORDERING; USE RELAY FEEDS, USE NIP29, USE NIP63, ETC. Nostr. View quoted note → View quoted note →

tell me you are retarded, without telling me you are retarded:

With all the buzz around Buzz, lets provide the world some context shall we? It so happened we had a conversation at @BTC Prague on Nostr and AI. If you have any contact with the ''outside world'', who were not aware of Nostr before Buzz came along, perhaps this can provide them with some context. I would like to thank these three for making up the panel. @Jeff Booth @Tanja @Francis Mars

Mood