A real bitcoiner ™️
You might not characterize the community of bitcoiners as a welcoming group of folks. Market forces have caused some of the most vocal among us to have developed a certain “toxicity”. And this is a rational mechanism of defense against all the nonsense scams, schemes and fraudsters orbiting bitcoin (and boy are there a lot of them!).
However, I have a more welcoming idea to share. You can be a “real bitcoiner™️” without subscribing to all the angry toxicity. I’d suggest all it takes is understanding what makes bitcoin special. I have been accused of not being a “real bitcoiner™️” at times. But, I don’t really care. I’ve been on a continual journey of educating myself and my friends about this technology. You can begin to climb the educational ladder as soon as you begin to become curious. Understand what bitcoin uniquely adds to the world: digital scarcity.
A partially ordered list of the stages you might go through:
+ buy some bitcoin via an ETF
+ buy some bitcoin and hold it on an exchange
+ understand what makes bitcoin special
+ withdraw some bitcoin to a non-custodial wallet
+ withdraw some bitcoin to cold storage run a bitcoin full node
+ explore privacy preserving technologies like TOR and CoinJoin
+ buy some non-KYC’d bitcoin
+ convert all your personal assets to bitcoin
+ run a bitcoin miner
+ exclusively hold all your wealth in cold storage
+ exclusively use bitcoin to pay for all your monetary needs
+ move to El Salvador or another bitcoin-centric community/region
+ only participate in circular economies on the bitcoin standard
The beauty of bitcoin is that it’s a voluntary system that nobody controls. So don’t let anyone shame you into living up to their expectations of what it means to be a “real bitcoiner™️”. I’m somewhere in the middle of this list personally. The further I get down the list, the more curious I become about items a bit further down. I don’t expect I’ll be moving to El Salvador, but I’m a “real bitcoiner™️” and you can be, too.
make bitcoin fun again
what is the best game anyone has built which uses bitcoin as a native currency?
Nostr News - Jan 25 -
@Max and
@David King
The more Nostr-specific stuff starts around 52:37
We spent the first hour catching up on the following: walks, AI/Nostr/Lightning Hackathons, Max's interest in Ancient Civilizations, n00b podcasting tips from another n00b, intros to bitcoin, bitcoin ETF, Solar/Wind/energy
Ellie's here for the freedom, too! 🤙
which bitcoin ETF should you buy?
I'm selling $GBTC and buying $BITB tomorrow
why?
1) lowest fees
2) 10% to quality open source development orgs
of course, self-custody your main stack… this is just for tradfi needs
if you're building tools for freedom, I'm on your side
Happy New Year, Nostriches! 🥳🦅
buy the rumor, buy the news
#bitcoin
I’ve been reflecting on my core beliefs about nostr. Today we have a simple protocol and some high quality apps which enable us to use nostr together. That’s wonderful and, imo, the right way to instigate a new ecosystem from scratch!
However, I think nostr may succeed fastest when it’s able to orchestrate reading/writing of all Internet messages a person wants to read/write. A lot of discussion assumes people have to adopt ecosystem clients for nostr to succeed, but I’m not so sure.
Instead of requiring everyone to adopt it directly (and changing publishing behavior to new nostr-focused apps), I wonder if we consider it from the perspective of an infrastructure. Can we aggregate all existing messages from the internet that a person wants to read? Can we publish once to all important destinations that someone wants to write?
Who has explored these ideas so far?
Merry Christmas, nostr-friends! 🎄🎅🤙
Nostr News - Dec 19 -
@Max and
@David King
where we talk about Nostrasia, Bob's Prisms, building businesses in AI, AI to build custom software, StackerNews, Territories and The Network State, nostr search, prediction markets
can these easily make it to nostr?
Who Builds Software Matters
On the declining production costs and coming remixability of software
“As we become more sophisticated, our ideas about what our word processor, ourgraphics system should do for us diverge more and more from those of the initial designers. We now want to edit our tools as we have previously edited our documents.”
-Alan Kay, Apple Computer Corporation, Sept 1984
The High Cost of Software
Software is expensive to build today because there are very few software engineers. There are about 8 billion people in the world, but only about 28 million software developers. So the number of people who can build software rounds to roughly 0. Yet everyone in the world wants and needs software. Up till now, we’ve been prevented from getting what we actually want due to the high cost of production. Talented engineers only have a limited number of hours in a day to build so they need to get paid for their rare skill.
Software for the Masses
Building software has been expensive so we’ve become accustomed to accepting software designed for the masses. Today’s designers aim to serve the broadest set of users possible so the high cost of building gets amortized over a large number of people. That means no one gets exactly what they want, but everyone gets something that’s good enough to be useful.
AI changes WHO builds software
AI brings us tools that democratize software development. As production becomes cheaper, it changes who can build software. This changes how software gets designed, developed, and deployed, which creates an explosion in how much new software gets built. We can appreciate how AI code generation models help software engineers build. It’s easy to see how these tools can improve their efficiency. But we can organize these same tools in ways that change who builds software. And who builds software matters.
You can squint and see a future where we can all build our own custom software. We’ve seen this kind of auto-generation in the domains of language, images, and video. We'll soon see it in the domain of software creation.
Free-to-build encourages remixing
In the future you’ll notice a simple need and you’ll be able to conjure up a micro-app in minutes to address it. The economics of creating and owning software changes. Anything a user dreams up is low effort to create and copyable by someone else. That’s a good thing. It makes software more like media. Micro-apps become building blocks. Other users can remix them adding new functionality. We can now equip software with the same memetic super powers as we have with short-form video. This is the future of software. But no one has built the end-to-end tools to enable this yet.
These user-to-user creative interactions make the value of software compound. But we’ll need some network (or protocol?) to manage the specifications and data across these apps if they’re going to be collaborative.
Forget the drudgery of design, implementation, testing, deployment, monitoring, upgrading, and data migration. This will happen behind the scenes. Who thinks about flipping electrical signals in silicon these days? We operate at a higher level of abstraction.
Implications of an AI codegen revolution
+ The amount of software created increases by at least 3 orders of magnitude. Likely much more like 5-10 orders of magnitude.
+ The concept of “charging for apps” feels dated. If everyone can conjure anything into existence for pennies, why “buy” when you can “create”? “Make me a free version of app ABC”.
+ The importance of modern app stores declines. Non-technical users create micro-apps and use them. For this to work it needs to be simple. This future might look like something of a super-app for user-generated micro-apps. Or they get deployed as PWAs.
+ How data gets stored and shared could get radically reimagined.
+ These micro-app/remix concepts may themselves become the basis for a new type of app store. If this were a company, I think it would likely become the most important company in AI.
+ A new layer of collaboration commoditizes adjacent AI layers. A hyperscaler could attempt to build this layer, but it seems as likely as someone new doing it.
At this point it's all up for grabs. If you’re building something like this DM me — I’d love to play with your project and give feedback!
Has anyone built a simple way to cross post to Nostr/Twitter/Threads?
the world has gotten so crazy
the only thing that seems real to me any more is fake Internet money
🤷🏼♂️
what are your favorite “other things”?