For those of you who are still on Twitter, I had a long debate thread today with Parker Lewis about Nostr. I'm a big fan of Parker, so I figured I'd share it here for shared learning. Here's the latest post. I'm not sure it'll be the last or not but it's the latest one as of this writing. You can scroll up to see the exchange from the start.

X (formerly Twitter)

Lyn Alden (@LynAldenContact) on X

@parkeralewis 1) I said right in my first post that Nostr doesn't prevent app CEOs from getting arrested. But I think that's not really the #1 issu...

Linking to my own post in isolation is bad form and the thumbnail is awkward depending on what client you're using, so I'll also provide a pic of the start of the debate too, with two posts of his and one of mine. I'd be open to any thoughts about this debate.

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Nearly a decade and a half ago, in my early twenties, I was an administrator for a small/medium online forum. This was before social media was super popular. At first I just posted on the forum, and then the admins asked me to be a mod. And then as some admins left, they asked me to be one of the admins. So I did. I did this for like five years, for free. I was working full time, going to grad school part time, running a dividend blog part time, and yet for some reason was also volunteering a lot of time to help run this forum. Because I liked it. After years eventually I left, and someone else stepped in to take my place. All the admins were just volunteering. Anyway, that’s who runs the relays. The psychopaths.

I think it’s important to analyze the questions. For an ecosystem to be successful, it has to be both technically sound and sufficiently incentivized, either economically or ethically. In my opinion based on what I’ve seen and analyzed, Nostr relays will likely continue to be well-incentivized. But I don’t fault people from exploring the questions as they seek to understand the protocol and potentially build a conviction about it. Instead I would only criticize those that start out with a negative conclusion before they explore the facts, and think in perpetually Malthusian ways about its prospects. The fact that the protocol has bootstrapped to this significant degree for this significant duration, is already a rather positive sign. Too many people theorycraft rather than just observe what works, observe what fails, and keep iterating. Lean into what works. And so far, Nostr works. View quoted note →

Literally a whole wall in the supermarket with nonfat yogurt and even nonfat plus non-sugar yogurt. View quoted note →

Nonfat Greek yogurt is one of the saddest things.

This is my npub. There are many like it, but this one is mine.

The issue with this is that whenever Bitcoin does go up like 5x, a lot of sellers *do* materialize. So it takes a lot more DCAing that one might think. Like when the ETFs were gobbling up a lot of bitcoin, much faster than it was being generated, and people assumed it must go to the moon soon. In reality, there was also a lot of sellers out of cold storage from people who bought years ago. View quoted note →

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Someone made a Japanese version of my Broken Money video, complete with brand new animations for that audience. Looks pretty sweet:

Amplifying this for critical discussion. Who will run relays in the future, and is there anything that Nostr as a protocol can tweak to improve future relay decentralization? View quoted note →

What sparks your joy?

Based on the information at hand, this is very well-worded. View quoted note →

-Treat the arrest of the Telegram CEO as an emergency. -Advocate for his freedom and for all freedom tech providers. -Support and build things that function without a CEO, like some aspects of Nostr. When authoritarian Europe or the US arrests you, be able to say, “I literally can’t control it, it’s already out there, and we are legion.” -Tell me and others, as capital providers, how to accelerate this.

The best way to say that Lyn is too bearish, is to go and tell all your friends that the Telegram CEO was just fucking arrested for allowing free encrypted speech, and to forge your new decentralized identity right now. Anyway, good evening. View quoted note →

Stay humble. Push forward. 💪 View quoted note →

This needs more reporting but so far, this is wild. Terrible precedent. View quoted note →

Great fireside between @ODELL and @jack at Nostriga. I got a chance to listen to it now. Regarding the question of whether Nostr will have more users than Twitter/X in five years (~500 million), my base case would be no, actually. And I say that as a huge Nostr fan and daily user. In the long arc of time, Nostr's addressable market is nearly unlimited (basically everyone who uses the internet could be using Nostr in some form), but I expect somewhat of a slower burn. Infrastructure build-out type stuff. And breaching a network effect with a better solution is generally quite a long uphill climb. To me, Nostr is successful once it starts serving tens of millions of people well. I expect it to be more of a quality over quantity thing for a while. Bitcoin is almost 16 years in and still isn't at 500 million users. But for many of those people, it was lifechanging. I'd like to be surprised to the upside, but I also don't want people to think that if Nostr is "only" at tens of millions of people in five years, or 100+ million but still sub-Twitter, that it underachieved. It's tiny right now, and numbers anywhere approaching that would be a huge increase. Nostr is a great improvement for everyone using it. But sometimes it takes people time to see why a given solution is better than what they have, or to realize they have a problem at all. So in the meantime I monitor Nostr's success by the quality and quantity of developer activity, the capability of the protocol as a freedom tool or the shortcomings it still has for that use case, the quality of the conversations throughout the ecosystem, how many people consider it to be lifechanging tech compared to centralized social media, and in time, steady growth.

At the Bitcoin Conference, people could pay for photographs with politicians. Or pay more for a dinner with them. So when you see an awkward pic with some bitcoiner next to a politician, there’s a good chance they paid for it. I think most people know that, but for those that don’t, keep that in mind. All else being equal, the more awkward the pic looks, the more likely they paid for it.

I resolved the situation by just not screwing it down for now, until I get the right screw. The M.2 drive is just kind of floating in there, connected on one side. Didn’t want to close the case without at least partially completing my mission. Happily playing Baldur’s Gate 3 now that I have the storage for it. View quoted note →