Thought I'd be preaching to the choir, but it turns out that isn't so.

What's the single most marketable feature of Nostr? I mean the thing with the greatest potential to engage a person's attention and hold their interest, and something that is sufficiently distinctive as compared to other offerings to make them want to re-use Nostr rather than something else. My answer: It's the practice of deliberately self-authenticating on the internet through public key cryptography on an everyday basis. The idea of decentralization, relays, etc. are just consequences of that practice. What is basically empowering about Nostr is that it provides mechanisms for distributing content that has been deliberately authenticated by the user with a digital signature from a private key. If that's right, then the tendency among developers to try to hide this authentication mechanism from users rather than highlight it is very unfortunate. It's hiding precisely the thing that makes Nostr interesting. It's not a good way to market something.

Took the night train through Transylvania. Just got off. The trees are all ready for spring here.

Set up my first instance of strfry. But I'm a bit confused about plugins. The way plugins.md talks about "event-sifter plugins" sounds a bit as if there are are plugins *other than* event-sifter plugins. Is that so? Or are *all* strfry plugins event-sifter plugins, i.e. that's the only type of plugin there is?

Another script is now up on the Inkan website. This one lets users check a given Ethereum block directly to see which Inkan declarations were actually recorded there, rather than just taking the client’s word for it. The output also includes transaction hashes and other on-chain details for anyone who wants to cross-check further in a block explorer. It’s again in the spirit of making Inkan easier to audit. You can again download it under Settings >> Inkan Management Utility.

I’ve added a Python script to the Inkan website that parses the signed Ethereum transactions produced by the Inkan Management Utility. The script should be useful for anyone who wants to independently inspect / audit what these transactions encode. You can download it under Settings >> Inkan Management Utility.