Really great nostr chat at the @HRF Oslo Freedom Forum with @JeffG , @PABLOF7z , and @rabble. Covered everything from the amazing primitives you get for free with the nostr protocol, how it can be a credible path for communicating privately with AI agents, and why Divine was built on nostr and not Bluesky 💜

Watching everyone at once is cheap. freedom tech (i.e. encrypted messaging, bitcoin, etc) makes it expensive. AI cuts the costs on both sides. Mass surveillance gets cheaper, and so does freedom tech. The race just got faster. @Matt Corallo at @HRF Oslo Freedom Forum

Afghanistan is the only county on earth that bans girls from attending school That’s why Roya Mahboob vibe coded Roshan, an app making education accessible to those that need it most Wonderful example of freedom fighters embracing AI to accelerate their work @HRF

A favorite from today’s programming at @HRF Oslo Freedom Forum was Claudia Ortiz speaking on El Salvador: The lesson the government is telling people is if you can solve one problem, you can get away with everything else

We're looking for bitcoin, nostr, and other freedom tech apps that are interested in a free, live design review. Make using your app as empowering as the decentralized, censorship resistant technology it is built on 🚀 View quoted note →

As we wind down this year's BOSS Challenge, there have been a number of really cool projects to come out of the program. Check them out and show these builders some love! View quoted note →

“Thanks for picking that up for me! I will Venmo you the money.” “Oh I don’t have Venmo but I can do bitcoin, CashApp, or PayPal” *radio silence* Even if bitcoin has world-class UX, I’m not sure if we’ll ever see widespread adoption until we can figure out how to release the absolute chokehold Venmo has on people, especially millennials. CashApp may not be self custody but at least I can live my bitcoin life if someone uses it to send me money. Venmo has normalized digital payments so much that it’s changed how people behave and has become a verb. Nobody bothers to split bills anymore and they have stopped carrying cash. Why? Because they “can just Venmo you”. I can see stack overflow error happening in real time when I tell my friends I don’t have Venmo because I don’t believe they created the social feature in good conscience and think it’s an awful thing for Venmo to try and normalize the destruction of financial privacy. Yes, you can now make transactions private, even if it’s not the default. No, I don’t care. I’m dying in this hill. I don’t want to link my fiat ass bank account to ANOTHER system when PayPal, which owns Venmo does the exact same thing. And you know what? People have been using PayPal since the dawn of the Internet 2.0. You already have it! And if I’m going to use a newer, mobile, digital payment solution, it’s going to be CashApp because at least I can turn that money you owe me into bitcoin, which is what I actually prefer you pay me back in. To add to that, Block and Jack Dorsey have done so much for the Bitcoin ecosystem. Of course I want to support CashApp! In my experience the hierarchy is: 1. Venmo 2. Zelle 3. Cash (middle ground for “you don’t want to set up CashApp? Weird because I don’t want to set up Venmo!”) 4. “I’ll get your lunch next time” 5. MAYBE PayPal or CashApp 6. Not getting your money back 7. bitcoin So what do I want? Obviously the Bitcoin Standard, but if I can’t have that I want to make cash great again and more people using bitcoin compatible payment solutions. I encourage everyone to join me in a crusade of maximum pain for anyone trying to use something that is not this. We all deserve better! A win-win would be if Venmo integrated bitcoin so then all my Venmo using friends could transact with whoever they wish, using a free and open monetary protocol. For starters it would probably help if I was more often in the scenario of needing to pay people back instead of the other way around…