We all want adoption, but adoption does not start with payments. It starts with meaning. You cannot force people to zap and you cannot lecture them into caring. We have to build something worth caring about first.
We are building a new neighborhood here on Nostr, and zapping is part of the experience, but it is not why people show up. They come because it feels different. Zaps are not the only form of value. Relationships, connection and purpose all have value.
Eventually, zaps will take care of themselves. We should not have to explain the rules or etiquette. People will zap because it feels right, not because they were told to.
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I appreciate your perspective, and I hear you, but that's not how I see it. Culture is too often an excuse for “someone else fix this first.” It's downstream of investment.
Sure, that can mean many things, but if we want to create a real change in categories of products like social media, we need to support the alternative. The alternative to extractive, exploitative enshittification is to pay for the product.
As I began with, to each their own.
Or because it gives them access to something they can't get anyway else 😊
Having @npub1qf9p...auu5 LIVE at @Adopting Bitcoin may have seemed, from the outside, like “just a simple zap dashboard on a screen” but in reality, it was far more ambitious.
Every single speaking slot in the conference schedule had its own PubPay LIVE.
Before the event, we emailed every speaker explaining how Nostr works, how to create an account if they didn’t already have one, and how to set up a Lightning Address. For the ones who missed the email, we reached out personally. Texting, onboarding, troubleshooting. Whatever it took. We made sure every speaker had the tools to participate. For the speakers who didn’t create their own PubPay LIVE event in time, we displayed a default event created by the conference’s Nostr account.
In total, we got 47 PubPay LIVEs.
On stage, speakers got to experience the magic of Nostr firsthand: sats streamed directly to them in real time, tied to the identity of the payer, often with comments full of love, questions, or even criticism. It was value-for-value in its purest form.
The audience, on the other hand, got the simplest introduction to Nostr imaginable. Anyone could instantly reward their favorite speaker, send a message that appeared both on-screen and on Nostr for the entire world to see, and compete for the top of the leaderboard, gaining visibility, clout, and often advertising their own products.
A total of 325,293 sats were zapped to the speakers' posts.
Nostr was even featured in the official livestream during @Giacomo Zucco talk.
It wasn’t just engagement.
It wasn’t just fun.
We onboarded.
We educated.
We opened a new channel of real-time interaction.
We tested interoperability across Nostr clients under real live pressure.
And the result? We purple-pilled and orange-pilled an entire conference.
What @Pedro 🧨 and I pulled off was nothing short of incredible.
And we’re not stopping.
The goal is to bring PubPay Live to every major Bitcoin conference in 2026.
With everyone’s help, it becomes easier, smoother, and even more impactful.
Who’s in?
View quoted note →
View quoted note →
It wasn’t just engagement.
It wasn’t just fun.
We onboarded.
We educated.
We opened a new channel of real-time interaction.
We tested interoperability across Nostr clients under real live pressure.
And the result? We purple-pilled and orange-pilled an entire conference.
What @Pedro 🧨 and I pulled off was nothing short of incredible.
And we’re not stopping.
The goal is to bring PubPay Live to every major Bitcoin conference in 2026.
With everyone’s help, it becomes easier, smoother, and even more impactful.
Who’s in?
View quoted note →Are you trying to tell me that if I'm trying to make money by using NOSTR like some sort of Twitter-that-pays-me-for-snarky-comments that I'm doing it wrong?
Aho @Seth! I’ve made some seriously solid connections and friendships through here and look forward to the moment we can get together the physical world and hash out more collaborations.
What the beggars fail to realize is that the lack of zaps and/or large zaps is the free market speaking.
Yes, v4v!
…but this also means their must *be* value in the posts.
Right, I've seen videos zapped 82K sats and posts getting 10K sats. Consistency is key with value for value to find your community, but V4V is alive and well on Nostr!