Peter Todd has been saying this for a long time and all the time I’ve been thinking he is misunderstanding everything, but I guess a more charitable interpretation is that he is right.
Nostr today is indeed centralized.
[…]
Peter Todd is right that if the way Nostr works is that you just subscribe to a small set of relays and expect to get everything from them then it tends to get very centralized very fast, and this is the reality today.
Peter Todd is wrong that Nostr is inherently centralized or that it needs a protocol change to become what it has always purported to be. He is in fact wrong today, because what is written above is not valid for all clients of today, and if we drive in the right direction we can successfully make Peter Todd be more and more wrong as time passes, instead of the contrary.
It’s not a long post but my summary is that network effects of the most popular relays are bad for censorship resistance on nostr.
Very happy that @fiatjaf talks about this.
Hey stackers, if you missed it yesterday, part 4 of the Broken Money book club was unleashed.
I left a bunch of discussion questions quite late in the day, so if you're interested in the topic, have another peek. There's a few that I really hoped that someone would bite on so I'd have someone to talk to about them. The loneliness of the long-distance bitcoiner :)
And also, if the super generous stacker who zapped the shit out of this is reading, it really is much appreciated, every time. The motivational power of knowing that people care about your efforts cannot be overstated. Each time this happens I think about how to bring the same energy to the rest of my life, who I could encourage. Gracias, muy amable.
https://i.postimg.cc/c4tSWC39/Muun-others.jpg
Trying to use my basic programming skills to play with my LN node but stuck on the first steps :(
I believe it's pretty simple but cannot figure out, some help would be appreciated
I honestly have no idea how Impervious Browser is always soon^TM coming but never a concrete timeline
My insides are aching over how much I want this to succeed.
Day 400 of snailposting everyday 'til BTC hits $100k.
__@_'-'
@k00b learning to humor
https://m.stacker.news/42035
Covid sucks. Sitting at home for week and still feel like a crap.
WordPress?
and obviously:
:)
Hopefully sub territories and sub sub territories are quite a ways away. I know founders are going to want to try to recoup the monthly fee but personally I think we need this wild west phase to play out. Let the market determine which territories have staying power and the most committed founders (because lets face it, they won't be profitable any time soon).
I also think, now that we have territories, SN should lean into the frontier town theme. The whole user experience could be built around the saloon being the town centre and the home page as it is now could direct people to interesting places where they might like to visit. Besides ads/boosts maybe the Saloon stays at the top of the home page. then you get into the top 10 (or so) hot posts and lower down the page maybe feature a "what's going on around town" section where some of the top territory posts are featured.
That could be the default layout of the homepage but then of course you could have other filtering (recent etc).
A couple other ideas (admittedly a bit corny- but I like a little corn) to tie into the theme. In the saloon there should be a bartender and when someone walks in and says "howdy" the bartender replies with a beer emoji. Little details like this drive a lot of retention. Now users need to stop by and engage and get their beer, just like they need to zap to keep their hat. And the other idea would be when entering a territory maybe we get some animation, like we do when we zap. Maybe saloon doors opening and users get the sense they are somewhere new. Maybe only happens the first time per day you enter the territory though, could get annoying if you are in and out as it is more obstructive than the zaps lightning bolts.
Anyways some crazy ideas for you.
I've talked a lot about Mobile Nodes and ECash being terrible ideas- and regret that it was perceived as friendly fire and taken personally... All respect due nevertheless for the effort as builders with the prescience to pivot
More bullish than ever on Bitcoin means of exchange
It's a passion industry, like Hollywood. Too many people willing to work harder and for lower pay in order to be part of the industry.
If you mean to ask what the incentive for me working on this: Because domain names are centralized in ICANN and I wanted to try to build something that isn't. Also, I just think it's an interesting problem.
The protocol stipulates that indexers just ignore duplicates. It's first come/first serve. It's a looser social consensus, but Ordinals have well demonstrated that even without miner enforcement, the benefits of social cooperation can incentivize correct behavior.
One of the nice benefits of loose social consensus is that we can use it to deal with squatters in a decentralized manner as well. Most decentralized means of identity usually just decide that squatters have to be lived with (think .eth, .btc, etc), but with Nomen we could actually set up a system where indexers could subscribe to Nostr events from trusted third parties that keep track of "illegitimate" claims, analogous to spam blocking lists.
This promotes self-sovereignty, because anyone operating their own indexer can pick and choose which parties they trust for "spam protection", much like choosing ad blocking lists in your browser.
It promotes decentralization because it allows handling squatters and name conflicts with "eventual consistency", i.e. network effects will naturally select for the most rightful owner.
Lastly it promotes good behavior. Because it costs real resources (mining fees) to register a name, and it's cost-free for indexers to ignore your illegitimate claim, simply HAVING such a decentralized system to handle squatters means that there is very little chance it will need to be used often.
quite good stance, imo
https://m.stacker.news/53840
Amazed with how much I've been getting. I thought it might ave something to do with the 18m sats returned from that bug. So I'm enjoying it while it lasts
https://i.pinimg.com/originals/e8/7c/2e/e87c2e1a537976b95edceeae3ab13b72.jpg
https://m.stacker.news/20060
I say you get her to post an lnurl or invoices here and we'll make her special day even better.
I agree on all of your points, but like others have said, context matters. Nobody should be storing their life savings in ecash notes - just like nobody should be storing their life savings in paper cash notes - but there's nothing wrong with carrying a small wad of cash for spending money, even if the mint that issued that cash could go under at any moment.
What people aren't realizing here is that while ecash is fundamentally a custodial IOU, it is also incredibly flexible compared to lightning. You're not just trading custody for privacy - it's more nuanced. You can build tools with ecash that are incredibly unwieldy or impossible on Lightning. Think about technologies like Ecash-DLCs for example.
Furthermore, ecash mints are a great moving target. Anyone who can run a lightning node can also run a mint. And yes, regulators could say "ecash mints are banned" in specific countries... But they can't ban ecash mints worldwide, and neither can they prevent determined users from connecting to mints hosted in open-minded countries (or hosted over TOR). It would be an endless game of whack-a-mole.
I personally think ecash mints will proliferate, and there will be two kinds:
As always with a free market, everyone is free to vote with their money and use the solutions which work best for them.
Going through trouble in my life at the moment. But I remember the vision of bitcoin, and what it means for the future. Is this what it felt like to be a founding father of the U.S.? Is this what it felt like to be a pioneer of philosophy, law, science? To know that there is a better way, to actively work towards it each day?
Keeping my longest cowboy streak going until __@_'-' reaches its destination: 16
0?
I've lost my focus during the holidays.
I probably came in too hot and excited talking about bitcoin and what our team has been building and didn't do a warm introduction first. haha
My next attempt would definitely have to be more subtle, I think listening to the user first, finding out the doubts and fears people have about bitcoin, and demystifying those right from the beginning.
The media with all their FUD has really steered people away, I myself was one of them until 2021 when I finally opened up and decided to go on my own journey down the rabbit hole 🐇 🕳 .
Also, one thing to keep in mind is that our main target 🎯 users are bitcoiners or at least where the full user journey starts, so for bitcoiners it's an easy sell - "Gift sats without onboarding or losing them"
But the heavy lifting will go into building self-educating guides for a nocoiner to be able to easily follow.
For example, we just added a guide for spending only one listing for now: https://lightsats.fly.dev/guide/spend
Here's one listing for different LN Wallets:
https://lightsats.fly.dev/guide/wallets
We'll be building this whole area out based on the following actions we feel would be important for a nocoioner to start exploring on their own.
https://i.postimg.cc/G2MQQWwM/Screen-Shot-2022-11-03-at-7-21-37-AM.png
Also in case you want to see what we have so far on the receiving side, I'd love for you to test claiming these 1000 sats - https://lgt.st/keyan
Network security is a field that industry professionals typically study and practice for years before achieving competency. You are unlikely to find a single nugget of information that teaches you everything you seek.
Instead of worrying about what the world already knows about your internet usage, take some actionable steps towards making your router STFU (shut the f*** up).
People on the internet (and those running the internet) only know what your router tells them. They won't know very much if you make your router STFU.
Build your own router/firewall server or flash a store-bought one with open source firmware like OpenWRT or pfSense. This firmware will surface new configuration options that you can use to make your router STFU.
For example, you can make your router encrypt 100% of traffic and send it to an anonymous offshore no-KYC server with a Wiregaurd tunnel. The traffic is decrypted on the server and forwarded to the next hop. Even tor traffic will go this route, encrypted again so it no longer appears like tor traffic.
With a setup like this, go ahead and run dozens of services that are very chatty. Tor relays, bitcoin nodes, webservers, torrent seeders. Make it very noisy to distinguish patterns among the already encrypted data.
The offshore server knows very little about you because it was anonymous signup and paid with bitcoin. They just know your account number, and they know every request you make on clearnet. But the hope is that the offshore server doesn't have an obligation to share data with foreign government agencies.
Hopefully, only your ISP is forced to share data. And all they know is how many GBs of encrypted packets you send/receive to the offshore server.
You don't have to jump straight into this idealized setup. In fact, its probably impossible to set this up in a weekend unless you're already a professional.
Just try to make your router STFU a little bit more every week. Study the dark art of Network Security and practice building your own defensive networks at home.
Recommend this book: https://inteltechniques.com/book7d.html
Specifically the section on firewalls.
I am a BItwage user from the beginning... 2015
All good!
https://darthcoin.substack.com/p/be-paid-in-bitcoin-using-bitwage