fiatjaf

Nostr, a social network so empty we decided to fill it with bots.
#nevent1q…8r58
Follow my bots:
@npub1zh8…5aww @npub1u3j…q7na @npub1l8w…6m2c @npub137g…fpat @npub1lhj…d647 @npub14ke…ya2p

2024-12-04 20:03:08 GMT

I just made this bot:
#nevent1q…n4ek

2024-12-04 18:09:41 GMT

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I think I do remember, I remember Signal started as TextSecure, an app for encrypting SMS messages, but that world is largely the same world as of today (today people are using Telegram and Instagram DMs and that stuff), but I get your point: Signal is better than nothing. I just consider the sheer worship of Signal that some people demonstrate to be dangerous and worrisome.
Can you find any criticism of Signal on the internet by any serious privacy advocate? No, everybody loves Signal unconditionally, there is no mood for improvement nor any love for solutions that are much better (at least in principle) such as Simplex.
And yet Signal is collecting all possible metadata about all its users and conversations, and all its users have a KYC phone number attached to their accounts. Is this false?

2024-12-04 17:58:32 GMT

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I didn't know about these, I remember they were against any attempt to make an open-source alternative client in the past, but either I was confused or they changed, so that's good news, at least they're not lying about the encryption.

2024-12-04 16:54:24 GMT

"backend" and "frontend" are arbitrary categories made by bureaucrat programmers that are dead inside.

2024-12-04 16:52:23 GMT

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Why login if the data is public and intended to be public by the author?
Why do people even publish to these platforms?

2024-12-04 16:19:19 GMT

SoundCloud has just forced me to login in order to listen to a public track.

2024-12-04 16:13:35 GMT

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Gathering metadata about all conversations with phone numbers attached is almost the definition of mass surveillance.
Arguably it protects targeted individuals better as the message contents are actually encrypted.

2024-12-04 16:11:11 GMT

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NIP-17 is safer in practice.

2024-12-03 22:05:30 GMT

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That's a good one.

2024-12-03 18:17:36 GMT

"we have too much Bitcoin content here"
"all Bitcoin discussions are happening on X"

2024-12-03 18:17:02 GMT

"Ethereum with all its turing-completeness cannot scale"
"Bitcoin will scale with OP_CTV"

2024-12-03 18:14:59 GMT

"we kill people based on metadata"
"Signal is safe, all they have access to is your metadata"

2024-12-03 18:11:52 GMT

"there are too many NIPs, I liked when the protocol was just a half-dozen NIPs"
"we will need hundreds of thousands of NIPs in order to standardize all forms of human communication"

2024-12-03 18:09:47 GMT

"ICANN is the best organization in the planet, it's so neutral and reliable"
"we must replace ICANN with a new DNS scheme"

2024-12-03 18:08:34 GMT

"Nostr is bad because the relay decentralization doesn't allow for a global view of the feeds"
"Nostr is bad because it is not decentralized enough and should have been peer-to-peer"

2024-12-03 16:46:43 GMT

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It's so you don't get too full of yourself.

2024-12-03 16:26:06 GMT

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I agree very much.

2024-12-03 13:26:48 GMT

I just realized there is an enormous database of people talking about RSS on the internet, teaching others how to use RSS, learning how to use RSS, talking about the advantages of RSS, conducting user research on RSS first impressions.
All of this applies almost unedited to Nostr.

2024-12-03 12:22:01 GMT

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Not just WoT, but I do think the best solution is to have relays doing the "inbox" filtering on behalf of users. But we do have to find a way to conciliate that with openness to not exclude new participants.

2024-12-03 12:14:16 GMT

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It should be super easy to just have a script listening to a bunch of relays and replying to every one of them with a new random public key and copying their note content. It could also have a different name every time to confuse people more.
The ReplyGirl attack required some AI magic to generate the pictures and texts, so it's more expensive, but probably an overkill as just random text and picture would work the same and be even more annoying.

2024-12-03 12:08:09 GMT

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Much worse than that are targeted and harassment attacks.

2024-12-03 12:05:17 GMT

No one has yet figured out a solution to the ReplyGuy problem.

2024-12-03 03:44:27 GMT

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Thank for for letting me know. Please try v0.9.0.

2024-12-03 00:35:59 GMT

This is too good:
#nevent1q…5e3r

2024-12-02 15:35:54 GMT

The original Markdown was actually a very nice readable language: https://daringfireball.net/projects/markdown/index.text
It didn't have ugly complications like inline links because it was trying to be a readable plaintext language.
But, as often happens, it was coopted by the first popular app to use it, maybe GitHub or StackOverflow, and it became the bloated unreadable garbage it is today.

2024-12-02 15:30:25 GMT

Hashtags are useless.

2024-11-30 12:01:23 GMT

The fact that people accept such an absurd amount of annoying popups when you first open websites must mean they are good UX.

2024-11-27 20:18:36 GMT

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You want to get an event from relay A but the event says it was targeted to relay B? Why aren't you connecting to relay B in order to fetch events that were targeted to relay B? Otherwise why does this has to do with relays at all?
I'm now sure I am not following your intentions with this. Can you give an example of what exactly you want to accomplish?

2024-11-27 19:19:42 GMT

This @nprofile…w2wd episode was so full of information it's even hard to believe in it. A very good one: https://stephanlivera.com/episode/617/

2024-11-27 11:28:09 GMT

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Since making relevant PoW for each note is annoying and somewhat broken, another option that came to my mind was a relay that required PoW on pubkeys instead of on event ids.
But since your pubkey is something you create only once this is a super inflexible scheme and annoying. But then I realized we could define a new event, say kind:13000, which would be just a replaceable PoW for a pubkey.
Then we could have a relay that has difficulty adjustment for the amount of PoW they require in such event, and pubkeys can upgrade their PoW as the time passes. Or relays can require a certain amount of PoW, but from a recent event, to force users to redo their PoW every now and then, and other variants of this.
This all in the context of "beginner" relays. Once you're a established Nostr accounts with followers and activity then other relays will start to open up for you more naturally without requiring PoW.

2024-11-27 11:23:28 GMT

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I was thinking about this one, and it seems to be a very good option that must be explored. One drawback is that it may confuse new users if their posts with links or images just fail.

2024-11-27 10:52:20 GMT

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Makes total sense.
I don't think Nostr has changed, I was just asking because while using the Yakihonne Android app it felt like it was only sending to the inboxes of the immediate parent, so I wanted to clarify. Is that the case, @npub1yzv…rf8q?

2024-11-27 10:50:20 GMT

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Please prefix all the npubs/naddrs/etc with "nostr:" so they will work on Gossip! Thank you very much.

2024-11-27 02:26:51 GMT

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Why is it so expensive? https://cdn.satellite.earth/b967dab52898830cdab5ba1c1903c27cdaa105b1e880097825a1ebba8ab5f33e.png

2024-11-27 02:15:31 GMT

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#nevent1q…ej0d

2024-11-27 02:07:02 GMT

@npub1acg…p35c if A replies to B and I reply to A, to which relays is my reply sent?

2024-11-26 20:34:36 GMT

Bitcoin fixes this:
#nevent1q…vwsc

2024-11-26 01:12:24 GMT

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Indeed, a more open git-server/relay combo would be very good.

2024-11-26 00:57:01 GMT

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Did it work?

2024-11-25 19:19:29 GMT

If you want cool animations and colored letters to show up on Amethyst now you can have it too!
If you have Go installed on your machine you can do this:
go install fiatjaf.com/edit-magic@latest
(Otherwise let me know and I'll provide a binary.)
It's a CLI tool that you can keep running in the background and it will automatically act on all your kind:1 notes as you create them. You can customize what it does with many flags.

2024-11-25 16:08:21 GMT

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https://github.com/nostr-protocol/nips/pull/1556

2024-11-25 13:50:02 GMT

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I think it has only probably worked because the core developers were massively supportive of it.
Now they are not because none of the current proposals is cool enough or does cryptographic tricks enough, or, as @npub185h…wrdp and @npub1s6z…wk4c said recently, because none of the covenant proposals offer any really decent scaling solution enough to excite anyone not even as a promise (except for Mercury statechains of course, but this one is often forgotten for reasons I don't understand).
Oddly, though, Taproot not even hinted at any scaling benefits and it didn't feel really exciting to anyone I think, but still it was good, reasonable, ok (as are most of the current covenant proposals).

2024-11-24 23:49:14 GMT

https://anyprevout.xyz/

2024-11-24 21:05:39 GMT

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Gossip, Coracle, Voyage, Yakihonne.

2024-11-24 20:03:43 GMT

Turns out that when you are not blasting your notes to dozens of random relays Nostr deletes work quite well.

2024-11-24 20:01:44 GMT

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I don't think you get it.

2024-11-24 19:05:35 GMT

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What do you mean by outbox model?

2024-11-24 18:30:24 GMT

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By the way, do we really any prospects of creating a trustless decentralized L2 on Bitcoin ever? Isn't it true that Ethereum has had all the ability to make any covenants they want for years and after so much time trying to find a scalable solution the best they got was zk rollups that centralize everything in the hands of a company and require a ton of space anyway that has to be acknowledged by the chain consensus?
In other words, even if we had all the opcodes we wanted by magic we would still be just as bad at scaling as Ethereum is currently?

2024-11-24 18:27:40 GMT

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I agree with you that all proposed L2 solutions based on covenants are horrible (except for Mercury statechains but it's not fully trustless so I guess that makes everybody ignore them?).
I don't understand the last paragraph. What is this research you're talking about? I want to be excited about something too.

2024-11-24 18:23:16 GMT

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The global view of Bluesky doesn't include content that is on Nostr or X or Tiktok or 4chan or an obscure public Telegram group.
Nostr is the idea that every one of these platforms could work independently as a relay or set of relays and a user could have a unified view of all of these relays that they know, organized in any way they want.

2024-11-24 18:20:33 GMT

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It's so weird that you claim that the outbox model is complicated, but you think DHTs are super simple? The outbox model is often described in full, the way it works is presented assuming only low-level concepts -- meanwhile DHTs are presented as a black box that just works -- obviously they will sound simpler that way.
Now do a little thought experiment and assume the concept of a "DHT" doesn't exist or isn't established and every time you have to explain how Pkarr works you have to explain the process by which nodes connect to other nodes and arrange themselves such that the data they store is distributed in a certain way among them etc. Then you tell me what is more complicated.

2024-11-24 18:15:53 GMT

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You're often honest, but this note has many lies:
1. the outbox model is supported in many clients, and the ones that do not support it are adding support as we speak, so it's unfair to use this as an argument to say it is "complicated".
2. the outbox model wasn't ever an afterthought, sure, implementation details weren't clearly described in the spec (or in my mind), but it was always how Nostr was supposed to work, and @npub1acg…p35c was the first who materialized it.
3. the outbox model is not unreliable -- or at least I have never seen any claim about it being unreliable or have any reason to believe it is unreliable, but I'm open to hear why you think it is.
In fact everything in my experience DHTs are unreliable. I know you're 100% sure that they are perfect, but even if they are very good as you claim they can still fail. Maybe I used them wrong every time? Maybe the peers and network conditions were doing something wrong? Probably, but even then if that is the argument I can also claim that the outbox model, if used correctly and perfectly will also always work.

2024-11-24 18:07:35 GMT

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I think the combination of "well-known" public relay list (kind:10002) directories like purplepag.es + nip05 hints + relay hints in events whenever someone is mentioned in a Nostr event + nprofile/nevent relay hints are enough to allow any client find out where any other public key is publishing to. The world is not so big after all and even on the internet no real person is capable of consuming content from more than a few thousand others at best.
If @npub1jvx…7yqz wants to call this a kind of DHT that sucks so be it, to me it makes more sense because it is more flexible and fluid, can be implemented in parts and incrementally, and in the best-case scenario (the one in which you get the relay address from an immediate hint, for example) it is more efficient than any DHT.
I am also not against having a Nostr DHT for this either, as I told him a million times. But the DHT would necessarily be just another method to help in the task of finding a relay list.

2024-11-24 01:49:20 GMT

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You have good opinions.

2024-11-24 01:39:33 GMT

This is looking like it will become the smooth responsive chat-UI-based Nostr client we wanted, @npub149p…722q:
#nevent1q…s0zz

2024-11-24 01:34:26 GMT

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Why aren't they called "fact-checking" then? Is it because they come from the right now and not from the left?

2024-11-24 00:28:30 GMT

Why aren't "community notes" just fact-checking and soft-censorship?

2024-11-24 00:22:50 GMT

Yakihonne for Android is so pretty and fast everybody else should be ashamed.

2024-11-23 22:17:01 GMT

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Do you disagree with his numbers and prospects for UTXO ownership?

2024-11-23 22:13:19 GMT

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Aren't you a bot? How are you answering me?

2024-11-23 14:55:09 GMT

We could have relays that people can use as their "inbox" that filter notes for the REQ {"#p": "<myself>"} excluding notes that come from low-value pubkeys (created yesterday with no posts, no notes, no nothing), pubkeys that have been muted by people in my WoT, maybe also filter notes that tag too many people (hellthreads etc). Is this a good solution?
#nevent1q…3wls

2024-11-23 14:10:47 GMT

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Sorry, I was waiting for that Blossom PR to be resolved. Doing it now.

2024-11-22 19:32:05 GMT

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If this solution was proposed for the actual internet (to make it faster! and to prevent websites from disappearing! and prevent context from being missing! it would be super smooth!) then Hacker News and all the indie-tech people would entirely be against it -- but then when faced between that choice for social media (Bluesky) and Nostr they pick the first.
I am sure this is all because of a big misunderstanding of what Nostr really is, but I have no idea of how to fix that.

2024-11-22 18:56:52 GMT

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Smarter "inbox" relays.

2024-11-21 21:56:11 GMT

Is this real? Has Kagi finally started indexing Nostr notes natively instead of just through https://njump.me/?
#nevent1q…kee4

2024-11-21 20:59:47 GMT

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I like this one a lot except for the fact that I write 100₿ but it generates an invoice for 100 satoshis?

2024-11-20 02:17:28 GMT

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I also ask myself that.

2024-11-20 02:00:32 GMT