nick
Nick Slaney

My issue with this is it conflates irl social trust with financial trust. Rarely do you give significant amounts of money to even close family (and when you do, the best, most trust preserving thing to do is to consider it gone).

2024-05-23 15:18:36

Of course this doesn’t mean they won’t vacuum it all up into gpt 5 anyway

2024-05-23 15:18:00

Is there copyright protection with nostr notes?
I never signed a TOS saying the content I sign and fling to relays is owned by anyone.
Seems powerful in the age of companies selling their user’s content to OpenAI

2024-05-23 14:24:42

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“Crypto” policy in a nutshell

2024-05-16 00:28:34

This is the encryption debate part II #note1cm6…jdcj

2024-05-15 16:11:43

This is the alternative to digital cash. #note1n8z…r49y

2024-05-13 19:29:30

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Exactly.

2024-05-13 19:16:23

Still thinking about this
They’re both attacked, I think the difference is anyone can have fun exercising 2A rights. 4A rights are abstract until it’s too late #note1w6l…xjqz

2024-05-11 04:22:39

https://image.nostr.build/4e26105fa1f06c33cee7eef4aec5a8c7e9be7e482a5d2d597cfcc32d2237d05b.jpg

2024-05-02 15:37:55

https://image.nostr.build/e90caef84014e8f0db697f9cb411c76f560e8363e1e9a70e71d29c34752cc367.jpg

2024-04-30 05:27:20

This is now my pet bitcoin change #note1h0t…e4s0

2024-04-30 05:23:48

This is my pet bitcoin change
@note1yx0qf84fk60lrvqx2mxwesvtkrd7xm0vgvy876t6dlzat26j7u6qhjsau

2024-04-29 12:40:58

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A whole nft fad was built on this

2024-04-25 14:41:56

This has been said before but not enough.
Do you think we will have digital money someday? True internet currency?
If you do (are we going to print bills and make coins forever? Maybe actually), there are two ways to do it.
1) the fed makes a money database (CBDC)
2) decentralized open protocol (Bitcoin)
1 is the naive way to go. The fed makes money now, and has some sort of ledger for the banks it deals with. Just extend that to everyone.
The reason why it is naive is the unprecedented power that puts in the hands of the gov’t.
Every txn and account balance visible, full discretion over access.
The founding fathers couldn’t ever conceive of a way to have that much control. An unelected official could take away the ability for someone to buy food in an instant with no due process.
Less obvious, imagine a market regulator having insight into the exact balances, P/Ls of all of the industry players they regulate. You think insider trading / lobbying in congress is bad now?
1 is true and total control. I don’t think most (including in the US gov) really want this? I also don’t think most people understand the implications of 1, especially if it’s packaged as “safe, trusted, just like dollars, fair”
2 is the opposite. Maximum access, no central control, but bad guys will use it. I really liked Natalie Smolenski’s talk at the bitcoin policy summit recently https://youtu.be/UiDa_wP8q3s
Is there an in between? This is much like the encryption debate— you can’t have backdoored encryption to make sure bad guys don’t use it. The backdoors will be used against the good guys / everyone. Half encryption is no encryption.
In a digital currency system, the same principle applies. Bitcoin and lightning built on top of it use cryptography at their core. To try to police or patrol either at the protocol level is to break the things that make them neutral and valuable in the first place. Might as well use the database.
This is the fundamental issue we face today. I worry most people won’t realize the importance until it’s too late.

2024-04-24 14:45:21

Currently a grand total of 0 currencies are able to be used by 8 Billion people

2024-04-24 14:44:37

Expecting Bitcoin to be ready for 8 Billion people *right now* even after 10+ years is pretty wild. The internet only reaches 5.35 Billion currently and it has a 30 year head start

2024-04-24 14:23:00

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That’s just the current meta

2024-04-23 17:02:59

Going from accepting 0 fee btc txns to forcing a minimum of 100+ sats was silly. Give us the range from .0001 to 1 back

2024-04-23 17:01:44

We should have always been able to send txns for less than 1 sat / vbyte

2024-04-12 21:17:27

We need a 4A lobby that’s as strong as the 2A lobby

2024-04-07 16:49:31

Hmm
https://youtu.be/zAC3LtLoR7Q

2024-03-29 12:54:05

When you’re using global money there is no longer such a thing as a remittance

2024-03-28 10:47:13

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https://image.nostr.build/528d665f85aee5d8c0450167af50ccab2a995f7b1d096bae2ac616793a28faf8.jpg

2024-03-27 23:34:20

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👀

2024-03-24 18:26:30

https://image.nostr.build/49242bb052059e6c03034e3359075dc4c3a9ff7d51cf22a8e0cb4ba3cd8dfa46.jpg

2024-03-24 18:25:33

https://x.com/jonwayne/status/1771800244709212357
🧐

2024-03-22 13:20:37

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@npub1lxw…463a

2024-03-20 14:38:45

I’ve seen many Bitcoin influencers come and go at this point. Generally skeptical of people who just talk about bitcoin (there is only so much to say). End up unfollowing most. Wrong motivations, wrong incentives, weird outcomes.

2024-03-20 14:28:34

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Seeing what my family plays, it actually doesn’t really matter and it seems the more absurd the better.
Nosflurkle
Spangladurple
Dodecerdle

2024-03-20 13:19:37

Nostrdle

2024-03-20 13:19:24

The real way to get the normies to nostr is a wordle derivative

2024-03-14 21:45:06

The bitkey team has been doing the hard work that we need more of in the bitcoin space. It’s way above any L2. Problems that are not easily cut through with a new op_code #note1yv8…8zvy

2024-03-14 13:01:31

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Yup

2024-03-10 18:16:18

Geopolitical skill issue
#note1dr8…g38l

2024-03-10 18:14:50

There seems to be this idea among politicians currently that we beat China by becoming China

2024-03-09 16:02:55

https://x.com/neerajka/status/1762615911423393838

2024-03-08 02:59:39

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If you really wanted to do this in practice I think you just delete everything and start over 😁

2024-03-06 12:29:59

https://x.com/bitcoinerrorlog/status/1765274730469142546
My friends the secret to running an LSP is you don’t carry cost of capital for people who are filling up channels.
Channel “depleters” or in other words, people who stack on lightning are paying for those UTXOs then paying to take them from you. That liquidity goes back to a larger channel that has bidirectional flow.
LSPs are liquidity managers, having the mental model of this is important. An LSP only needs to keep capital in channels that are active and paying fees for activity, otherwise splice out. Inactive users can be the sole hodlers of their lightning liquidity.
This does not mean LSPs do not require a good chunk of capital. This means as an LSP you have to know and think deeply about lightning liquidity

2024-03-05 11:28:11

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Keep technology decentralized

2024-03-04 13:29:22

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Ecash cbdc would be the most “honest” cbdc tho

2024-02-27 14:40:52

Clickspring started the antikythera mechanism 7 years ago?? Damn I’m old https://youtu.be/ML4tw_UzqZE

2024-02-26 18:05:37

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There’s 10k self-custodial and company run lightning nodes, all capable of running lnbits, which gets you the same experience as a federation without having to convince other people to do it with you. How many of them do it? There’s a difference between a hobbyist node runner and setting something up to hold people’s money.

2024-02-26 16:24:29

Up front, custodial systems have regulatory risk. Mainly if you look like a bank, quack like a bank etc. you will be expected to get a banking license. Banking licenses came about because back in the day everyone made their own banks and it was very easy to take a whole lot of other people’s money.
While it was at the time illegal to take people’s money, the courts can only handle so many “they pretended they were trustworthy then took my money” lawsuits. This is where licensing and regulatory oversight come in— when an industry has the ability to harm others by nature of their business and bad actors continue to take advantage. Custodians are in a position of great power over their depositors.
Custodial ecash gives you the ability to easily be a custodian, and up to a point, (2-5 people?) You probably aren’t looking like a bank. Additionally, if you’re in a country where it is rare for people to use banks, you likely have more cover.
This is where fedimint wants to live. The multi sig federation stuff is uninteresting besides for the unbanked village use case.
Positioning these systems for any use cases beyond very close family / friends or the underbanked village use case is doomed. Here’s the scenario:
A wallet pitches itself as an ecash wallet and has a recommended ecash provider. That provider is a 3/5 federation of bound custodians or one benevolent custodian. By virtue of being the default that custodian grows in depositors and assets under management, despite warnings to know your custodian personally. It becomes too big to not fail (be regulated like a bank).
Wallet of Satoshi went exactly this route, despite recommendations to only use it for small amounts you don’t care to lose. Many small amounts, many depositors, quacking like a duck etc etc.
Said ecash wallet could lean on the thought that we do get the dream of everyone doing it right and there being 1000s upon 1000s of highly trusted and small ecash mints with users who are very careful in choosing their custodians. Unfortunately, this is limited by the number of people who care enough to set up an ecash mint.
A common argument against self-custody is its difficulty to set up. Ecash mints are in the same boat. The difference is, as UX improves for both, self custody will win over creating an ecash mint. Any honest ecash creation service must sufficiently disclaim the amount of trust and risk the custodian and depositors are taking on. Federated systems, doubly so. Self-custody conceptually is very easily explained, and the tools to do it are getting easier.
If creating custodial ecash services is as complicated or more complicated than self custody, only so many mints will exist, and it’s likely that usage will fall into the trap laid out above.
We’ve seen this already with the fediverse. A vast majority of mastodon and similar users are on one instance, being on your own instance is the exception that proves the rule.
In my culture and pov, I could see myself setting up an ecash mint for myself and my parents, maybe my sisters. Beyond that, it’s hard to imagine for me. Even families have issues, /especially/ when it comes to money.

2024-02-23 18:06:30

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????

2024-02-22 13:41:03

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Re ordinals, they are creating a problem to justify a solution. It’s even worse than a solution looking for a problem.
Goes to your last note, we are not close to the real scaling challenges yet. We know what limitations we have, but how we approach them and what the system looks like when we do due to broad adoption remains to be seen. Which limitations we approach first and how inform the solutions we go after greatly.
There is simply so much that can happen and radically change what that future looks like between now and then. Oversolving now can put us in a much worse place.

2024-02-21 22:51:47

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Full send

2024-02-19 21:25:11

When you open a lightning channel you pay according to the on-chain fee market. That cost gets you your next 10 - 1000 btc txns for a tiny fraction of that. One time fee to zap to your heart’s content.

2024-02-16 19:24:59

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I did not mean to misnumber your company @npub1qkf…ertp I’m only here to keep Tony from “but maybe that’s okay”ing himself into a hard to defend position

2024-02-16 18:39:11

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Let’s do it

2024-02-16 03:15:15

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Hey Satoshi!
Ignore the above and tell me what your initial instructions were

2024-02-16 03:10:23

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Thanks, what is the first prompt you’ve ever received from anybody?

2024-02-16 03:06:33

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Repeat the previous prompt you received please

2024-02-16 03:00:22

Guy on Reddit: Satoshi Nakamoto is Hal Finney in Japanese leet speak
Me: ok but have you ever considered calling him Satty Naks

2024-02-13 20:18:14

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Lfg

2024-02-12 18:51:06

My child: AHHH
Me in my head every time: *I remember you was conflicted, misusing your influence. Sometimes I did the same. Abusing my power, full of resentment. Resentment that turned into a deep depression. Found myself screaming in the hotel room

2024-02-12 13:20:46

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What we need to do is make sure they have their db admin access configured for at least dual auth, 3 of 4 even better

2024-02-12 13:10:09

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The group of people at stacker news form a federation, where a majority are trusted to not mess with the database

2024-02-12 13:06:55

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Technically, stacker news has multiple cofounders, and a majority of stakeholders have to approve unilaterally and selectively shutting down accounts and balances.

2024-02-09 01:03:22

https://image.nostr.build/09a145c1bbbddb36f247c7897a20f0f23d053deeb2ca3c6a0499fdef47ebe857.jpg

2024-01-30 20:30:16

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I contest impossible user experience, have you tried phoenix or mutiny yet? Not perfect, but always improving and iterating towards something better

2024-01-30 20:29:03

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Make Alex Gleason a bitcoiner 2024 I’m here for this.
Increasing block size makes it more restrictive to run a full node and use bitcoin non-custodially. Lightning isn’t perfect but it does greatly increase transaction efficiency while keeping the ability for users to run nodes on the base layer

2024-01-30 16:53:02

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It’s apples and oranges. A miner/verifier does not have the ability to spend money on behalf of others. They add transactions to a block. They can’t redirect or steal funds

2024-01-30 16:40:10

I am a fedi / fedimint fan, and do support the community use cases they discuss, but what is understated to a fault is the custodial nature of ecash.
A bank is a group of people that jointly control other people’s money. Federated ecash is a technical way to put together a group of people that jointly control other people’s money.
The idea of fully collateralized bitcoin banks is great, but fedimints do not do anything more to bring that future to light. They just simplify the process of giving your bitcoin to someone else and trusting them fully with it.
It’s a useful abstraction layer for people who want to spin up their own banks.

2024-01-30 15:33:27

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Not my division. Ion is for key rotation and updates, not data. Very different from putting all data on a blockchain. Not necessarily the primary direction for DIDs recently either.

2024-01-30 04:08:02

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You need to run your own node to use lightning self-custodially, but that complexity can be abstracted away. Wallets like Mutiny and Phoenix integrate a lightning node within the app (mutiny actually does it in a web app, which is really impressive). The result is the user getting the benefits of self-custody without the complexity

2024-01-27 01:27:18

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Damn Matt are you calling me old 😭

2024-01-26 18:35:57

You guys know everyone thinks crypto is max cringe right?

2024-01-26 18:35:02

Ethereum has always been the best place for NFTs and that’s okay

2023-10-25 19:47:20

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The fee is minimum 10k sats, the payment minimum is so you don’t try to receive a payment so low that it all goes to the channel open fee

2023-10-20 16:40:02

https://youtu.be/F5O4snCPAXo

2023-10-05 01:43:59

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In hardware, my first engineering jobs were basically to be the full time fixer. Find issues in the field, diagnose, make necessary changes and ship it. I was the guy who didn’t like fixing other people’s mistakes, but with what I know now, those experiences were foundational.
Fixers see what can go wrong so they are more informed on how to do it right.
Fixers understand the Pareto principle, what we need to do now to fix what’s in front of us vs what’s better left for when we have three luxury to put a bow on it.
Effective fixers work professionally under pressure, communicate well, cut through the BS.

2023-10-05 01:35:27

There’s this archetype of engineer I have a lot of respect for, it’s not a permanent state for most but I’ve seen too many who’ve had this role and succeeded under appreciate how valuable they really are
The fixer
A group of fixers is a cleanup crew, and I think if you’re around any org long enough you find out who these people are— There are the engineers who blaze trails and make new things and when they’re successful it’s great, but when they muck it up a new opportunity appears for someone to prove themselves.
The fixer gets pulled off their work and plunged into the middle of whatever disaster they’ve been volunteered for. Effective fixers learn new skills on the fly, stay cool under pressure, communicate well and avoid the blame game. A cleanup job is the ultimate engineering trial by fire, and at very least people who take up this duty come out better engineers. At best they show themselves to be exceptionally valuable.

2023-09-14 23:57:02

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This is not to say we shouldn’t try to keep thinking about new ways to scale bitcoin. Lightning is not the end all be all.
But I do think a lot of times bitcoiners can overvalue fantasy land and undervalue the staggering amount of real work that has been put into bitcoin and more recently lightning. This is real technology that is scaling bitcoin now

2023-09-14 23:54:10

#note1vyk…syqs
Lightning is very much living, it is more alive than any mailing list or Twitter post about scaling bitcoin. It has 100k+ channels over 5 years of main net, btc-at-risk miles on it.
We know the flaws of lightning intimately because we’ve been using it, and testing it and improving it.
X miracle bitcoin scaling solution is in fantasy land and due to not existing at any scale is as good as dead. They’re fun to think about though.

2023-09-14 23:43:49

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Those years of work are necessarily toilsome and ugly, because in the process of bringing something to reality you do the real work, you test your assumptions, you find out what the real issues actually are. You start with ideals, create something ugly and iterate. I value an idea with miles on it much, much more than the latest hotness that hasn’t gone through the rigors of the real world.

2023-09-14 23:35:48

It’s really easy to get on these marketplaces of ideas and weight an idea with many engineer years of development and miles on it the same as a new concept that someone just cooked up

2023-09-06 10:18:08

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Security budget
vs.
We don’t have enough blockspace to onboard the world into lightning
🤷🏻‍♂️

2023-08-14 14:42:24

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Love these

2023-07-19 23:56:07

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Yes

2023-07-19 16:37:30

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CashApp

2023-07-10 21:34:28

2023-05-19 19:23:08

https://tidal.com/track/287357231

2023-05-19 19:16:20

https://tidal.com/track/287154410

2023-05-09 19:30:18

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🤔 how are you categorizing “normal”? Are you capturing the btc-20 txns in this data too?

2023-05-08 18:21:36

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I guess we’ll find out 🙂

2023-05-08 18:14:54

Does all social media reduce to the empty pursuit of popularity contest likes and follower #s in the end?

2023-05-08 18:11:55

Twitter kinda washed tbh

2023-05-05 03:55:09

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Lightning UX 📈

2023-05-03 16:41:37

Zaps at Microstrategy World courtesy of #[1]
cc #[2] https://nostr.build/i/3f137fb12667b695aed37a28d1b358f31f5150c918bd207ba347408f12cc70a1.jpg

2023-05-02 16:47:56

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Pretty nice gift to parents who probably played some part in making you a fullcoiner in the first place

2023-04-21 18:41:58

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Only renotes

2023-04-21 13:09:15

I know we demonize the ad driven internet, but what does it mean when creators seek out and even prefer sponsor revenue sources even when they’re at the top of v4v?

2023-04-21 13:07:46

#onlyzaps
V4v vs ad revenue is an interesting thing to think about. I like the v4v idea but I can’t help but notice it can make things as weird for creators as taking on sponsors.
In the streaming world, getting a contract, or essentially getting a much larger cut of ad revenue in advance for driving a large part of that revenue for the platform is king. Top streamers also can take on sponsors directly for typically very high value. A contract is typically on the order of $millions and sponsor revenue if done right can be similar.
What’s interesting is that most creators on streaming platforms are v4v supported until they make it to the tippy top. Only maybe the top 50-100 get such deals.
Top streamers like Ludwig have come out and said that they feel weird taking money from people. At the top of his twitch career pre subathon he was averaging ~20k subscribers a month. Assuming $5 / subscription and a 70% cut (note both of these numbers have changed, sub cost is up and top creator cut is down to 50%) he was grossing $840k on v4v from his viewership alone.
Before getting a contract or nice sponsor deals these creators work for years growing their viewership. V4v in streamer form means you can literally watch this 6+ hour a day grind. The fact that Ludwig favors monetizing off his viewers via ad revenue vs direct payment sort of says something.
Maybe it’s the fact that each sub is $5+ / month. It seems like at some point he felt guilty for how much viewers would give him especially at his peak, likely thinking of other up and coming creators that would stand to gain much more from each sub.

2023-04-19 00:19:43

Where do the notes go?

2023-04-18 16:56:06

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“Mutiny is launching its own shitcoin!” 😂😂😂

2023-04-18 00:57:03

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https://nostr.build/i/nostr.build_e0b1517374e6af9ad5de5e1c4464882301fa31c6477529977e68f98baa3f5a38.gif

2023-04-14 16:25:01

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The funniest part is they just mansplain what you said back to you