Johnathan Corgan

So far my relay crawling experiments show a steady state of about 800 nostr relays online and queryable at any point in time, while the collective unique relays extracted from recent NIP-65 kind 10002 inbox/outbox lists is nearly 3000. About half of the difference is down to DNS failures--relays that simply don't exist anymore.

Just coded up a recursive relay crawler using NIP-65 events for discovery. Over the course of a few hours it discovered a total of 2,761 unique URLs for relays (after discarding a variety of malformed or otherwise unusable relay tags.) Unfortunately, actually going out and attempting a connection with each, only *800* were online and queryable! Not sure what to make of this. Clearly many people need to update their kind 10002 relay lists...

I have to say that coming back into the world from seven years of self-imposed hermitage is both gratifying and horrifying. On the plus side, I have recently met and interacted with young people carrying the torch of a movement I had given up upon, yet the forces of humans at their worst remain arrayed as always against us. Nonetheless, I am hopeful again.

GM ☕ Last day of vacation before going back into the fiat world. I don't wanna!

GM ☕

Nerd sniped by so many new ideas in the last few days the day job is really gonna suffer.

GM ☕

The kids are alright.

🛬

✈️

proof of life

If it weren't for the police and the army, politicians would just be disgustingly evil people you could safely ignore. This one fact tells you everything you need to know about their actual role in the world--anything else is just propaganda to hide this.

A big beautiful box of pork...

We didn't get lucky, we just didn't listen to you.

Bitcoin does not need politicians, it just needs them to go away.

One of the disappointments of being in my late 50s is watching young people having to learn the hard lessons of life all over again, instead of learning from history only a generation or two old. Especially now, where events before the Internet seemingly never happened, and events after the Internet get endlessly memed or propagandized into whatever currently fashionable ideology benefits the status quo. There has been a thin thread of rebellion against this that has survived in the form of cypherpunk activism of the 80s and 90s through the invention and proliferation of Bitcoin in the 2010s and now the advent of distributed, uncensorable communication networks such as Nostr. And yet, it's not clear to me whether this nascent drive towards individual freedom will survive. Too much of the public discourse is consumed by "strategic reserve" this, "legal tender" that, and in general the tying of Bitcoin to its relation to the State. Politicians seek political favor by making noises allying themselves to the Bitcoin community, and to great benefit. The vast majority of Bitcoin movement is between exchanges, not individuals. I won't even go into the absurdities on display at conferences ostensibly about Bitcoin but have turned into promotional grounds for grifters and influencers. We are at a unique point in history where we have both the technology and the motivation to establish direct, peer-to-peer, mutually beneficial, and most importantly, voluntary, non-coercive relationships among each other that bypass existing systems of surveillance and control. Let's do this.

Sometimes it feels like being a small mouse dodging the feet of dinosaurs fighting each other for power, all the while a massive meteor is inbound. You know mammals will emerge triumphant eventually, you just have to avoid the collateral damage long enough. Be the mouse, not the dinosaur.