GM ☕ Do we have any Nostriches who have done the #Camino?

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.

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.

I've been away, but still kicking. Sometimes a break from the craziness is needed to regain one's equilibrium 😎

Has anyone checked in on Peter Schiff lately?

Voting is consent to the outcome and the system that produced it. Don't encourage the fuckers.

GM ☕ Nothing like the feeling of a morning coffee, a fresh editor window, and a new idea.

Satoshi wept.

Pro tip: When the comet arrives, be the mammal, not the dinosaur.

Voting is deliberate consent to the outcome, explicitly granting your sanction to the status quo and the system of threats and force against you and others that back it up. It is difficult to argue against the injustices stemming from the people ruling over you when you have participated in and perpetuated the very thing that gives them oxygen.

So much space, so little time 🙂

GM ☕ There comes a time when it is better to know someone who knows something than to try to learn that subject oneself. It's great to have smart friends and colleagues to lean on.

If the success of Bitcoin and its ecosystem is still dependent on or even just affected by which politician or bureaucrat is in office, cypherpunks must write more code.

The mining process for proof-of-steak.

NO TIKTOK NO FACEBOOK NO TWITTER NO LINKEDIN NO THREADS NO BLUESKY NO TRUTH SOCIAL NO GAB NO PARLER NO INSTAGRAM NO TELEGRAM NO WHATSAPP and just as important, NO TELEVISION I have Signal for DMs, Nostr for bitcoiner stuff, and a Fediverse/Mastodon account for normie stuff. Life is good without all the propaganda, bots, hate, and conspiracies!