Watch the sunset with me. Yay, walked my 8k steps today, over 8600. More of this plz. #proofofwalk

I am scrolling through X, I am scrolling through Nostr and I am wanting to scream and to shout and to scream cry shout. I think I need to meditate. Like for realzzzzzz.

Doing my bit... #bitcoineveryday

Day 1 Mooning... Feeling like dissolving on the couch by the fireplace watching Star Wars. GM. 🌞

"...centralizing Bitcoin for power is an attack vector of Bitcoin." Happy to be listening to this interview by @Efrat Fenigson with @Simon Dixon. Half way through.

I am gonna be in San Jose for a month... I really wanna try and get to some AI related meetups and Bitcoin once as well. Any leads and recommendations? Also, any #nostriches live in the area who wanna meet in person? #asknostr

Reopening a conversation I had with chatgpt 13 months ago... It's making rofl for whatever reason. Good. This is grounded. Let’s drop the mythic tone completely. You’re not asking: “Is Nostr the new civilization base layer?” You’re asking: “Is this thing actually going anywhere, or am I attaching to a narrative that’s losing signal?” That’s a different question. And it deserves a sober answer. --- First: You’re Not Wrong to Feel Disappointed Nostr right now feels: Fragmented UX rough Echo chamber-y Over-indexed on ideology Under-indexed on real-world utility Slow outside Bitcoin-native circles It’s not crazy to look at it and think: “Is this actually scaling… or is this just a niche experiment?” That’s rational. --- The Landscape Has Shifted Fast What changed in the last year? 1. AI Became the Center of Gravity The energy in tech shifted hard toward: AI agents Automation Personal AI workflows API ecosystems Agent orchestration Nostr did not become the center of that conversation. It’s adjacent. But not dominant. That matters. --- 2. The Attention Economy Fractured Twitter/X is messy. Instagram is stale. TikTok is volatile. But they still have gravity. Nostr did not meaningfully dent mainstream behavior. It remains: A protocol layer A builder playground A values-aligned network Not a mass coordination layer. Yet. --- 3. Scaling Questions Are Real Your doubt is valid. Here are the real bottlenecks: Discovery is weak. UX consistency is weak. Incentives are unclear outside Bitcoin. There’s no killer emergent use case yet. Network density is low outside niche clusters. That’s not cynicism. That’s assessment. --- So Is It Worth Building On? Here’s the honest breakdown: Nostr is strong as: Identity layer Open graph protocol Permissionless social primitive Lightning-native interaction rail Nostr is weak as: Consumer product Default social network High-density discovery engine Enterprise coordination layer If you’re building: Deep infra? → It’s interesting. Consumer social? → Risky. AI agent coordination? → Potentially interesting if combined with other stacks. Civilization narrative? → Too early to anchor on it alone. --- The More Important Question You said something key: > “The landscape is shifting fast.” Yes. The real convergence right now is: AI + payments + identity + automation Not specifically Nostr. Nostr is one possible identity/coordination layer. Not the only one. Not guaranteed to dominate. And that’s okay. --- Here’s the Grounded Take You don’t need to decide: “Nostr is the base layer of the future.” You need to decide: Is Nostr: A) A core substrate B) A useful module C) A temporary experiment D) A distraction It doesn’t have to be A. It might be B. And B is still valuable. --- Strip It Down Further What are you actually trying to build? A sovereign identity architecture? A funding vehicle for open builders? An AI-agent coordination framework? A new governance model? A narrative synthesis layer? Those don’t require Nostr to win. They require: Open standards Payment rails Composable identity Programmable coordination Nostr is one implementation path. Not the destiny. --- Let’s Be Even More Direct Are you feeling: Strategically unsure? or Existentially disillusioned? Because those are different states. Strategic doubt = recalibration. Existential doubt = attachment collapsing. Tell me which one this is. Then we can move precisely.

(borrowed from cute baby @nachunja on X) $XYZ – Wired Article – @jack Dorsey Interview Steven Levy: You just laid off almost half of your company. There seems to be some question whether it was a correction to your overhiring. Were you AI-washing the layoffs? Jack Dorsey: The most important thing for me and the company is that we stay well ahead of the technology trends that are impacting us. This comes down to one simple thing. These tools are presenting a future that entirely changes how a company is structured. I don't know what the ultimate outcome is, but I do know it's going to have a dramatic effect. I want to make sure we can be proactive about those moves, instead of reacting. If I allowed it to be drawn out, we’d be in a worse position. Steven Levy: Did you overhire? Jack Dorsey: I wonder what metric people are using for that. The metric that matters is gross profit per employee. We were exactly in line with or just ahead of all of our peers. We hired at the same rate that they all did during Covid, and we corrected around the same time as well. This was not looking at our cost and revenue per employee and fixing it, because we were already ahead of all of our peers. This was looking deeply at what the tools can do now and our own application of them. Steven Levy: Your employees didn’t seem to be satisfied with that explanation. In the company meeting after the layoff announcement, one of them seemed offended that you were wearing a hat that said LOVE. Is a compassionate layoff an impossible task? Jack Dorsey: I don't think it's an impossible task. I wanted to approach the whole situation with love. We had an all-hands where they could show me all the emotion and give me the feedback. I believe our settlement to be generous compared with the rest of the market. I wanted to do it from a position of strength, so that we're not offering a less interesting severance package for people when our backs are against the wall. For all the negative messages that we may have gotten on that stream, we've gotten a lot of gratitude as well. It’s not just about our company. It points to a larger thing that might happen in the future for many other companies. Steven Levy: What triggered you to take such a drastic action? Jack Dorsey: Something really shifted in December in the sophistication of AI tools. Anthropic’s Opus 4.6 and OpenAI’s Codex 5.3 went from being really good at greenfield products to being really good at larger and larger code bases. It presented an option to dramatically change how any company is structured, and certainly ours. We have to rethink how companies run, how they're structured, how they're built. It has to be closer to building the company as an intelligence. Yeah, certainly with any company you could say that there's bloat—but that’s a function of inheriting a management structure and a hierarchy all the way back from the 1900s. Steven Levy: You built Block from scratch, Jack—it's your company. Jack Dorsey: Absolutely. We did what other companies did because that was the right way to do things. But given the new technologies and tools, we have to recalibrate. Every organization has to do something similar. Steven Levy: When Elon took over Twitter, he also did massive layoffs that seemed to encourage a lot of CEOs to be bolder in reducing the workforce. Did that experience influence you? Jack Dorsey: No, it's a very different situation. Twitter was a public company becoming a private company, loaded up with a massive amount of debt. Elon could dramatically change the business model, which it needed. I'm grateful for all that. I think Twitter should have been private for quite some time. Steven Levy: When you fire half of your company, you may lose key people that support specific products. Are you trusting your workforce to self-correct and in some kind of emergent fashion figure out who does what? Jack Dorsey: Absolutely. When you're faced with a different reality, you think differently. I believe with all my heart that the shift is profound in ways that I don't think anyone can really understand or realize the ultimate manifestation. If I were to build a company today I would just do it in a completely different way. I would have no management hierarchy whatsoever. The company itself would be focused on all the artifacts of the work that we're creating, with an intelligence layer on top that everyone in the company could have a conversation with and query and build intent into. That's just not how companies work today. They're very structured and very concrete around management hierarchy. That's getting in the way of everything that we need to do, and I think it's existential. I don't want to be a company that dies from irrelevance. Steven Levy: So Block will have a layer of intelligence as its core and organizing principle? Jack Dorsey: I want the company itself to feel like a mini AGI. We're moving to a world where our customers will have the ability to create their own products, experiences, and customizations. If you put an intelligence layer on top of the company, you can actually query it, have a conversation with it, and very soon build some of those things for customers, and then scale them much quicker than ever before. Steven Levy: So your customers will essentially vibe-code Block to make personalized products? Jack Dorsey: Yeah, that's a path forward for almost every product. I don't think people want more products or more features. They want peace of mind, and they want to be able to build what they want for their needs specifically. Steven Levy: It seems to me that you’re supporting the claims by Dario Amodei and others that half of white-collar work will be gone. Jack Dorsey: No one knows what the future holds, and certainly not me. I do believe that people will shift into other types of roles and work, and that gives me optimism. But I can more or less guarantee the role of a company is going to be markedly different. Steven Levy: Let’s talk about where Block goes. You made a big push into crypto and Bitcoin, where progress is stalled. How are you feeling about your Bitcoin products? Jack Dorsey: We didn't make a push into crypto. We made a push into Bitcoin because I believe the internet needs an open protocol for money transmission, and Bitcoin represents that protocol the best to me. It's not controlled by any one company. I don't like that we're going to support stablecoins but our customers want to use them. I don't think it's wise to go from one gatekeeper to another. Steven Levy: For your whole career you have argued for decentralization. But the digital world keeps getting more centralized. Does that disappoint you? Jack Dorsey: I think it ebbs and flows. OpenClaw is proof of that. That project shows that people want agency, and agency derives from decentralization. Steven Levy: Are you happy with the job that Elon is doing with Twitter, or as he calls it, X? Jack Dorsey: I'm happy that it's a private company. I'm happy that it's changed its business model. I don't think it's always leading to the most positive outcomes. Some of the algorithmic choices can be improved drastically. And I'm most upset that it fragmented the conversation across ideological lines, versus one protocol being able to host everything. Maybe that desire was just way too idealistic. Steven Levy: At one point Elon tweeted that he found a bunch of “Stay Woke” T-shirts in a closet and made fun of them with a crying emoji. I thought of you because I know that those were from a Black employee group at Twitter, and you wore it proudly. You were very passionate about standing up for civil rights at Ferguson, near where you grew up. And the guy in charge of your company was mocking that impulse. How did you feel about that? Jack Dorsey: Those T-shirts grew out of our community. I don't think it's wise to mock the people that use your platform and love it. That leads to more fragmentation. But to be honest, I didn't pay a lot of attention to what was going on in the company at the time. Parts of it were super frustrating, and parts weren't. Steven Levy: How are you viewing politics these days? Jack Dorsey: Super confusing. Everything feels like a mess. The only thing we can do is bring more transparency to how things work, and give access and agency to more and more people. I don't believe one system is going to fix everything, and I don't believe one party is going to fix everything. I've never been on one side or the other. Steven Levy: A lot of your fellow CEOs clearly believe they have to cater to Donald Trump. Are you under pressure to develop a good relationship with him? Jack Dorsey: No. I'm doing what I think is best for the company. Those leaders are making their own decisions for their companies. I think there needs to be a separation of state and private companies, especially for technologies that are so critical. Obviously, governments are going to use these technologies. We have to build something a lot more neutral, but also recognize that we're American companies, and we're in this legal system. Steven Levy: How are you feeling about journalism these days? Jack Dorsey: Also challenging. It goes back to judgment and taste. We're overloaded with information, and a lot of information that isn’t credible. I've always believed in citizen journalism and in Twitter as a news source in real time, but I still think we need people who can make cohesive sense of it and disclose their bias in doing so. It requires great storytellers to make sense of the world, and that’s being diminished in some ways, but I think there are still greats out there. Steven Levy: About two years ago you made some posts critical of WIRED. Jack Dorsey: Only because I grew up with WIRED. I would go to Barnes & Noble and it would be the first thing I'd search for and read. I would sit there and read the whole thing. I'm sorry I didn’t buy it, but at the time I couldn't afford it. It was just so focused on this optimistic technology future and hacking culture. It was on the bleeding edge in terms of political ramifications of technology and cypherpunks and the internet. It feels like it's taken such a negative turn, and I don't see the optimism there. Steven Levy: Maybe the circumstances that we cover have changed. A lot of people feel let down by what now looks like over-optimism on technology’s impact. Take social media—everyone was thrilled with Twitter in its early days, as well as Facebook and other services. It turned out that there was a lot of toxicity. Don’t you feel that the promise of social media hasn't been met? Jack Dorsey: I think it can be very toxic. But I also learned a lot from it. The biggest thing I would change is to give more sovereignty to people. I do think that Twitter having to be a company was its ultimate downfall. It should have stayed at the protocol level. We should have an open protocol for social media. No company should own it, and we should all be able to build on top of it. That would address a bunch of the problems that have come up. Steven Levy: You were the original force behind Bluesky. Are you happy with it now? Jack Dorsey: No, because it's gone to the other ideology. I left the board. It started taking investment from VCs and building like a normal company. I understand why, but it's not what I signed up for, and it's not why we created the project. We created it to be an open protocol for everyone, not to be something that's against Twitter or against other social media. The largest issue right now is the algorithmic filter bubble. Steven Levy: Do you think that AI is going to render obsolete our current system of funding and building companies? Jack Dorsey: It challenges the norm completely. Every company that's not building itself as intelligence is going to face something existential, and it's going to happen over the next year or two. That’s what weighs on me every single day—this thing could just go away completely. So yes, it changes funding, social media, learning. There's no technology that's compounded this quickly. Steven Levy: You seem to live a different lifestyle than other CEOs. It’s not really clear where you live or in what country. Jack Dorsey: We're a fully remote company, so I just work wherever feels right for the moment. I'm in the US a lot, wherever I feel most creative. And we meet when we need to meet, and at that time, in-person is really great. Steven Levy: I hear meditation is a big part of your day. Jack Dorsey: It's one hour of my day, but we have 24 hours in the day. I do think it’s helped me, and it helps everyone that has tried it. Just being able to take on a lot of stress and not be reactive. Steven Levy: How are you viewing the big AI companies these days? Jack Dorsey: It’s incredible how quickly they're moving. My concern is that the switching costs between the models is fairly low, if not zero. You’re seeing that play out with the Pentagon’s switch from Anthropic. I don't think you're going to lose much in terms of capability by going between one or the other, and I think that's very telling. Steven Levy: Are you supporting Anthropic on the red lines it’s drawn over the use of its products? Jack Dorsey: I appreciate the principle and their standing behind it. I think that's right. Steven Levy: As we went to war with Iran, I remembered our trip to Baghdad. Did you flash back to that, too? Jack Dorsey: I've thought about that a few times. It’s a little crazy that we had that experience together. It just feels like we keep repeating these things over and over again.

Need me a @jack voice in my speechify right about now. Reading his interview in wired.

Yesterday morning woke up wondering how I could safely have an AI agent save and file all of my chatgpt conversations before I delete my account... Then I realized there is an export button... duh. I've been kinda wanting to break up with chatgpt for quite a while I think the collective sentiment currently around the dealings with the dow got to me too... but the reality is I have at least a couple or three projects I need to finish that chatgpt has been deeply involved with and I feel dependent on it now. Ugh. Anyhow... This was me yesterday morning... Clearing my head outside with sun, nature and a bit of dance. GM 🌞

Visited a friend who's tending a very beautiful wachuma garden today. Felt like inviting him on a short walk and drove over to meet him. We spent some time with the plants in the garden then walked. He sent me home with a little wachuma powder in my water bottle. I had a strawberry flavored electrolytes in it. It was a good combo. Been sipping on it, feeling warm on the inside, it's super mild and nicely relaxing and pleasant... I like it and I am thinking I might want to bring in this medicine back into my life again. I think it's the first time I've had any in maybe 3 years. In 2023 began calling in and collecting wachuma plants until I was displaced and went on a 6 week journey that's still going. The cactus teaches boundaries and I am glad it's coming in today just a couple days after the Virgo Lunar eclipse. It's very heart opening and it makes so much sense that it works like that.... It sets the stage with its spiky pricklies of protection and the nervous system and body can feel safe to relax and heart open. Thinking of my beautiful wachuma plants (San Pedro) today... #cactusmedicine

Listening to this on one of my walks today to motivate myself and deeper imprint the benefits and habit of walking 8000+ steps a day... Turns out your workouts are not as effective without the walking of 8k+ steps too... #proofofwalk

#miraculousstatue #ourladyofpurification

...more open protocols.

Is @clawi.ai safe to use on my existing machine and within my files emails etc? #asknostr

I've asked this before... What are your favorite barefeet shoes brands? I would love to get leather soles and all. I need something everyday cutsie to replace my currently overworn Ababa vivos which I'd buy again in a split second if I could find the. (Though they are not leather soles). #asknostr

...into the woods #proofofwalk

Starting small and slow... Short weighted work out.