I'm sure most people on Nostr have already encountered the airdrop spammers. Their spam is very unsophisticated, the note content hash is identical in a lot of cases and could be screened out just by this. Partial matching would be the next followup countermeasure. AI matching would be another, but I think probably at first it would be unwise to mute but instead have it just put a ? flag on suspected posts and a confidence rating, and users could then train the AI progressively to become smarter. Something that's really important for people to understand. AI cannot be creative, because it is not alive and has nothing at stake. Creativity is forced by survival, because it tends to be "out of left field" and "off the wall". It is things that come out of places that seemed extremely unlikely to yield anything of value. This is something that an AI cannot do, because it doesn't have enough general intelligence to do it. All the AI compute in the world can't replace the devil at your back.

After having had my Brave Sync breached about 9 months ago, I started to become a lot more wary of this business of trusting any servers, even when all they are doing is providing a rendezvous path to connect two NAT router inbound connection blocked devices, such as a pair of PCs or a phone and a PC. I also lost a lot of emails some time back from my protonmail when I had to do a password recovery, everything was encrypted to a key I didn't have anymore. So, I'm now shifting all my reliability measures to my own hardware, which I can thoroughly audit and exclude from outside access far more easily than a public website. Backup to a second disk, at least, and also, for Protonmail, get yourself their Bridge (the import/export tool is b0rked), and install Thunderbird and keep all your data backed up on your own systems. This is a great example of how utterly the shitcoin token model fails to produce sufficiently useful services in a distributed manner. Why am I still needing to trust a few third parties to do offsite backups still? The answer is that we are still waiting for someone to build streaming payment systems that use real internet money, ie LN, for such services. Interestingly, this also is key to how the async receiving payments problem can be solved for LN as well. I am currently shifting my efforts to fiat mining via shitcoin development work, because I have been unable to get people to realise that Indra is the missing link that will make Bitcoin and LN complete and more secure. The majority of the work will now shift to another person, who was sponsoring me to this point, but there is still gonna be a lot more waiting time for the solution to be ready to be deployed by people. I'm just a programmer and protocol designer, I'm not a marketer and I don't talk bullshit. This means that Indra is drowned out by all the endless reinvention of the wheel of way too many wallet clients and mobile apps, and not enough fundamental new protocols being built on top of Bitcoin and Lightning Network. If I have to chase up funding, a) I'm useless at marketing and b) the inefficiency of devoting my energy to something I'm far worse at than building Indra is hard to justify.

Big blockers are unimaginative, unintelligent morons. We have the solution for high volume payments already, it just is a little immature technology still since it requires careful maintenance and strong redundancy on the nodes running it, if you want to be able to reliably receive payments (thus requiring LSPs and third parties to intermediate). It currently has a liveness requirement that is onerous. All that is required to make it a complete solution is a way to distribute that third party trust requirement for asynchronous payments and we are golden. If the thought behind big blocks has to do with "smart contracts", which basically means securitisation, then GFY, just because fiat mixes cash with securitisation doesn't mean it's good for anyone, and the market segment that it would attract is not going to improve broad adoption. "Worse is better", has been a golden rule of computer technology since the days of Unix's inception (and the birth of the C language). What it really means is found in one of the "laws of unix" - a piece of software should do one thing, and do it well. Adding complex programming to a money ledger is an example of mixing concerns and leads to bloat and bugs. Bitcoin's purity is key to its strength.

Why is it that we must be subjected to sodium hypochlorite and sodium hexafluorophosphate or sodium fluoride in our water, and yet you can buy basically the same water in a plastic bottle with neither of these endocrine disruptors added? If there's anything going on in the world that right now is literally National Socialism, it's what they do to the water. The fluoridation of water was originally used to pacify prisoners in concentration camps.

My theme song for the day. It should be a Bitcoin Maxi theme song. Also, you are welcome for now knowing of this excellent Belgian electronic music artist.

I'm thinning out my follows, just too much noise on my feed rn.