Anyone else’s “Trending 1h” feed become the same two notes over and over after scrolling for a bit? #primal

Great newsletter!

Just joined #nostr, would appreciate follow recommendations and tips for how to get the most out of it. I’m on @primal. Bitcoiner looking for the stay-in-the-loop aspect of Twitter without the addiction and rage bait. #introductions

- David Sacks asks the Winklevoss twins/the audience what else the administration should do for bitcoin - People shout ‘no capital gains tax’ - One of the twins takes it in and says, “Something about capital gains tax. You know, I think it’d be great if the US government started proactively acquiring bitcoin.” JFC. Some of the people heretofore celebrated by bitcoiners stand to gain a lot if bitcoin is boxed in as just an investment, and lose a lot if it becomes money.

Good businesspeople, though knowledgeable, tend to not make good panel moderators because the necessary skills run contrary. Watching the Las Vegas livestream made me realize this. In business, you don’t want to offend because you might need to work with someone in the future. If the truth is uncomfortable, there’s little upside and large downside to stating it. Better to focus on points of uncontroversial agreement. This makes for boring panel discussions. You have session after session of mods telling politicians, “Thanks for everything you’ve done, you really saved us from Biden/Warren/Gensler, let’s highlight the big moments once again.” Huge missed opportunity to ask important, interesting questions like: - What the hell happened to the bitcoin audit? - How did an XRP lobbyist convince the president’s social media manager to tweet about stockpiling a grab-bag of shitcoins? - Why is the president making his stated aims harder to achieve by seeking self-enrichment? You need moderators whose careers depend on asking the tough questions, not businesspeople/marketers/randos whose careers depend on precisely not doing that.

What’s the current #nostr state of discourse around deleting notes? I see that it’s possible to request deletion and I understand that that doesn’t guarantee it’ll disappear everywhere on Nostr, just that it’ll be deleted from the relays that accept deletion requests. That’s the internet - never know when someone’s archiving or screenshotting what you post, even if an app or service offers a delete feature. The ability to communicate without censorship is important, but it seems like that’s not most people‘s primary need. Speaking for myself, my main interest is having a few ideas that I develop over time - longer-form essays (or drafts, really) that I can edit and update without being chained to the original, clumsy thought. I sure don’t need the entirety of the drivel I post being etched in perpetuity. Not every art or philosophy benefits from being worked out in permanent public. If anything, that does more harm than good, since as a species we have millions of years of experience with the luxury of most of what we say being forgotten. Our views change radically over the course of our lives, and what we said a long time ago is seldom a reliable indicator of what or how we think now. Do we always have to answer for it? Even crimes have the statute of limitations, but not our most inane online utterances. Maybe I want something more like a Snapchat or disappearing message app or text-based Stories/Reels for most of what I post, and then a few posts that I choose to leave up upon which I hope to collect feedback. Or is Nostr just not the place for that? Perhaps, like Bitcoin, it does one thing well and one thing only - permissionless communication?

It’s crazy how little BTC Inc seems to care about keeping its conference Bitcoin-focused (never mind Bitcoin only). It would be one thing if they were making the typical profit-motivated tradeoffs (e.g. “we’ll take money from any sponsor, but you have to talk about bitcoin onstage”). Reputationally, they could get away with having a lot of crypto speakers if the moderators at least were bitcoiners. That could even be kind of interesting. But no. Far from recruiting bitcoiner moderators and MCs, they haven’t even told the people they did get that they have to focus on bitcoin. The MC is a Dubai crypto influencer. The moderators are crypto reporters (at best) who’ve never demonstrated understanding of bitcoin. It’s a free-for-all. Stablecoins, memecoins, even tokenization. This goes way beyond sheepishly making some ethical tradeoffs for profit. If they truly care as little as it seems, just who is it that we’ve made into the world’s biggest bitcoin media outlet?