GM! Hello world. After lurking for a while, I'd like to introduce myself.
Lately I've been working on something called
@ICKNO.
TLDR; ICKNO follows merchants on and off Nostr who produce high-quality, low-time preference goods. It tells you about the coolest new launches, deals up for grabs, and highly-anticipated restocks. We use only open protocols to do this: Nostr, email, and RSS. All our infrastructure is FOSS and self-hosted. Our website and all communications have zero trackers. Our links record precisely 1 extra bit of information—which medium a click came from—merely so we have _some_ idea of our performance, but this tells us nothing about you or your activity.
I think it's important to put this information front and center for a service like this because, historically, such services have a reputation for being shady and exploitive. But I'm going about this in a totally different way, and my goals are totally different too (read on for details).
---
As you all know, basing your life on a hard monetary standard means you tend toward lower time preference. This means you start to demand higher quality across everything in your life...the people you hang around, the things you do, the media you consume, the places you go, the food you eat, and the things you buy. There was a great post recently from
@Branta talking in detail about the dilemma between saving sats and spending sats, and how the deflationary power of bitcoin is so great that the marginal utility of a good must be unusually strong for a rational pleb to justify buying it.
ICKNO curates deals from this perspective. Food made of actual food, clothes without plastic, furniture without formaldehyde, toiletries without toxins, etc. As you might expect if you've spent any amount of time here on Nostr and see how people think and what they're into, many of the merchants on Nostr sell goods that fit this approach perfectly.
In fact, if you look at the ICKNO front page right now (see image below), you'll see that 6 of the 8 items featured on the front page are from merchants on Nostr that accept Bitcoin: they're products from
@PermaNerd 🌱 💻,
@SoapMiner,
@Name TBD handmade toothpaste!,
@beejay, and
@Small Act. You guys are doing great work, keep it up!
[In case you're wondering, I didn't plan it this way. There just hasn't been a whole lot happening in the world of fiat merchants that ICKNO follows, while at the same time, Nostr merchants have been absolutely killing it. It's pretty crazy because I currently follow over 100 merchants, only 15% of them are active on Nostr, and 75% of the notable activity in the past week came from that 15% of merchants. Nostriches ship!!]
Part of my previous work in the Bitcoin space involved working on a decentralized marketplace. One of the biggest takeaways I had from that experience was that even the most decentralized of technologies benefit greatly from centralized interfaces that abstract the underlying complexity away and polish the experience to make it more approachable for users.
I think simplification is something we need right now in this world of Bitcoin+Nostr commerce. There's folks developing storefront software, others working on smoother payment flows, and still others working on building out Nostr more generally. While that's all critical work, the end result is an overwhelming commerce scene for even a seasoned user to navigate. Some merchants are selling on
@Plebeian Market, some are selling on
@Shopstr Markets, some have basic NIP-15 listings, some take advantage of the #zapsnag, and still others have their own storefronts using BTCPayServer or even Shopify with its Strike integration. It's quite a fragmented landscape. Even fiat merchants are fragmented these days...many have no Amazon presence, a bunch use Shopify, but many use other platforms as well.
Don't get me wrong—this kind of merchant fragmentation is not a bad thing! In fact, it's an essential requirement for merchant _and_ consumer freedom. Merchants should be able to set their own conditions for business, payments, logistics, etc. Consumers need choices so they don't find themselves boxed in by a monopolistic juggernaut 20 years later. Problem is, in practice, merchant fragmentation doesn't translate into a great experience for consumers. People don't have time or patience to follow what's going on in 20 different places every day. They need 1 smooth, clean interface that masks the ugly fragmentation underneath. Hence ICKNO.
That leads to another key difference in ICKNO's approach. The main requirement for featuring a product is that it must not be icky, not that the merchant must accept bitcoin. This is common ground that many bitcoiners and no-coiners alike can find useful. No-coiners in particular will see all the amazing stuff you can only by for sats, see the prices of those goods go down first-hand over time, and start to wonder what the hell they're doing.
To that end...if you're launching something new and want to make sure we know, tell me. If you're a merchant of anything high-quality and
@ICKNO is not following you, tell me. If there's anything else we can do that would help you, tell me. I think Nostr+Bitcoin commerce has a ton of potential and I want to support this burgeoning community as much as possible. If there are merchants outside of this space you especially like, tell me about them too.
Cheers and pura vida 🤙
🫂
#introductions #grownostr
2. Mobile view was pretty bad for most phones. So now lines wrap and you can see everything. Especially useful for items priced in sats because we're still early and a few dollars is still thousands of sats 🤡
