Doing research for the book aaaand:
I was already familiar with the "Everything about the Internet is bad" Greek chorus of Nicholas Carr et al - the early Internet equivalent of nocoiners, if you will - but I seem to have hit a rich vein of "the Internet would be so much better if only those damn Internet maxis would have listened to me" cope - from Louis Pouzin at CYCLADES (pre-TCP/ARPANet) to Mark McCahill at University of Minnesota (Gopher) to Robert Desjardins (OSI).
It's wild how often the same behavioral pattern repeats itself, with even the same personality (arche)types. Maybe I should be studying mental health and dysfunction instead of networking...?
arbedout
arbedout@granddecentral.com
npub15elf...yswk
I put the punk in cypherpunk
"Iranian Vice President for Economic Affairs, Mohsen Rezaei, proposed the creation of a joint bank with African states with the aim of helping develop economic relations."


thecradle.co
Iran proposes creation of joint bank with African states
During a conference with representatives from West African states, the Iranian president stressed that, unlike the west, Tehran is interested in Af...
Goals for today: making chicken katsu at home and filling in the gaps in my understanding of PSBTs.


Any nostr clients or apps with built in cashu wallets?
Thinking about how the State encouraged home ownership because it meant more saltpetre (a precusor to gunpowder) would be produced.


Remember, the shitcoiners will try to write their own histories of their utter, total ideological defeat.
The slides below is an excerpt of a presentation from an ex-CYCLADES engineer. CYCLADES was a French research network that launched in 1971, was terminated in 1976, never reached more than 20-some nodes, and whose alumni have *very* strong opinions about the current Internet.
I feel like I can guess this guy's shitcoin portofilo just from reading these bullet points:



🎶 3AC was first in line 🎶
🎶 Now Silvergate and Gemini 🎶
🎶 SBF, Caroline 🎶c
🎶 Gensler wants Binance to die 🎶
🎶 We didn't play with shitcoins 🎶


Copied on a thread right now that reminds me of the Great Microsoft Exchange Email Storm of 1997 (Bedlam DL3)
For your morning enjoyment:
TECHCOMMUNITY.MICROSOFT.COM
Me Too! | Microsoft Community Hub
One way of telling how long a Microsoft employee has been working here is their reaction to the phrase “Bedlam DL3”. Just for grins, I was at l...
shill me your best 'the train derailments were caused by cyberattacks' theory


Nostr is less interesting to me as a communications protocol per se - at that layer it's just a bunch of websocket clients and servers with novel ways of discovering each other and a shared understanding of how to encode datagrams- but the sort of de-facto "not quite petnames, not quite SSL certs, something else" identity layer that has built up on top of that is frigging nuts
Getting used to the nostr dynamic of posts with maybe two likes but several thousand sats from a dozen randos
The first live show at Pubkey last night was a blast! Thanks to everyone who came out, especially in the middle of our first snowstorm of the year.
Most of the examples of data embedded in the blockchain are catalogued here:
This 2018 paper goes over different techniques to embed arbitrary data, including the Satoshi uploader I'd mentioned:
https://fc18.ifca.ai/preproceedings/6.pdf
@BitMEX
did an amazing article on the OP_RETURN wars that covers Counterparty:
The PSBT dutch auction stuff that @orenyomtov
is working on is here
The case of the Slovakian politician sending financial transactions that were secretly coded messages is here:
...and I think that's all? DM me if you have any questions and see you next time!


Cool data embedded in the Bitcoin blockchain - Ciro Santilli
BitMEX Blog
The OP_Return Wars of 2014 - Dapps Vs Bitcoin Transactions - BitMEX Blog
Abstract: In this piece we explore why Dapps are typically built on Ethereum rather than Bitcoin, which takes us all the way back to March 2014. W...

OpenOrdex - Open Ordinals Decentralized Exchange
OpenOrdex is an open source zero-fee trustless Bitcoin NFT marketplace based on partially signed bitcoin transactions

Marian Kotleba - Wikipedia

From a comment on an HN article about the causes of the decine of UseNet:
"These days we're used to being overrun by everyone who can use a point-and-drool interface on their phone to look at Facebook, but back in September 1992 it was a real shock to the system when usenet was suddenly gatewayed onto AOL, I can tell you. Previously usenet more or less got along because the users were university staff and students (who could be held accountable to some extent) and computer industry folks. Thereafter, well, a lot of the worse aspects of 4chan and Reddit were pioneered on usenet. (Want to know why folks hero-worshipped Larry Wall before he wrote Perl? Because he wrote this thing called rn(1). Which had killfiles.) "
...we're gonna need nostr killfiles Soon.
Kill file - Wikipedia
gm, ETHDenver has approximately 60% the number of attendees as the Midwest FurFest, America's largest furry convention
gm, Gary Gensler is an ex-Goldman Sachs investment banker in an appointed-not-elected position, this guy isn't your friend just because he's making shitcoiners miserable.
better to let all these bad ideas fail on their own (lack of) merits instead of cheering that they're being regulated out of existence
The PSBT auction stuff is undeniably cool. I hope it gets more traction / use cases. Maybe the POWSWAP hashrate derivatives Jeremy Rubin was working on...?
Moving on from UseNet to the death of Gopher, comparing this article:
"Where Have all the Gophers Gone? Why the Web beat Gopher in the Battle for Protocol Mind Share"
...with an interview with Mark McCahill, lead Gopher dev:
https://conservancy.umn.edu/bitstream/handle/11299/107471/oh328mmc.pdf
TL,DR:
Historian: This protocol failed due to complex technological and sociological problems
Lead Dev: "What killed the protocol off was when people stopped using Gopher clients specifically and started using Mosaic" 🤔
Where Have all the Gophers Gone? Why the Web beat Gopher in the Battle for Protocol Mind Share
The combo of:
a) this Politico oral history with Biden admin officials marking the one year anniversary of the war in Ukraine - in which sanctions against Russia are described in terms of 'shock-and-awe' and collective punishment, with Treasury officials imagining themselves as warfighters deterring enemy behavior and blithely ignoring collateral damage
https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2023/02/24/russia-ukraine-war-oral-history-00083757
and
b) this Bloomberg article published on the same day, quietly admitting that sanctions proponents have given up on them having any impact on Russia's behavior
has convinced me we're in the final stage of the decline of the dollar system, in a "where are we going and why are we in this handbasket?" kind of way.

Bloomberg.com
How Biden’s Shock-and-Awe Tactic Is Failing to Stop Russia
The economic punishment of Russia was touted as a game-changer. Instead it’s turned into a war of attrition — and a race against time.
CBDC strategy docs, but make it 30 years ago

