Have you ever explored gopherspace, the predecessor of www? Exploring the gopherspace is a unique experience to find some unusual texts and documents, notably some archives from the early computer/Unix days. Gopher is a very light text-based protocol. Some geeks still keep the gopherspace alive in terms of clients and content. There is at least one goid Android gopher client: DiggieDog. There is also a useful gopher extension for Firefox: Overbite (computer versions, not for Android). Maybe a gopher protocol could be built on top of nostr 🤔.

People have been afraid of any and all major invention: cars, electricity, trains, the metro/subway, elevators, planes, computers, robots, biotechnology, cellphones, etc. The same currently happens with #Bitcoin and #cryptocurrencies in general, and with Artficial Intelligence ( #AI ) and Artficial General Intelligence ( #AGI ), or #biotechnology. Every tool carries some risk that is not intrinsic to its nature but dependent on its usage. Fortunately, history tells us that inventions have overwhelmingly been put to reasonable use and improved the capabilities and wellbeing of humans; few hammers are used to break skulls. So it was in the past and so it will be in the future. The quest for knowledge and its application to technological development is part of human nature, but is only embraced by part of us. Every time, the early adopters of a technology, the ones who embraced a new technology and sought to understand its possible uses, emerged better equipped and wealthier in the new paradigm created by the new technology. People gathering thanks to #nostr, itself a novel protocol, cypherpunks exchanging views and expressing their trust in #bitcoin among others new technologies, are the scouts tracing the path for those that will themselves still be considered early adopters. Let's be positive, let's move forward, let's build.

If you need to buy a car in Europe, buy a diesel one. The drive towards electrical cars will push the price up of electrical cars and electricity, and incentivize governments to tax both more. At the same time, as consumers are discouraged to buy diesel cars, you will get them cheap. And as refineries are made to produce a certain ratio of diesel and fuel, there will be a surplus of diesel, driving it's price down. Last bit: as neither the lithium production capacity nor the current electrical network are able to reach the 100% electrical engine target by 2035, the right to sell and use internal combustion engines will be extended. Eventually, the right time to buy an electrical car is probably 5 years away.

The race to productivity, notably thanks to automation, and the race to reduce costs to 0, are 2 sides of the same coin. Eventually this results in an ever larger amount of goods and services requiring an ever smaller workforce. Yet the goods and services that people can consume are eventually limited by how much hours there are in a day. E.g. as one French television boss once coined it "We are competing for available brain time". Inevitably, this leads us to a society of abundance were a shrinking fraction of the workforce's available time is necessary to produce in a given period of time all what humanity needs, wants or can practically consume in that same time frame. Inevitably, this leads to the necessity of a universal revenue, as everyone needs to have sufficient money to buy all what society produces, money being eventually just the oil in the economy machine, not an output of that machine. How much money is allocated to workers or capital owners on top of the universal revenue is not defined by economics, it is defined by politics. The obsession of the current political (de)generation that everyone must work full days from one's twenties to one's sixties is rooted in the 20th century perception of infinite growth being necessary to satisfy an infinite thirst for goods and services. The system will eventually collapse when the exponential efficiency trend crashes into the finite demand reality.

The trend in various IT domains since the 70's has been a move from free solutions built by the hackers, geeks and cypherpunks, to privatization and appropriation of the commons by a greedy few, to liberation by a new generation of hackers, geeks and cypherpunks. First for software. Now for protocols. Next for knowledge and science. Thank you to the hackers, geeks and cypherpunks of this world for your small or large contributions. I feel excited about Nostr just as much as I felt about the internet, linux or bitcoin.