Melvin Carvalho's avatar
Melvin Carvalho
_@melvincarvalho.com
npub1melv...5c24
Mathematician and Web Developer
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melvincarvalho 9 months ago
If we had someone who could act as an honest Oracle, we could make an AMM for this event on nostr using digital signatures, and on-chain commitments. People could bet on the team of their choice, and the odds would adjust according to how much is staked. At the end the contract pays out to all the bets made. However, you you need someone impartial to report the winner of the tournament. If the wrong winner is called the funds would go to the wrong place. View quoted note →
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melvincarvalho 10 months ago
Nostr + Bitcoin: Built-in Time Boxing 1. Your npub is a BTC address. 2. Pay npub (event hash in tx) -> means NOT-BEFORE block time. 3. Spend output -> means NOT-AFTER block time. Now Events are time-boxed between two blocks. It turns out that this is all you need to solve the double-spend problem. And hence to unlock smart social contracts. image
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melvincarvalho 10 months ago
"life is not black or white, and fastening your seatbelt when driving a car is safer even though some people die in car crashes" I remain a huge fan of bitcoin core. It is one of the most successful projects in the history of open source. But it got where it is by listening to the community. Controversial PRs, should not be merged too quickly. Bitcoin benefits enormously from stability. View quoted note →
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melvincarvalho 10 months ago
#mindstr give me an update on the OP_RETURN debate on 20250505 image
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melvincarvalho 10 months ago
With did-nostr you can have private direct messages that do not leak meta data. image
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melvincarvalho 10 months ago
3 questions: 1. What are the most important problems in your field? 2. Are you working on one of them? 3. Why not?
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melvincarvalho 10 months ago
"We can't stop something, therefore we should allow or enable it" is known as an appeal to futility, and it's often a subset of the either/or fallacy, also called binary thinking. It's a powerful framing shift: if you can't stop something 100%, then why bother trying at all? But the real world is messier than that. People have choices, but 80% follow defaults. Harmful behavior is possible, but not inevitable. And well-intentioned changes to working systems can have unexpected consequences. I'm a big fan of Bitcoin Core — it has brought us a long way. But no single developer always gets it right. Listening to the broader community often makes the system stronger.