Chile with 1:3 ratio of liver to ground beef 😋

When newbies ask about the difference between bitcoin and everything else, give them this well-known line by Stephen Covey: “The main thing is to keep the main thing the main thing.” In this case, the main thing is censorship resistance. Those who follow Covey’s advice are bitcoiners. And then there’s everyone else.

One way to describe the goal of the decentralized web is that we want to provide communities with communications tools (platforms, protocols, etc) that are powerful, nimble, dynamic — but LEADERLESS. Open source is a step in the right direction, bc if you don’t like the leadership of some project, you can fork the repo. Replace the leaders with new ones. But have we figured out how to make platforms, protocols, etc truly leaderless? Nope. Not yet. How to do that remains an open question.

Anyone else getting a flurry of random zaps over the past 1-2 days that are showing up in your wallet but not on nostr?

Anyone know of a good article that summarizes how and why ethereum is prone to centralization? A friend of mine has a son who’s asking me my general opinion on ethereum. College age, open minded, intelligent, knows a little about bitcoin but not a lot. Not exactly a techie although he is involved in a research project on AI. I’ve told him that it’s overly complex and that PoS is a bad thing and he’s interested in a deeper dive.

In addition to avoiding “processed” food, it’s probably a good rule of thumb to avoid consuming anything that’s heavily advertised and branded. Come to think of it, that should probably apply to pretty much everything, not just food.

Great discussion on BRICS on today’s All In Podcast. Very informative and complementary perspectives by Chamath and Sacks. They mention bitcoin (in a positive manner) just briefly, then seem to forget about it even as they proceed to make a powerful case that BRICS should adopt bitcoin.

I like that status on Damus can be set to expire 👍🏻

Are there any bitcoiners who have written about the abstract concept of proof of work as a central component of human interactions? Example: conspicuous spending as a signal of one's wealth. Or advanced degrees as a signal of one's intelligence and abilities. One might argue to categorize these somewhat differently, perhaps proof of "burn" rather than work, but there is a unifying something going on here. The challenge is to figure out what exactly the unifying concept is and how to put it into words. The purpose of PoW, or proof of burn or whatever, is to signal something to somebody. To signal what? For the sake of this post let's just call it "virtue." Virtue signaling, by its inherent nature, perhaps by definition, must incur some sort of expense. When we look at it that way, our usual reaction is to deem it a fundamentally wasteful thing. But perhaps the desire to obviate the need for virtue signaling is inherently misguided, in the same sense that the desire to replace PoW with proof of stake is misguided. It's like trying to make a perpetual motion machine: it simply goes against the laws of physics. But perhaps what can be done, and what should be pursued, is the "optimization" of virtue signaling. What does that mean? I would argue that sub-optimized virtue signaling means work (or effort, or burn, or whatever) that is intended to prove something, but which is done in a way that is not perfectly provable. Maybe only a small fraction of the work is provable. Or maybe it's provable, but inconsistently so. Or perhaps the intended recipients of the signal simply don't know how to interpret the signal, i.e. don't know how to verify the proof; like using a language the recipient does not understand. Arguably, this is what bitcoin achieves: an optimization of PoW. Perhaps in the broader perspective, it is "virtue signaling" in its purest form. It may still have stuff to teach us about the human condition from a broader perspective.

The thing that troubles me about things like Popular Posts, Trending, etc is the unstated presumption of a single frame of reference, one that represents “the community.” We need to reject this presumption. Every user is a unique frame of reference. And we need to do it explicitly, in a way that users can feel the difference.

I find Primal’s use of the phrase “caching service” to be confusing. Who’s providing what service, and to whom? My understanding is that the service allows me to store data locally in sql, for my own use. But talk of providing a “service” would seem to imply that primal is storing the data for me in a central database, which is not the case. (Right?)

Perhaps there needs to be a discussion to define the difference between good and effective filtering on the one hand versus “censorship” on the other. I submit that the difference depends on how easy or difficult it is to be immune from / route around filters that you don’t like or agree with. To craft your own filters that find the content you want and block the content you don’t want. Ideally you won’t need to be a tech giant or even a dev to do this.

A personal relay whose sole purpose is to backup every note that you care about seems like an awesome idea. Anyone building this?

I finally got reactions and reposts (NIPs 25 and 18) implemented in the Pretty Good Apps desktop client. Next up: zaps. Probably create another release at that point. Then back to work on a basic lists (NIP-51) implementation, which is partially working. (Took a break from that this weekend to work on reactions and reposts). Roadmap after that, in broad brushstrokes: try to expand the use-cases for NIP-51 lists, probably ones that involve "composite" lists via importation of one list into another. (Composite mute lists? composite people lists, for use in nostr feeds? composite bookmarks lists?) Then add more list management features (beyond NIP-51; maybe mix in some NIP-32, maybe add some nonstandard protocols if I have to) until we arrive at DCoSL: decentralized curation of simple lists. Then build on list curation to achieve DCoG: decentralized curation of graphs, which we can do bc a graph is made of two lists: one list for nodes and one list for edges. Then build on that to achieve DCoS: decentralized curation of standards, which we'll be able to do because things like schemas, verified credentials, etc can be represented as graphs. Then pick one or a handful of w3c standards and see if it is possible manage them using these tools rather than the committees that are today's standard. That still won't get us all the way to the self-sustaining, atomic chain reaction of the decentralized web that I mentioned in a note yesterday. But it will get us a good bit of the way there. DCoP and/or DCoR: decentralized curation of protocols and/or of repositories will have to be conceptualized and achieved at the same time or maybe after DCoS. Then DCoS, DCoP, and/or DCoR can be used to manage the NIPs and other protocols that got us to this point in the first place. At that point, we can start to think about feedback loops: self-sustaining chain reactions of decentralized curation of data in all its forms.