Zap marketing is cooler to see than platform marketing, imo. Commenters getting micro-paid, love to see it. From my recent lightning bounty thread:

The other day on Twitter/X, I paid out a 2,100,000 sat or $1,700 USD Lightning bounty. Over the past couple years, I’ve offered an occasional challenge on Twitter/X. When people tell me Lightning doesn’t work, I often ask them in random comments for their Lightning details so I can pay them in the next 5-10 minutes on the spot, permissionlessly, wherever they are, with this payment method that supposedly doesn’t work. Every single time, they can’t do it. Because they haven’t even tried it. They’re just talking. I’ve done this a ton of times and nobody ever takes the sizable sat offerings. In Dan Held’s anti-Nostr thread, Mark Jeffrey was critical of Lightning. Unlike most who I offer the challenge to as 99% sure they won’t take it, I offered it to Mark despite knowing he had a much higher probability of accepting it, since he’s tech savvy and active in the broad crypto space. But in my view, if he accepts, then that’s also evidence on the spot that it works. He declined my 21,000 sat offer and politely still talked anti-Lightning. So, I said since I like him, I’d up it to 210,000 sats. He still declined and talked more anti-Lightning. He spoke about how he *wanted* it to work, but the problem just isn’t solved yet. My inner Nostr Lyn couldn't help it, so I upped it to 2,100,000 sats, or $1,700+ USD, if he would just post a way to pay him on Lightning within the next ten minutes. Nobody had ever taken me up on my challenge, so I pressed to my highest offer ever just to see, out of sheer curiosity. He’s a multi-time published novelist, which with my recent fiction hobby, interests me. So, if there’s someone I want to claim the bounty, might as well be him. And then you know what? He did. Of course he had a Lightning address. He went from “want it to work but…” to digging through his past experiences and finding an old Lightning address, within a few minutes. The first person on Twitter/X to accept my challenge. I paid him 2,100,000 sats on the spot, or $1700+ USD. He provided a Stike address, so that’s a shout out to @jack mallers who made Lightning convenient enough for Mark, who doesn’t understand or particularly like Lightning, to finally call my challenge and make me have fun staying poor, lol. And it worked flawlessly despite being an above-average sized Lightning transaction. I then asked Mark if he could identify the sending wallet, but he said he couldn’t. He asked about block explorers to identify the payment, and while I pointed him toward Mempool Space, I highlighted that Lightning tends to make sending privacy pretty good even though I didn’t maximize privacy on this one. I'm not deep into the weeds on privacy tech, so I'm always genuinely curious just to ask "hey, can you identify any privacy leaks here?" I also asked him if he would have shared his bank details publicly like he shared his Lightning address. He said of course not. So even if people say “But Lyn, Mark used a custodial wallet”, I’d say that this tech stack reduced his friction and boosted sender privacy. I think there are still improvements to make of course, particularly Lightning combined with other scaling methods (ecash, Ark-style stuff, and so forth), but it’s a powerful glue that connects a lot of things together. In addition, when it comes to payments and small amounts of working capital, there is an important “choose your own adventure” aspect. For small amounts, in safe jurisdictions, custodial Lightning is not that big of a deal, like keeping cash in your wallet that is prone to theft or loss. It maximizes UX. But it’s important to keep pushing hard, keep developing, keep providing capital, to make as many tools as possible available for people that need to maximize privacy and/or self-custody. Not everyone needs or wants those capabilities for every single payment, but they do need the *option* to turn to them when it’s important. Mark Jeffrey then reached out to chat about fiction. Last year he asked me to go on his podcast to talk about Broken Money, but I fell behind on Twitter/X DMs due to bandwidth constraints and didn’t get back to him. So, after this I got back to him and said I’d be happy to talk about fiction with him to pick his brain, and talk Broken Money on his podcast, and we got one scheduled. 🤝

I've got this song stuck in my head. The funniest and most brutal prolonged lethal fight scene in the movie "Kate" happens in an apartment while this entire song is playing in the background and it's purposely at odds with the extreme context of what's happening.

I saw a few posts here dunking on Dan for his anti-Nostr posts on Twitter/X. I'm grateful for them. Happy to treat it as a marketing/education opportunity. If life gives you lemons, see if there's a way to make lemonade.

The type of scene I never get tired of is when some badass protagonist is going through a movie or other story and taking all sorts of people out, but then runs into some random unexpected guy they can’t beat. Like some guard or middle manager happens to spend all his time on martial arts as his obsession, has a fifth degree black belt, and just rekts the protagonist out of nowhere.

I watched the movie Kate on Netflix yesterday. As far as action movies go, the fight scenes were decent and the plot was kind of limited and predictable. Classic revenge flick. But I did really like the acting of Mary Elizabeth Winstead. She's kind of like one of those chameleon actors where she can be in multiple movies and eventually you're like, "Wait, that's all the same actor? This bloody assassin was also the girl from Scott Pilgrim?"

Spending a few hours tonight going through my fiction writing and seeming where I can change passive voice to active voice, like removing was/were wherever possible. A bunch of tiny little sentence tweaks to tighten up the prose. One of my early run-throughs was to search for "ly" and see what percentage of adverbs I could eliminate by using stronger or more precise verbs. And now this run through is meant to increase the ratio of active voice. As a benchmark comparison, Brandon Sanderson used the word "was" as about 1.2% of his words or less in the Mistborn trilogy, whereas I found it to be 1.5% of my fiction writing.

A lot of people in the Silicon Valley tech community and similar tech communities have historically been drawn to newer blockchains because their perception of technology involves rapid change and disruption. Thus many of them implicitly assume that older (eg. Bitcoin) is being and/or will be disrupted by newer. In my experience, a good way to circumvent that is to remind them of communication protocols. Things like Internet Protocol, Ethernet, SMTP, USB, and others tend to have very long lifetimes once they reach dominance. That combo of simplicity and network effects lasts a long time and pushes most rapid change to the edges or higher layers, and that the underlying foundation moves more slowly. That seems to effectively recategorize it in their perceptions with a decent success rate.

Just did an extra on-stage bitcoin/crypto Q&A at the Abundance Summit. The last question was for us to name three coins we like other than Bitcoin. My answer was stablecoins, and decentralized technologies that don’t need coins like Nostr.

Speaking today about bitcoin at Peter Diamondis’ tech summit in LA. Most people here are into AI, longevity, etc. I usually I speak about bitcoin at either 1) macro conferences or 2) bitcoin conferences, so I figured I’d switch it up and agree to speak to a crowd that isn’t the choir.

Gotta keep clearing this type of stuff out. Everyone is so focused on nation states, meanwhile retail keeps buying alts and memes instead for a quick buck.

When I was a kid, an older relative had this big rubber band ball, about the size of a softball, and I thought it was so cool, that I started my own rubber band ball. So for years, I had this subplot of adding to my rubber band ball. It eventually became bigger than a basketball, and extremely heavy since it was dense rubber. Only unusually large rubber bands could go on it, and so tracking down hyper-sized rubber bands became a task in its own right (this was largely pre-ecommerce, 1990s, thus shopping was like hunting and gathering rather than searching and clicking). Various relatives would surprise me with like $5 packs of specialized rubber bands that they happened to run into and for me that was like an A+ gift. I try to always focus on rekindling and/or being open to that basic sense of wonder and joy in things. A kid and her large rubber bands. Anyway, happy Sunday.

If people ever debate or ask what your title is, just pick the funniest and most humble one.

Anyone here have thoughts on Keet? From a user perspective or a technical one? I used it a bit when it came out, then just didn't have much context to use it for a bit, and lately found myself using it a bit more again.

Some people say I should post more about bitcoin on Nostr. But you already know about bitcoin, don’t you Neo? Your real question is what you should do with it now.