The most common lament about bitcoin today is that you're too late. That all the opportunities were over a decade ago, when bitcoin could be successfully mined on laptops or bought for pennies. That the pioneers already staked their claims, built their fortunes, and locked up all the value.

I want to convince you that this perspective is completely wrong.

In fact, we are still living in year zero of a monetary revolution. What appears to be a mature, 15-year-old technology is actually embryonic. What looks like a settled landscape is really just a foundation. The real rush to transform our global economy with an open monetary system hasn't really started yet.

Yes, you missed mining bitcoin on your laptop. You missed buying it for a dollar. But you haven't missed the crucial part: building the future of money. It’s civilizational-scale transformation.

Consider this: Less than 1% of the world's population has ever used bitcoin. Most of those who own it treat it as a speculation, not as money. The infrastructure for using it as an everyday currency is still primitive. Lightning Network adoption is in its infancy. Most people still can't explain what makes bitcoin valuable or how it works.

It may look like we're late if you judge bitcoin's timeline against internet companies. But bitcoin isn't a company - it's a new form of money. And money's timelines are measured in decades and centuries, not years. We're not in bitcoin's equivalent of the dot-com boom. We're in the early hacker phase of the internet where we’re using a combination of BBSes; siloed internet service providers; and Gopher protocol to just barely interconnect across these walled gardens of information.

The opportunities ahead are actually far larger than those behind us. Here's why:

1. Every financial instrument, contract, and transaction in the world will eventually interface with bitcoin in some way. The market for these financial tools is orders of magnitude larger than bitcoin's current market cap.

2. We haven't even started building most of the critical infrastructure. The equivalent of web browsers and social networks for bitcoin are still waiting to be invented.

3. The real adoption curve begins when bitcoin becomes invisible - when people use it without even thinking about using it, just like they use TCP/IP today without knowing it.

4. The hard problems - scaling, privacy, smart contracts on bitcoin - are still largely unsolved.

5. We haven't even begun to imagine most of bitcoin's uses. Just as the internet became far more than just email, bitcoin will become far more than just digital gold or payments.

The early adopters didn't grab all the opportunities - they just grabbed the obvious ones. They bought and held bitcoin. They built exchanges. They created wallets. But that's like saying the early internet pioneers grabbed all the opportunities by building email services.

But, but…here is the thing. In terms of bitcoin, nothing has happened yet. Sure, there are still real opportunities in speculation today, but we’re far enough along that you can actually build useful open source software and commercial tools to help people.

Consider working on the following:

- Create financial tools that make bitcoin more useful to more people

- Build the interfaces that make it invisible

- Develop the applications and networks that couldn’t be built before the internet had its own native digital currency

Because here is the thing the greybeard cypherpunks in 2050 will tell you: Can you imagine how awesome it would have been to be an entrepreneur in 2024? It was a wide-open frontier! You could pick almost any category and connect AIs to their own money and rip open new frontiers. Few people had even joined Nostr yet! Expectations and barriers were low. It was easy to be the first. And then they would sigh, “Oh, if only we realized how possible everything was back then!”

You're not late to bitcoin. You're incredibly early. What we have now is just a glimpse of what's possible. Whatever the equivalents of Amazon, Google, and Facebook will be in the bitcoin space haven't even been created yet.

The next decade of bitcoin will make the previous one look like a mere prelude. The really important work - the work that will transform the global financial system - hasn't even begun yet.

So no, you haven't missed bitcoin. In fact, you're just in time to be part of its most important phase: the phase where we transform it from merely speculation into the future of money.

The frontier is still wide open. The most important opportunities haven't been taken.

You are not late.

Inspired by Kevin Kelly’s classic blog post You Are Not Late. With gratitude to the GOAT!

But is it good?

The results are impressive, but maybe not for the reason you’d hope. NotebookLM’s podcast absolutely nails the casual feel of 2 humans bantering about a topic just like you’d hear on a podcast. There are stutters, interruptions, and turns-of-phrase throughout the commentary that make the result sound very human. In the category of “authenticity” I’d grade it an A.

In order to try it out I decided to create a 2-person podcast out of the Satoshi-Sirius (Malmi) emails (https://mmalmi.github.io/satoshi/) that were published earlier this year.

NotebookLM warns the audio creator that “Audio Overviews are not a comprehensive or objective view of a topic, but simply a reflection of your sources.”

So it doesn’t really summarize the content in a meaningful way or contribute new information to the world. If I feed in a bunch of source material I would hope I could listen and get some sort of key takeaways or important overview of the information input. It’s certainly not a replacement for reading the information, but it also doesn’t really give me the important/broad strokes. It picks some details and produces humanlike conversations around those. This comes off as “a cool party-trick”, but not useful as a great research tool yet. So in the category of “overview quality” I’d grade it a C.

Obviously this stuff is improving very quickly and it doesn’t feel like we’re too far off from having much better AI generated podcasts. But this also opens a bigger question in my mind: will the future of podcasting include new durable AI personalities? Will there be a Rogan, Fridman, Cowen, or Dwarkesh of AI?

While the voices generated by NotebookLM do sound authentically human, today they have the depth of cardboard cutouts. I don’t know much about their perspective or life story. I can’t follow from episode to episode and understand where their world-view might align or diverge from mine. The reason I like human podcasts is that I get to learn something by listening into a conversation. Often I’m familiar with the host and mostly unfamiliar with the guest so I get to tune-into the host’s perspective which I’m gathering over time while learning about the guest’s special knowledge in this episode. Will AIs generate longitudinal, interesting hosts with a perspective? This doesn’t seem impossible to imagine with another breakthrough or two, but for now at least we’ve got “a cool party trick”.

Nostr reminds me of Linux in the 1990s. It’s foundational, ideological, and open. It’s a push back against that corporate overload everyone knows so well that you don’t even have to name it. But for Nostr we might not know its best use-cases yet. At the time I installed Linux on my computer in my dorm room, most people, including me, saw it as an alternative to Microsoft's Windows desktop client operating system. But the turbo-charger was when people started using Linux as a server technology. Similarly, today a lot of people think of Nostr as a social media protocol. And it’s good at that, but the magic that could really turbo-charge utility for a wide variety of people may still be out there yet to be invented (for example, look at how people are exploring Nostr as a way to coordinate ecash mints or connect ideas across long-form writing). And when that gets invented it wouldn’t surprise me if the social media use-case gets lifted in the updraft. This is why I find Nostr exciting. It’s brimming with unknown possibilities.

[FWIW, Linux did finally become a major client-side operating system years later in the form of Android on mobile devices, but the path looks very little like a direct replacement for Windows.]

But for now Nostr’s primary use-case and build-out has mostly been around censorship resistant social media. And it’s a good use-case to keep pushing so that Nostr can survive and thrive long enough that even more turbo-charged use-cases have a chance to arrive. So I do think we would benefit from more marketing.

I see 3 main ways to contribute to marketing in Nostr:

1. Create and support homegrown creators

2. Simplify consumption with discovery algorithms

3. Build bridges to the outside

More detail on each:

1. Create and support homegrown creators

   There’s a common refrain among nostriches today that goes something like this: “once the creators show up, then everything will be great…”. I don’t believe existing mainstream creators will just show up until they believe that Nostr provides at least similar opportunity for them as traditional platforms do. If you’ve heard of a given creator they’re usually already successful as creators in the old world. Traditionally creators care about 2 things: 1) growth of audience and 2) monetization. We may need to support a new kind of creator who is initially more interested in the ideology of censorship resistant publishing, has views that are not supported by the mainstream, or someone who just wants the adventure of being a homesteader in a frontier land. They may be more open to trying a new approach — publishing in a place that is uncrowded and niche even if it doesn’t provide amazing growth and monetization opportunities yet. It’s an investment in the future. Being early before the masses arrive will prove to be a gift to your future self.

   Rabble has done a great job instigating this kind of thing with the Nos Social Journalism Accelerator and the Global Sports Center Olympics coverage, but that’s just the tip of the iceberg. There are existing writers who care about freedom and alternatives to mainstream journalism, but they might not have clarity on why Nostr could be a good option — most of them are finding a “good-enough” home on Substack today. Meeting them and sharing the Nostr story may help. In fact, if you’re this type of person, reach out to me (on Nostr, Twitter, etc.) and I’d be happy to help you learn more about how it might help you.

   All of this home-grown niche content becomes marketing for the protocol. Want to hear about topic A? When it happens first on Nostr, come join the conversation about it.

2. Simplify consumption with discovery algorithms

   Algorithms get a bad rap. We’ve only ever seen corporate controlled algorithms so it’s hard to know how transparent, open, switchable algorithms may feel. But if you help consumers have a better experience finding the good stuff on Nostr easily then you help neo-creators get more excited about creating more on Nostr. It’s a virtuous cycle. And these consumers will talk about and share what they’re finding here.

   An algorithm is not some sort of magical mind control wizardry. It’s just a process that a computer uses to optimize toward a goal. We’ve seen what algorithms look like where the goal is to serve a centralized corporation which needs more ad impressions to sell. We haven’t seen what algorithms in media look like when they optimize for an end-user’s goals. How different might that be? I want a Nostr that can help me direct my attention toward the notes I might find most interesting. But if it’s behaving badly (in my judgment alone!) I should be able to read and modify the code running the algorithm or simply plug in another algorithm that I think may serve my needs better.

   Some nostriches say “oh, you’ve gotta do the work to find the good stuff — come, on — proof-of-work!”. Well, that’s fine when it’s small, but it does exclude a more casual consumer who might be good audience members for the new creators we want to nurture. Imagine there are 1 billion notes published on nostr some day. Do you still think there’s a way a person can sift through 1 billion notes to find the good stuff? No way. There’s not enough time in a day. We need algorithms to help serve our individual goals — not some centralized corporate goals.

   And algorithms can help surface creators who are doing their own proof-of-work. i.e. investing their time and energy in creating, scripting, writing, recording, editing, and publishing new ideas. Time-ordered delivery of notes to a consumer means that when a creator invests hours in creating something great it has just as good a chance of being seen by someone as a note I dashed off in 10 seconds. It seems like an obvious imbalance and a problem to solve.

   It’s a two sided marketplace of creation and consumption. Let’s harness the power of computers to serve the success of the protocol while ensuring no single actor gets to dominate the algorithm game. The best marketing here is to make the protocol easy to use and easy to find all the good stuff. It makes people talk about it.

   Primal pokes the tip of this iceberg with “Trending 24h” and “Most-zapped 24h” algorithmic feed options, but there’s a vast depth under-explored here. Amethyst demonstrates how DVMs can be used to surface notes algorithmically. Also, ideally this can all remain open and standardized so such algorithms can easily be used across all clients. Noogle.lol shows a promising direction for how this might work.

3. Build bridges to the outside

   Creating in a nostr-only way can be great. It helps nostr by being the only place for audiences to go to get certain good information. But we would benefit from more bridges to the outside, too. This could include technical bridges like what Alex Gleason did to connect ActivityPub and Nostr. But it could also be content bridges.

   For my part I’ve invited non-Nostr-pilled people to be guests on my Nostr-themed podcast. I could do more here and am considering a sort of reboot to focus more on helping in this way. Instead of telling successful creators to come to Nostr we should “be the change we want to see” and invite creators as our guests to create with us. Psst: there’s a cross-pollination of audiences when they show up. Some may find they like it and stick around!

If we push on creating along these three lines the marketing sort of happens as a side-effect. It’s a lot more work than just “build it and they will come”. But it’s not “traditional online marketing” activities. We need to tell great stories and make it easy to find and share while connecting nostr to the world. The best marketing is really just focusing on the process of creating and sharing.

First, on Friday YouTube chose to censor the Simply Bitcoin channel to the surprise of the creators and the community. No explanation has surfaced yet as to why yet.

Next, on Saturday we saw the arrest of Pavel Durov, CEO of Telegram, as part of an investigation by French prosecutors.

These are each respective examples of corporate and government meddling with freedoms of speech. Now I’m not personally a fan of Telegram and I don’t believe it represents strong freedom technology guarantees. But I do believe that communication technologies like it should be available to all individuals regardless of how good or bad any individual’s ideas might be.

Our centralized technologies like YouTube and Telegram cannot operate independently of the ideas of the corporations or governments that influence them. Even if they espouse such ideals on the surface — as these examples do!

Their architectures prevent them from making good on these missions. You can’t win this battle just by being well-intentioned, smart, or a great marketer. The architecture matters more.

When we see such restrictions on speech in any form we should make a bunch of noise. Each one represents a marketing moment for technologies which can’t be censored and are not subject to the control of 3d parties.

As corporations and governments attempt to strangle speech these moments will demonstrate to more people that alternatives are needed. Nostr couldn’t ask for better marketing.

I’m reminded of this scene from Star Wars: Episode IV – A New Hope

“If you strike me down…”

Mess with people’s communication tools and freedom technologies gain even more power.

Nostr is an open protocol. It’s independent of the use or existence of any cryptocurrency. It uses cryptography, but nothing super fancy there. It’s actually kinda basic, tbh.

So why did so many bitcoiners show up? A simple explanation might be that , the creator of Nostr, was a bitcoiner and brought like-minded people along. But I think there’s more to it than just the initial seed.

The critical feature which Nostr gets right is that you can create an account just by doing math on your own. Of course, you can use a little program on your own computer to help do this math (i.e., creating public-private key pairs). This is cryptography at its best — a tool that empowers the individual.

You don’t have to go to a 3rd-party-issuer to create an account for you. You don’t have to subscribe to a particular cryptocurrency or political ideology. You could identify as a libertarian, anarchist, democrat, republican, labor party, or you may not accept any political labels at all.

On Nostr, you’re welcome to even dislike the concept of bitcoin/cryptocurrencies altogether. As long as you have a curiosity about, or interest in freedom of speech you may find Nostr to be a good place for you to share your thoughts. On Nostr, your ideas and your words are published without being subject to anyone’s permission. The separation of power between clients and data stores is what enforces your rights. It’s baked into the architecture. Not promised and granted to you by a demagogue. That’s the whole idea.

• eCash is a layer on top of Bitcoin that aims to improve the user experience of Bitcoin payments

• Static messages in eCash allow for one-click payments without the need for complex invoice processes

• Stable eCash tokens enable the representation of stable value on top of Bitcoin

• Boardwalk Cash is a platform that facilitates the sending and receiving of eCash tokens Boardwalk Cash allows users to send money easily by creating tokens and withdrawing to a Lightning address or invoice.

• Mints can be trusted or swapped, depending on the user's preference.

• Sharing a link is a convenient way to send eCash to someone, and they can claim it by clicking the link.

• Boardwalk Cash has various use cases, including incentivizing engagement on social media platforms. Nostr has the potential to be used for digital payments and tips through zaps and a zap wallet that is dollar-denominated.

• Using recognizable currencies like USD in Nostr can help overcome the hurdle of understanding and using Bitcoin.

• The stable cash feature of Nostr bridges the gap between stablecoins and Bitcoin, allowing for limited volatility and easy adoption.

• Remittances and incentivizing engagement through payments are potential use cases for Nostr.

• Platforms like Discord can benefit from integrating Nostr for easy and instant payments. Mints can be tailored to specific functionalities or user needs, ranging from mints that support all features to mints that focus on specific use cases.

• Relay operators can play a role in the eCash ecosystem, potentially running mints or providing specific functionalities like storing messages.

• Open source components are important for the growth of eCash, but there are also opportunities for commercial models to drive adoption and fund marketing efforts.

• Targeting new users and creating experiences that demonstrate the benefits of eCash over traditional payment systems is crucial for adoption.

• Potential use cases for eCash include Discord payments, game shows, and AI agents.

A lot of people are trying to form narratives that smash crypto and AI together today. I can see why these narratives are attractive. There might be something in the future where AI machines do a bunch of training and inference work and the demand for their services is run on an open, competitive market of suppliers mediated by some sort of cryptographic monetary and payments technologies.

Sharing such narratives will definitely whip up a base of excitement on Twitter. Crypto is exciting. AI is exciting. If we collide them together wouldn’t it be even more exciting? 1+1=3!

But I’m guessing each of these technologies will need to make independent progress before we’ll collectively figure out how they should work together. Obviously some experimentation with crossing these ingredients can be fun and help us learn about the problem space, but we still face a lot of questions with each. For example:

What do we need for machine-to-machine payments to work?

• Traditional payment providers work today for machine-to-machine payments, but don’t achieve any of the goals of cryptocurrencies (low fees, fast transactions, censorship resistance).

• Bitcoin has superior monetary properties compared to other cryptocurrencies, but has so far fallen short on most attempts at scalable payments.

• Being a fast, scalable cryptocurrency payment technology is relatively easy to launch if you’re willing to compromise trust minimization, but the whole idea of using cryptocurrency is to avoid all the trust required to make these kinds of things work.

What are the winning services and delivery models for AI?

• Will the transformer long-term continue to be the most important AI architecture upon which all applications get built?

• What are the model/data/weight sizes required for various applications?

• How much are these open source/open model versus closed models/weights?

• How will the costs of training be amortized over the pricing of inference?

• Who will operate the infrastructure?

• What kind of hardware architectures might enable new applications?

• Who will be getting paid for which contributions?

• How much do winning solutions end up being delivered primarily by centralized versus decentralized providers?

The future collision is inevitable. But before we get to the unified theory, I’d say the “galaxy brain” idea is to help these technologies mature independently for a while. Primarily I’d like to see bitcoin achieve more scalable payment solutions and I’d like to see which AI applications (and underlying models) achieve PMF as utilities in our daily lives. Cryptocurrency payments and AI applications are fundamentally different layers of technology. The competition is fierce at each layer. Competing across layers today seems like a fools errand — you end up compromising too much. The winning formulas are almost certainly, as yet, undiscovered. Who operates what infrastructure, supporting which applications, and who gets paid for what?

I’d guess the collision happens a few years out from here and the fireworks will be magnificent to watch! For now, let’s keep building the best payment technologies and the best AI infrastructure/applications we can.

Even if you’ve figured out how to acquire a pile of money, keeping it takes work. Truly wealthy folks sometimes stop chasing more, but everyone wants their pile to at least hold its value over time. Whatever you can buy today, the thinking goes, you should be able to buy the same tomorrow as well as ten years on. Wealth should be saved energy — society's debt to you — not a leaky bucket.

Preserving Wealth

We buy assets hoping they'll rise in value, but at the same time inflation reduces the buying power of our dollars each year. We need more and more dollars just to stand still. There’s an illusion of “making money” when we see the prices of our assets go up. But we’re often just running on a treadmill, while staying in place. We can’t choose not to run or we’ll fall off the back and become poor again.

So we’re all out there buying assets trying to at least keep up with inflation. And the pricing of those assets ends up having two components: 1) utility value and 2) monetary premium. The utility is obvious for many of these. “I will buy real estate so I can live in this house”. That is utility. But also, you’ve probably heard the very common idea that houses “go up” in price over time. Since most people know (err… believe?) that houses always go up they are comfortable storing value in homes. If you expect the house will store value and you can retrieve that value 10-20 years later when you sell it you become very comfortable buying a “more expensive” house than you might if you were purchasing just for the utility value of the house. That “more expensive” component could be thought of as the monetary premium. That monetary premium in real estate is why you hear about foreign wealth parked in unused real estate in Vancouver, California, and New York. They don’t care at all about the utility value. They only care about the monetary premium because it helps them store value to retrieve in the future.

To beat inflation, people are constantly searching for things they predict that other people in the future will see as valuable. In economics this is called a Keynesian Beauty Contest. It exists across all assets. There is no absolute metric of value in our ever changing world. Some people think it sounds smart to say that something has “intrinsic value”, but there’s no such thing. All value is subjective. There’s just whatever we all get habituated to agree is “about right”. And those estimates of value can and do adapt over time. However, they do tend to be somewhat sticky. So they adapt slowly. Therefore, a lot of people think of pricing as somewhat “real” at any given time even though it’s constantly shifting underfoot.

Problems with Traditional Savings Tools

The value of each of stocks, bonds, metals, and real estate is subject to human decisions, risks, and corruptions. Boards/CEOs can make bad decisions about a business destroying the value of a stock while technologies and markets can shift further destroying value. Bonds can have more underlying risk — especially “tail risk” — than their pricing recognizes. If metals or other commodities get bid up to hold excess monetary premium then miners produce more which drives supply up bringing prices back down. Real estate is subject to property taxes where the rules can be changed by a new political regime and the property cannot relocate. All of our best tools for saving are subject to these problems.

Bitcoin’s properties, on the other hand, are not subject to human decisions (they were at the start, but we’re far enough along now that no individual nor even small groups can make meaningful unilateral changes on any important policies today). There’s no strategic blunders and no yield/risk to price. Excess mining capacity doesn’t increase supply. And unlike real estate, the taxation must be considered a “fair deal” by the owner who pays the tax since the property is not tied to any particular location and the holder has the option to exit and pay tax elsewhere where they consider the tax just. Bitcoin’s is a transparent set of rules run on open source software that anyone can voluntarily run and audit. The whole thing works because enough people choose to run the same open source software as each other. Neither Satoshi nor anyone else can show up and force people to change the software they choose to run.

Now bitcoin’s exchange rate to USD is entirely subject to human decisions at any given time, but the important properties of bitcoin's monetary policy and scarcity are due to math, cryptography, and social consensus. If everyone decided bitcoin is worth nothing then it would be worth nothing. But it has this special property of digital scarcity that never existed before and despite 10,000+ attempts has never been recreated after. And it’s easy to predict that if something uniquely demonstrates absolute scarcity and can be transmitted across electronic communication channels like the Internet that in the future other people will probably also value it. That’s why bitcoin might be the best tool for saving we’ve ever seen.

When you have monetary premiums in traditional stores of value the system continues despite the problems. But when an alternative comes along that doesn’t have those problems, the monetary premiums enjoyed by those assets that exhibit the problems would probably shift to the one without those problems. It won’t happen all at once. It might take a generation to fully play out.

But it’s relatively easy to predict that people will choose to store wealth in the form least subject to such human decisions, risks, and corruptions if such a thing were to exist.

And such a thing does exist. But it’s very early in its existence. So that repricing will only occur as more people learn about the special properties bitcoin has that no other asset in the world has. In the long run bitcoin reprices all of those other value stores into the neutral value store of its network.

Which is why it’s going up forever. It’s a much bigger deal than just “digital gold”. It’s the best tool for saving.

♾️/21m

For more detail on the scale of these traditional large asset classes:

• Stocks (Equities): Estimates vary, but the global stock market value could be somewhere in the ballpark of $100 trillion to $300 trillion.

• Bonds: The global bond market is estimated to be around $125 trillion to $150 trillion.

• Metals: The global gold market alone is estimated at around $10 trillion to $12 trillion.

• Real Estate: A rough estimate puts the global real estate market above $325 trillion.

Summing up the total value of these assets is somewhere in the range of $500-$750 trillion. Which is roughly the scale of the market of tools for saving.

DK: I believe that bitcoin is the neutral, internet-native monetary protocol. This creates a profound shift in how everything in media, communications, and information will work. I’m going to continue investing in and experimenting with how digital scarcity and global payments can be used to build a better internet.

Friend: Are you still of the mindset that Bitcoin wins as the base layer for all of these use cases? Or are you open to the idea that Ethereum or other platforms may be better suited for the programmable layer beyond store of value, e.g. Lightning doesn't really have traction while USDC+USDT has trillions in flow?

Programmability through different lenses

DK: I still believe that bitcoin and cryptography more generally is most useful when it allows us to create trust-minimized systems that empower the individual. I think a trust-minimized programmable layer is an exciting idea, but uncertain all the different ways it might be accomplished. The new BitVM idea builds on the strong security foundation that bitcoin provides (and includes ideas like "optimistic rollups" with appropriate credit given to initial work done on Ethereum).

I also think there is a lot of opportunity for cryptographic programmability outside of smart contracts. We can use well understood cryptography for individuals to sign messages and use open source software to coordinate peoples' ability to verify/read these messages. In many cases the presumed requirement to track global state as a blockchain leads to strictly worse implementations for programmable systems with cryptographic verifications. The best example I've seen so far here is the kind of stuff being built on Nostr, but I would guess there's going to be a tremendous diversity of programmable solutions.

But the hypothesis around Ethereum winning the smart contract programmability use-case doesn't seem likely to me. I think Ethereum represents a lot of new technology experimentation, but it's substantially worse across the most important characteristics of neutrality, security, and its properties as money. If it purports to be a foundational L1 it is de facto competing as money. But it's a worse money than bitcoin when compared against just about every property of money. Having non-monetary innovation while compromising on monetary characteristics is a bad tradeoff for convincing anyone to accept it as money long term. And the security guarantees flow out of being that money. Additionally, Ethereum is going to be under constant competition from new projects like Solana/Tron/etc. A new entrant can always promise faster transactions and cheaper fees, which are relatively easy features to achieve compared to improvements in the security model at the foundation of bitcoin. I'm not sure how any of these projects can recreate the "immaculate conception" that gives bitcoin the neutrality required to be a global money.

I agree that Lightning has not proven to be the answer for neutral global payments yet. I'm still hopeful it may be part of the solution since it's the leading attempt built on the solid foundation of bitcoin’s security guarantees. I've also been playing with Cashu/Fedi and various ecash projects which may also be part of the answer for scaling payments, but these are far from certain, have their own tradeoffs, and are definitely not operating at any interesting scale yet.

Are Stablecoins the Answer?

USDC+USDT may be trillions in flow, but they each require a tremendous amount of trust to work. So I'd argue they provide great utility to people who don't value trust minimization. Maybe these people don’t otherwise have access to or want to participate in the USD system directly, but are fine trusting 3rd party issuers and exchanges. I think these tools have primarily demonstrated utility as a way to exit trades in cryptocurrencies on exchanges before entering new positions. This may be a very large market, but it doesn’t seem to have much impact on how the internet is built so far and it’s already operating at pretty significant scale as you mention.

The new internet that excites me creates new dynamics of competition between application clients, datastores, identities and wallets. When everything is open source and in direct competition with each other you get services more aligned with the user’s needs. If you are okay accepting the trust of issuers and exchanges you head down the path of building traditional web applications like we already have operating at scale today. They have an application, datastore, identities, and integrated payment solutions all in the same product and platform. While I’m a fan of building such technologies and companies, those techniques are reasonably well explored now that the web has been popularizing over the past 30 years. They may represent a lot less opportunity to build new things in the coming years.

In my mind, the magic comes when you decouple all of these layers and make the solutions for any given component interchangeable. When someone comes up with a new idea for an interface they can just launch the new application on the existing datastore, identities, and payment solutions. When someone has a new wallet solution it’s easy for end users to swap in the new wallet instead of accepting the default as the only choice or needing to restart the rest of the network to experiment with a new wallet tool.

Interchangeability reduces the trust required in any given developer or provider. It also aligns all developers to contribute in ways where they must compete to serve users better – they don’t own a monopoly on user accounts, data, or the underlying monetary asset. There’s very little proprietary technology. It’s weird to think about technology businesses when such a different economic model emerges, but it’s possible that a pure application layer doesn’t accrue much value in the future. In the past that’s where all the value accrued because of the rest of the coupling it implied.

Ultimately, I'm excited about how to build a better internet and I suspect the solution is primarily dependent upon this relatively new primitive of having digital scarcity allowing us to explore an entirely new architecture for internet applications.

However, I have a more welcoming idea to share. You can be a “real bitcoiner™️” without subscribing to all the angry toxicity. I’d suggest all it takes is understanding what makes bitcoin special. I have been accused of not being a “real bitcoiner™️” at times. But, I don’t really care. I’ve been on a continual journey of educating myself and my friends about this technology. You can begin to climb the educational ladder as soon as you begin to become curious. Understand what bitcoin uniquely adds to the world: digital scarcity.

A partially ordered list of the stages you might go through:

• buy some bitcoin via an ETF

• buy some bitcoin and hold it on an exchange

• understand what makes bitcoin special

• withdraw some bitcoin to a non-custodial wallet

• withdraw some bitcoin to cold storage

• run a bitcoin full node

• explore privacy preserving technologies like TOR and CoinJoin

• buy some non-KYC’d bitcoin

• convert all your personal assets to bitcoin

• run a bitcoin miner

• exclusively hold all your wealth in cold storage

• exclusively use bitcoin to pay for all your monetary needs

• move to El Salvador or another bitcoin-centric community/region

• only participate in circular economies on the bitcoin standard

The beauty of bitcoin is that it’s a voluntary system that nobody controls. So don’t let anyone shame you into living up to their expectations of what it means to be a “real bitcoiner™️”. I’m somewhere in the middle of this list personally. The further I get down the list, the more curious I become about items a bit further down. I don’t expect I’ll be moving to El Salvador, but I’m a “real bitcoiner™️” and you can be, too.

We spent the first hour catching up on the following: walks, AI/Nostr/Lightning Hackathons, Max's interest in Ancient Civilizations, n00b podcasting tips from another n00b, intros to bitcoin, bitcoin ETF, Solar/Wind/energy

1:05 Thank God For Nostr

5:50 Ira Glass - on creative work

9:51 Christianity and Nostr

30:30 Relay selection and visibility

39:49 Commoditization of relays

51:58 Gossip model

1:08:53 Subreddit-like things/Zines on Nostr

Minds.com is one of the original approaches to building a social networking service that seeks to empower users with more freedom (e.g., free speech, portable identities, etc.). Beginning over 10 years ago they’ve evolved the service to play a role in the modern architecture we’re exploring with Nostr. After Bill’s recent appearance talking about Nostr on Joe Rogan’s podcast we got a chance to dig deeper on the key philosophical and technical principles behind their work and how they think about Nostr. We were also lucky to include Mark Harding who is CTO of Minds.

0:00 Opener

0:42 DK intro to convo

1:34 Minds - philosophy and exploration of nostr and other open source projects

4:04 What’s important when evaluating open source technologies?

4:20 3 Pillars: Sovereign Identities, Interoperability, Portability

6:45 Minds history with various technology approaches

9:42 adapting centralized approaches to decentralized technologies

19:00 why email signup is needed for spam prevention

24:28 will there be “one ring to rule them all”?

28:39 web5, Dorsey

30:27 schema-first approach

32:34 AT-protocol

35:12 fiatjaf’s feat of magic

36:37 a possible Minds fit in the nostr world

38:27 Verified Credentials

42:23 NFTs, token-gated community

44:22 making money on Minds

50:00 Minds business/community funding/advertising

56:30 Some final thoughts on interoperability and portability

57:12 Collaborate with Minds! https://gitlab.com/minds

0:00 the warm-up/welcome

4:15 making zaps work without support

10:55 new use-cases Max is following - Pablo’s data vending machine

29:30 software development changes based on AI

47:50 Nostr documentary

50:09 Danny/Deezy - Astral Desert - open source ordinal mosaic

53:00 lighting labs l402 - lightning payments for npm packages

1:03:37 Can Threads (Facebook/Meta) be good for open ecosystems?

1:11:45 Max’s broader concerns about social media

1:23:15 should we be experimenting with more centralizing forces to test the edges?

1:27:55 focus on UX - Primal, for example

1:30:16 antibodies in bitcoin

1:41:20 local, open-source, AI inference, webGPU

1:48:59 quickly experiment with monetizing some data/service

1:54:45 Jeff launched http://ostrich.work - job board

1:55:35 Gigi/Opensats, Nostr grants announced - roll call!

1:58:15 long-form video/audio content to chop to short - Highlighter relevant 💡

It has become a popular pastime of entrepreneurs recently to attempt to reinvent the public town square of the Internet. From Elon’s takeover and rapid “evolution” of Twitter to the attempts at decentralizing this kind of network we see in Blue Sky to a whole host of new entrants that make promises about how “fair” their content moderation or publisher monetization philosophies would be.

Among these Threads stands out. It doesn’t appear to be trying to change much about the core Twitter experience to start. Rather it has a very reasonable UX, not a straight clone — different enough that you know you’re in a new place.

Tailwinds

The follow-graph of Instagram and the overall distribution ability of Facebook point to an easy ability to bootstrap a new platform here. In the first day it reached 30 million sign-ups. It feels like the first day of school. Plenty of familiar faces — often people I haven’t seen in awhile — show up in my notifications and stop by and say hi. There’s a general vibe of friendliness and a lot of people looking towards what’s possible here. There aren’t any ads, nor have I run into any bots or spam accounts yet. So it has this fresh, clean feel. Once some amount of participation is established Threads could start to explore more innovative directions.

A notable innovative direction called out during onboarding indicates Threads has their eye on integration with the “fediverse”. On the Instagram Help site they state “Our vision is that Threads will enable you to communicate with people on other fediverse platforms we don’t own or control. This means that your Threads profile can follow and be followed by people using different servers on the fediverse.” I’m happy to see some experimentation from larger players who want to push toward more decentralized approaches.

Another tailwind for Threads is just the fact that they have an at-scale platform now that can run a whole different set of experiments than Twitter can at any given time. Maybe a purely algorithm-driven “TikTok for Text” experience would be fun?

Headwinds

The fundamental problems in Twitter’s product seem likely to become fundamental problems in Threads over time. How should censorship and jurisdictional compliance work on this platform (e.g. where are the lines between “free speech” and “content moderation”)? How do you handle bots and spam at scale? How do you enable a flourishing ecosystem of 3rd-party (even open source?) development and discovery around these communication hubs without putting the core business of ads at risk? Without a very new design space I’m skeptical we’re going to get radically different outcomes. Though it’s possible that some paths Twitter left under-explored could yield wins.

Future

Personally, I’m excited about more radically new design spaces supported by open source protocols like Nostr and bitcoin. But I think having a duopoly of centralized providers competing to serve the town square at scale is likely to encourage more interoperability and more openness than we’d ever get with the single Twitter monopoly we’ve lived with for the past decade-plus. So in a way Threads may save us, but not for the reasons one may think. It’s because of the competitive pressure it puts on the ecosystem of players rather than because it’s a new winning formula for an old habit.