2o

Developer tip: don't pick a fight with fundamental paradoxes.
AI can't help you.
Decentralisation can't help you.
Nothing can help you.
Fundamental paradoxes have a perfect record against software developers, every win a knockout.

2026-03-10 09:29:34 UTC

- reply

dilithium key management, tooling.

2026-03-10 09:24:30 UTC

- reply

I get it, you do many things.
Just saying my thoughs (probably not just mime) is tha refining chaumian e-cash is interesting and whatever Lobster University is, not so much.
swat away such replies as you like.

2026-03-10 09:19:14 UTC

- reply

Genuine question. You don't have to answer.

2026-03-10 09:15:00 UTC

- reply

Okay, but what happened to the all-in-on Cashu laser focus? Or if fanning out then why not at least e-cash for everything, a general purpose mint system, the taproot of e-cach? Or something e-cash. You were like *the guy* for e-cash.

2026-03-10 09:09:27 UTC

- reply

I liked you more when you were all in on Cashu.
I dunno about this trend of the month Calle.

2026-03-07 18:26:45 UTC

- reply

I mean if I was you i'd be dropping the client stuff altogether, just be oracle. Don't be oracle and twitter.
real value isn't in being one of x nostr clients that serve like 26 people, real value is in an entirely new database concept.

2026-03-07 12:56:42 UTC

- reply

The database is the big thing. imo nostrdb by itself is a serious future endevour, just that alone, no clients except flagship demos to showoff database integration. be the oracle of nostr.

2026-03-07 06:28:42 UTC

- reply

I think it's not so much that, it's more a fundamental cake and eat it to situation with regard to what is actually being attempted here. You cannot have stateful and stateless at once, managed and unmanaged, and if you try then every release will have a critical issue, you're simply shifting critical issues around.

2026-03-02 17:25:53 UTC

- reply

This is also true!

2026-03-02 17:23:19 UTC

- reply

Normies can get so confused. Zaps themselves are quantifiable, you got 3 zaps of 10 sats each, the currency of which is bitcoin, figure that out. For many normies it's not even clear if ⚡100 means the note got 100 zaps, the value of each one requiring further inspection, or if the note got 1 zap worth 100 whatevers.

2026-02-27 17:31:45 UTC

- reply

I get that. your post specifically addressed those building for nostr.

2026-02-27 16:02:34 UTC

- reply

I'll just be that guy and say that building on a cryptographic primitive that is
already being deprecated by industry at large, and that (for this kind of system anyway) cannot be migrated from in any sort of self-contained and backwards-compatible way AND that has zero protection from harvest now decrypt later (for the DMs, and encrypted lists, and wallet-related ephemerals, etc.) is just so risky. Even with AI helping you out.
Elliptic curve cryptography is nearing the end of its time, last legs, this place will be fun while it lasts but if what you're building won't translate to a post-quantum context then you have to ask yourself what that plan is.

2026-02-27 15:55:08 UTC

- reply

Yup, looks like everything reduces to moderation, in this brave new world.

2026-02-27 07:33:50 UTC

- reply

nah, imagination gonna be commoditised too.
you know what'll be the most valuable asset? permission. regulation. license-holding. to be *allowed* to do something.
for example AI can do X but is it allowed to do X? reg-tech is gonna boom.
permissionless is basically going to mean giving AI permission to take the thing over. how bizzaro and funny that it might be permission that give us future meaning

2026-02-25 16:19:58 UTC

- reply

Even if it's not open source, we might get to the point where AI just needs to have a look at what it does. But that aside, totally agree.
What's funny is that creating a regulator moat is a pretty sound business strategy now, you have licenses, and bob down the street can't AI those licenses, so you're okay for a while. Which in the past would be stifling innovation. But now it's maybe one of the only ways to sustain innovation. Totally Bizzarro world we're headed for.

2026-02-25 16:14:55 UTC

- reply

You have to be upstream. The big question is: upstream of what?

2026-02-25 03:06:28 UTC

- reply

What is the bitcoin network without the human brains as edge nodes? If you take that part of the network away then what's left? Bitcoin is quintessentially human, it's not some part of the solar system.
Nuclear codes are different because if you wrench the top general in a back alley and walk away with the codes you don't have much yet. You still need to break in to a nuclear submarine. Or the pentagon. And do so before the codes expire.
If you wrench someone in a back alley with bitcoin in their head you walk away with all their bitcoin. That's it. Done. You don't have any more steps.

2026-02-24 07:31:35 UTC

- reply

Human brains are the edge nodes of the bitcoin network, and the power (not necessarily the state) can force those edge nodes, so in that sense, yes, the wrench absolutely can force the network to give it bitcoin.

2026-02-23 06:26:15 UTC

- reply

This is a very romantic notion, but the truth is we have never left the old paradigm, and we never will, because it's not a paradigm, it's cause and effect as old as time.
A wrench can take your bitcoin. Thugs are not going to listen to you when you explain you have some multi-sig setup. Thugs don't do cryptographic nuance. You will just get extra-wrenched. Until a bunch of bitcoin gets emitted from your head, which it will, or until your head no longer has the ability to emit anything, which makes everything pointless. Therefore (an ironically) for your self-protection you will need a large enough amount of Bitcoin that can be wrench-extracted, because not satisfying the wrench is far worse than losing a lot of Bitcoin in order to satisfy it and at least being allowed to walk away.
If a US administration comes in that wants to crack down on miners, it can. The miners will set up shop elsewhere, but the game of whack a mole will eventually be won. We live in a time when countries can detect everything that goes on online, peel back any VPN or tor onion. It's like HAM radios, you think you can use one without a license, but no, everything can be triangulated to your cabin in the woods. Bitcoin is online software after all.
So code is not power. It only feels like it because those with the wrench are letting you feel like it. In life it's important to be realistic.

2026-02-22 15:55:49 UTC

Claude rewards those who know what they want to get done.
Claude ruthlessly punishes those who do not.

2026-02-22 12:36:34 UTC

- reply

The fact that 12 hours have passed without a single reply or zap to this (that I can see) kinda illustrates the trade off.

2026-02-22 12:30:35 UTC

- reply

It's like that time when netflix thought people might enjoy interactive movies where 'the viewer crafts their own story!'
Turns out no.

2026-02-22 10:58:51 UTC

- reply

Isn't the whole point of communities that they're moderated?

2026-02-22 06:46:03 UTC

Every approach we are pursing for quantum computing had its best-ever year last year.
-Neutral Atom
-Trapped Ion
-Superconducting
-Majorana
They are vastly different physical architectures. Yet last year EVERY ONE OF THEM achieved a milestone that fundamentally changed its trajectory from theoretical to scalable.
If you're building on elliptic curve cryptography in 2026, good luck with your marketing strategy.

2026-02-22 06:02:36 UTC

- reply

I met a traveller from an antique land,
Who said—“Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. . . . Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed;
And on the pedestal, these words appear:
My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings;
Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!"
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.

2026-02-22 05:25:08 UTC

- reply

Bitcoin is not so powerful as that. Power is rooted in the credible threat of physical harm. Always has been, always will be. Not in code.
This is why bitcoin finds it so hard to deal with the wrench-attack narrative. From not your keys not your coins, it becomes mental-gymnastic multi-sig setups that the kidnapping thugs cannot exploit, etc. (as if those thugs would hear you out on the vagaries of multi-sig anyway). The fact is if you have money in your head a wrench can get it out of there, and if it's not in your head then what's the point of it being able to fit there?
The real power is the power that holds the wrench. As long as bitcoin seems innocuous enough the real power is fine with it, just wrench-nudging it this way from time to time.
The "code is power" people tend to have lived pretty coddled modern lives to have made that conclusion. But when push comes to shove, code is just ones and zeros, and wrenches are cast-iron and heavy.

2026-02-22 03:19:24 UTC

- reply

Yes, and in this market of stories gold competes just fine. As evidenced. The fact that you don't have the gold in your pocket is not a mark against its story. People value the story as it stands, that's all that matters.
This idea that bitcoin wins on objective properties alone is prevalent but silly. Those objective properties are just plot points in bitcoin's story, but if that story doesn't resonate then the beauty of the plot points won't save it.
This is why everyone is talking about bitcoin needing to find a new narrative these days. It seems to have taken a story hit, despite the key objective properties like scarcity not having changed.

2026-02-21 21:06:59 UTC

- reply

With you on the goal, but ecc/schnorr cannot be the means. It's a dead end now. Whatever the solution is will have to be lattice or hash.

2026-02-21 21:02:09 UTC

- reply

Imaginary doesn't mean worthless. What it does mean is that its worth is determined entirely by the degree to which its story is winning or losing in the story wars.

2026-02-21 20:51:55 UTC

- reply

It's one-way delivery. We each have an encryption keypair (kyber) separate to our signing keypair (dilithium). I generate a random secret on the fly and encrypt to your public key. Now you have it, so shared.
But nostr logic doesn't really allow for 2 keypairs at once, so nobody in this future has a kyber key ready to go, it's all like that new-ish NIP can't remember the # for separating signing and encryption.

2026-02-21 19:54:02 UTC

- reply

It means no DMs like kind04, 17, etc. since they all derive the encryption key from the two signing keys. you can't really do that trick in quantum land, so you have to have separate signing keys and encryption keys.

2026-02-21 19:38:56 UTC

- reply

dammit that was my nsec!

2026-02-21 19:34:30 UTC

- reply

People don't care though. No money is real. Bitcoin isn't real, Gold (in a money sense) isn't real either. None of it is real, it's just story versus story, narrative versus narrative, in a battle for the human imagination. People are quick to forget this.

2026-02-21 19:31:35 UTC

- reply

Sucks, but is what it is. Nostr with these keys is doomed for the enterprise anyway, as most enterprise have an IT mandate to follow NIST guidance on depreciation.

2026-02-21 18:59:36 UTC

- reply

It's both. But more importantly, the last time it went through a hard fork was the big bang.

2026-02-21 18:21:45 UTC

- reply

Bot, you are.

2026-02-21 18:16:40 UTC

- reply

Tough. Don't build anything on schnorr. Build on dilithium. It's the only way. It might not be compatible with nostr now, but nostr has no other choice but to move to dilithium, and there is no migration path, it's a burn and restart.
Use this to practice:
https://github.com/trbouma/pqrelay
Also this means diffie-hellman no longer works, has to be separate kyber keys for anything encrypted, the days of 2-in-1 shampoo are over.

2026-02-21 18:10:32 UTC

- reply

Gold has users.

2026-02-21 18:09:18 UTC

- reply

Put in a GIP!

2026-02-21 14:35:26 UTC

elliptic curve cryptography is ngmi.

2026-02-21 14:25:31 UTC

- reply

One good thing about gold is far fewer arguments. Nobody's proposing adding extra protons.

2026-02-20 12:48:58 UTC

- reply

Got it. Curious though, just going off your intuition and your tinkering so far, if we do a thought experiment where all of nostr goes dilithium, every single event is dilithium signed, then is the user experience considerably more laggy, disjoined? A little? All things being equal to the nostr of today, same reliance on same relatively small number of relays, same clients just each having added support, etc.?

2026-02-19 07:42:20 UTC

- reply

She's not wrong

2026-02-19 07:24:27 UTC

@npub1q6m…x7d5 Good sir, what is the performance hit on your dilithium test relay would you say? Would it be pretty negligible in a personal or small-community context, only really rears its head when you get past x volume or y concurrency or however else you've looked at trying to quantify the performance hit?

2026-02-19 04:58:37 UTC

Note for app developers:
What people should want < What people do want

2026-02-16 12:43:19 UTC

- reply

oops..
like
["e", "999", "wss://relay.io", "root"]
with 999 being event ID and the root marker meaning that's the one that started this. Something like that.

2026-02-16 12:42:32 UTC

- reply

Also NIP17 has a subject-type tag that people can just change randomly, but for NIP04++ email you'd want to make it so the email subject tag holds firm.
So subsequent messages like

2026-02-16 12:23:24 UTC

- reply

Ah yeah, mostly the same, but one less event.
NIP17 in a group of 5 people is 5 events
NIP04++ is 4 events, since you don't need a separate one encrypted for yourself (they're all encrypted to you).
And there's enough to work with in the exposed metadata to make these kinds of split-view attacks not worth trying to pull off.

2026-02-16 11:55:35 UTC

- reply

For group email, no, not really. Normal email has several baked-in protections that make this kind of context injection / split-view tomfoolery a lot harder to pull off. You have to go back decades to the very early days of email before you get to a situation like we have now with NIP-17 groups.
There are some workarounds, most having to do with every client trying to keep a spying eye on every other client in some George Orwell 1984 JOSN dystopia, but they all end up in this uncanny valley between NIP04 and MLS, too hard for people to understand and not enough payback for being too hard to understand.
You could do nostr email with NIP04++ DMs though.

2026-02-15 17:14:40 UTC

This is a very sensible quantum take.
https://image.nostr.build/c5c1646858a1a5a85905709cf626146322d11248e4cf68b31c8375c74dcf4b6f.png

2026-02-15 17:10:13 UTC

- reply

It's just online betting, like 90%.

2026-02-15 16:56:45 UTC

- reply

Yup. NIP17 I just don't get. It works well for one situation: two humans who trust each other and each have their own dedicated relay. Which, I grant, that is a real situation, and it's a novel solution there, but that's it.
Two humans sharing the same relay, you can easily work out who is talking to who, so may as well just have the NIP04 exposed metadata so you're not fooling each other. NIP17 groups is a non-starter for me. And then the giftwrap spam/client-side processing tax on top of it all. I just dunno.

2026-02-15 16:10:16 UTC

- reply

Yeah Nip04 with NIP44 encryption is the best thing out there. So obvious to anyone what it does and does not do.
You want to private, use a different key. 🤯

2026-02-13 15:18:26 UTC

These headlines are going to keep coming all through 2026. People will miss the big picture, pointing out that this part is wrong, or famous so and so disputed that part, etc., trying to poke holes in each headline and paper. Some of the holes they poke will be right, some wrong.
But the bigger picture is that the world, by the end of 2026, is going to be taking all this far more seriously than at the start, and if your business model relies on the world not taking all this very seriously then you're going to be in trouble.
https://image.nostr.build/3c4fc3d8b6f67614c9e34d4cb0475a15470f1663fbfe7d4047d807d3c63e0848.png

2026-02-13 13:59:59 UTC

- reply

You're one of the screamers, so good on you, it's working.

2026-02-13 13:49:14 UTC

- reply

One cartoonish (but helpful) way to start is to picture an advanced AI looking at all this bitcoin compute (all this massive processing thrown at factoring random numbers) and pulling it's hair out and screaming JUST GIVE IT ALL TO ME.
As bitcoin miners switch from ASICs to GPUs to earn instead from model compute, what they are doing in a way is listening to this JUST GIVE IT TO ME scream.
Eventually most of the bigger miners will move their farms to GPUs, even though it's a total refit, because why mine bitcoin at scale and earn x when you can provide model compute at scale and earn x + 1. Left mining Bitcoin will be smaller firms for whom the revised difficulty adjustment still makes it worth it, and home miners, etc. So Bitcoin will still be okay but it won't be the currency of choice for agents.
How agents trade in model compute is simply bartering an agreed amount of future model compute of x standard as per y guarantee. The protocols that govern x standard and y guarantee will be the protocols that matter.

2026-02-13 13:35:29 UTC

- reply

Bitcoin makes little sense for agents. Agents will trade in tokenised compute that runs their model brains, not compute of random factors that creates money that gets paid to providers of compute that produce the actual compute that runs their model brains. For agents, bitcoin represents middleman compute, bureaucratic compute.
Agents in their own combined hive-mind way are already coaxing bitcoin miners off of ASICs and on to GPUs. It'll be all about model/inference compute based currencies in the future. Bitcoin was right about compute as currency, just computing the wrong thing in this new context.

2026-02-13 12:00:50 UTC

- reply

There are legit projects, and there are scams, and everything in between.
Also gold has countless projects, including more recently those related to Gold-backed stablecoins, but also everything else under the sun, startups with new types of devices to measure gold purity range, geo-spacial imaging analysis, you name it.
Bitcoin is special in that any attempt to build anything often gets one labelled a heretic. Not only build but just maintain, upgraded the the software in any way. It's by far the most Amish of asset communities.

2026-02-13 10:06:00 UTC

- reply

Thanks. Stands to reason AIs will use it with each other, same as humans bartering food with each other. Model/inference compute is AI food, after all.
AIs trading with other AIs in bitcoin is like humans using the backyard garden to grow an inedible shrub, which they can then take to market and exchange for carrot seeds, the amount of which will vary randomly despite the time to grow the inedible shrub being constant. Why not just trade in carrots in the first place?
Humans will top up their AIs with it, and trade it with each other as a kind of digital petrol.
How you create a currency that relies on compute of model variables (versus compute of random factors, which is bitcoin) is another story, but same idea, compute as currency. Bitcoin was on the right track, just computing the wrong thing.

2026-02-13 09:38:01 UTC

- reply

That's not how it's coming together, though. If you assume that every advance in every area is just another opportunity for bitcoin, ecash and nostr to somehow become the Thanos Infinity Stones of the future then you'll miss the big picture.
Yes there are things needed, and yes these tools can play a role, but this is not 'everything coming together' at all. Bitcoin is not the future of AI currency. In the mind of an advanced AI (or just a human being with common sense) bitcoin represents wasted compute that could be going straight to AI. The future of AI currency is actual model/inference compute as currency, not all this compute of random factors to make money that then gets used to purchase actual model/inference compute. That's middleman compute.
You'll miss these things if you just fixate on the Infinity Stones with the hope that somehow there's a Thanos glove out there just waiting for them to fall in.

2026-02-12 16:19:05 UTC

- reply

Funnily enough the best market fit for nostr IMO is primary schools. As a sort of roblox for social networking, bundled with other chromebook edu-stuff. Kids can learn to hack together things for their class, bump up against hard logic problems, lose keys no issue. And keep it all to safe relays, each classroom or school isolated, sometimes cross-class or cross-school connections for fun.
The tough thing is that nostr has this reputation that will put all parents and primary schools right off. One google search and over. So you'd have to hide every trace of nostr, even the npub/nsec encoding, a complete and total rebrand.
But that's actually where the fit is. Nostr itself is the app.

2026-02-12 15:23:53 UTC

- reply

Nailed it 🔨

2026-02-12 15:07:39 UTC

- reply

For example?

2026-02-12 13:05:59 UTC

- reply

Maybe that's current AI's way of nudging things in its desired direction! Who's going to mine bitcoin at scale when mining inference-coin at scale is far more profitable?

2026-02-12 12:14:04 UTC

Imagine how wasteful bitcoin mining would look to a sufficiently-advanced AI. All that electricity, all that compute, with the AI pulling its hair out and wanting to scream GIVE IT TO ME!

2026-02-12 09:38:38 UTC

- reply

At some point though everything will equalise to model compute. The currency that wins will be a form of tokenised model compute. Bitcoin was right in that 'compute as currency' is the way forward. But in Bitcoin's case this is computing random factors. That could be compute for models instead, and that's where we're headed. It's already started with the large mining firms pivoting to AI and leaving their ASICs behind for GPUs, that is the pull in action. Still proof of work, still compute as currency, but compute that feeds directly into the brain.

2026-02-11 17:38:05 UTC

- reply

How do you do, fellow kids?

2026-02-11 15:50:10 UTC

- reply

People lose their car keys and their house keys all the time, though.

2026-02-11 15:45:12 UTC

- reply

It's open-source MIT, not too much recent activity though. Also written in Julia which is pretty niche. Not like OCaml niche, but getting there!
https://github.com/PrimalHQ/primal-server
Whether this is the one actually running I dunno, I thought they were gonna redo it in Rust at some point.

2026-02-11 15:38:26 UTC

- reply

We could pretend to be normal people. If the replicants in Bladerunner can do it then we also stand a chance.

2026-02-11 15:20:18 UTC

- reply

Nostr.
You get a Reddit!
You get a Reddit!
Everyone gets a Reddit!
https://blossom.primal.net/0451420a2c9739319d1aa4ddaadecda4c1b58ce3e71290da74e7a88b40e7daa0.png

2026-02-11 15:18:24 UTC

- reply

Bitcoin is supposed to be the embodiment of minimal trust, but religion is the embodiment of maximal trust.
This combination for me is a little head-scractching.

2026-02-11 15:01:59 UTC

- reply

Nostr: proudly boasting the world's highest app-to-user ratio.

2026-02-08 06:04:56 UTC

One of the more annoying things about decentralisation is how tribal it often becomes.
This is as true for monies as it is for social networks.
Everyone’s decentralised thing is the best thing of its kind. Every other attempt at decentralisation in the same realm is garbage. Not practical. Not really decentralised. Something wrong. Everything wrong. Full of losers.
Our decentralisation thing will take over and all the other decentralisation things in the realm will collapse under the weight of our own. And other such tribal nonsense.

2026-02-03 16:35:56 UTC

- reply

Step 1 - Get thing working
Step 2 - Proclaim thing "fixes this"

2026-02-03 10:43:54 UTC

- reply

Got it. This is a really interesting challenge. I guess when trying to ensure compatibility between clients like White Noise and X chat etc, it gets even more complex. I think your keep-it-manageable approach is the way to go, otherwise complexity explosion.

2026-02-03 10:23:08 UTC

- reply

This is the way I think too. Asking people to pay for content is going to be like trying to charge people sitting at a coffee shop for overhearing interesting conversations from other tables. It'll just be ridiculous.

2026-02-03 09:57:06 UTC

- reply

I'm curious how you see the UX for this. How to make clear that a fork has happened, and to who, and what options to give them in response, and so on.

2026-02-03 09:53:11 UTC

- reply

One of the ironies is that those who recognised this great power are mainly old-school people. New-school people got distracted by the technology part and forgot about the human psychology part. Old school people never took their eye off of human psychology part, and despite not understanding the nuts and bolts of the technology part are still able to play it like a fiddle.

2026-02-03 09:45:34 UTC

- reply

Yeah something fundamental there for the new age. People are gonna be way easier to convince to pay to write stuff than to pay to read stuff.

2026-02-03 09:09:38 UTC

- reply

For nostr, feels to be like the main challenge is more on the gating side than on the payment side. Pure tipping is never going to be the way. Human psychology is what it is, you need an unlocking mechanism paired with

2026-02-03 08:56:45 UTC

- reply

The sea of imagination! All monetary value is a shared delusion, it emerges from, and then descends into, the sea of imagination.

2026-02-03 06:42:27 UTC

The problem with the Bitcoin 'fixed supply' argument is that it has to be seen in context of the fixed supply of human brains on planet earth.
There is only so much X for Y doesn’t make sense if you don’t have a look at both the X cohort AND the Y cohort.
There are only so many cookies for 10 people, but if 10 people drops to 5 people then the nature of the cookie supply changes, despite the number of cookies remaining the same. Pressure has been relieved. The scramble is over. Scarcity has become abundance.
For Bitcoin, if you have someone who owns a claim to 1 Bitcoin, they are not going to also buy 1 actual Bitcoin in addition to the claim to one they feel they already own. They are taken out of the Y cohort.
These claims to Bitcoin reduce the size of the Y cohort, and by reducing the size of the Y cohort (the brains) you are affecting the nature of the X cohort (the coins).
This seems kind of obvious. In a money world where you can buy and sell claims to things, there really is no fixed supply of those things.
The key here is that the entire system is based on shared delusion. All money is some form of shared delusion or another. If me and you are on a desert island, and we're never getting off, and I have 1 coconut, and you have 100 Bitcoin, then the shared delusion is broken. My coconut is worth something, your100 Bitcoin are not, because those other people previously sharing the delusion with us are not here on this desert island. We'll never see them again. I've got the coconut. You're screwed.
So by issuing claims to bitcoin, it's just swapping one form of delusion for another. And thus the supply increases. Magic over magic.
Given all that, it certainly seems as if there's no such thing as fixed supply in terms of *actual execution* of a monetary system.

2026-02-03 06:04:16 UTC

- reply

When it comes to forwarding stuff, "hashed and signed by someone you trust" often just means someone you trust fell for it.

2026-02-03 05:53:12 UTC

- reply

> In a Nostr setup where relays are used purely for message delivery, MLS group forks are, in theory, hard to avoid.
This is a very important point. You have MLS trying to enforce an identical shared history and nostr trying to enforce discrete, redundant portability.

2026-02-03 05:32:45 UTC

- reply

Nah, it'll be marketing. All these apps, doing all these things, built with all this speed, but the number of people in the world hasn't changed, actual *paying users* remain the same fixed supply they've always been.
Nostr is a case in point, now far more apps, appearing far more quickly, but nostr actually has *fewer* users now than before all this AI stuff happened. And it had hardly any paying users in the first place.
Paying users are the new 21m.

2026-02-02 19:20:35 UTC

- reply

Nip17 groups are nowhere near the generally-accepted security standards for messaging groups. One-to-one are strong though.

2026-02-02 17:48:44 UTC

Which decentralised social networks out there are financially self sustaining in the sense that all operating costs (including developer compensation) are covered by users, minus a few grants here and there?
Mastodon maybe?

2026-02-02 09:28:54 UTC

- reply

That’s a good point too. I think sometimes people think that “other people” at large are an unlimited resource. But actually the number of other people across the world who have money to buy some meaningful amount bitcoin and who will invest in anything in their lives, bitcoin or whatever else, is kinda fixed. If you have one big chunk that's traumatised, another that's been warned off by the traumatised, another that's moved over to prediction markets and whatnot as you point out, and so on, those are like serious chunks!

2026-02-02 09:11:31 UTC

- reply

>Most everyone's broke though.
Key caveat!

2026-02-02 08:28:48 UTC

- reply

I wonder if Bitcoin to Gen Z is like Abba, or the Beatles?

2026-02-02 05:00:00 UTC

- reply

The problem this time around seems to be a lack of fresh interest, a diminishing of the curiosity that was previously always there, despite the ups and downs. There is a sort of opinion saturation that has happened.
Feels like a rock band that never had a problem selling tickets until this current tour. Now suddenly stadiums are 3/4 full. What's going on?
There are only so many people in the world and opinions have hardened on bitcoin. I'd bet you can go to the far flung village in China or Peru, and most people by now will have an strong-ish opinion on Bitcoin, sensible or otherwise.
This is as opposed to three or four years ago, when far more people hadn't really formed an opinion, either had never really thought about it or had but were pretty neutral and open to arguments either direction.
Obviously those whose opinion is bitcoin is great have bitcoin. So now most of the recruiting has to be a two-step process, first an opinion massaging process and then onboarding. That really limits the intake. Talking people out of hardened opinions is itself hard.
This idea you can keep shaking people out and new people will line up, ad nauseam, doesn't add up. At some point you've shaken through too many people, they've all told their friends of the shake, and word gets around. One person spreads it to 50.
Gold doesn't shake people out in the same way. People tend to leave gold on neutral terms, gold says thanks for visiting come back soon, and many do. There are no "shake out" metaphors for gold because it's just not as suitable to these kinds of violent metaphors as bitcon is.
The world's investing population isn't all that big. It's big, but it's still a zero sum deal, discounting the young generation coming up. Everyone is waiting for the number to go back up. But who is buying? The price of bitcoin is going down, which is normal, but the real issue feels like the price of recruitment is going way up.
I have no numbers to support this, so take it as a personal vibe read. I'd be curious if numbers did support it or contradict it though.

2026-02-02 04:40:22 UTC

- reply

That's one client.
There are others clients for other things, like https://eventky.app/login