LynAlden
Lyn Alden

https://www.lynalden.com/

Founder of Lyn Alden Investment Strategy. Partner at Ego Death Capital. Finance/Engineering blended background.

Public Key

npub1a2cww4kn9wqte4ry70vyfwqyqvpswksna27rtxd8vty6c74era8sdcw83a

NIP-05 Address

lyn@primal.net

NIP-57 Address

lyn@primal.net

Profile Code

nprofile1qqsw4v882mfjhq9u63j08kzyhqzqxqc8tgf740p4nxnk9jdv02u37ncpzemhxue69uhhyetvv9ujuurjd9kkzmpwdejhgqgjwaehxw309ac82unsd3jhqct89ejhxlha6p9

Publishing to

relay.primal.net

purplepag.es

relay.kamp.site

Author Public Key

npub1a2cww4kn9wqte4ry70vyfwqyqvpswksna27rtxd8vty6c74era8sdcw83a

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Last Notes

2024-09-04 15:55:38

I've been doing consistent long walks in the sun around my neighborhood while the weather's nice. Doing some business calls while walking, or listening to a podcast while walking.
I mostly blame @npub1dvu…0pwx for getting me into this trend.
https://m.primal.net/KeEU.png

2024-09-03 04:38:04

For everyone who says they don’t work out because it’s hard to get to the gym, this is your final boss:
#note1v0z…plw5

2024-09-03 04:28:29

- reply

Yep.

2024-09-03 03:18:20

When I was growing up in middle school and high school, I had a next door neighbor trailer park friend named Jordan, who is quite a character and has showed up in detail in some of my long-form Nostr posts from a while ago. He ran a series of sand-pit fights in his backyard that I participated in.
Sadly, he had the most broken and crazy home, like him and his younger sister were often alone and figuring out life for themselves, with their mom coming back like every other day barely, but Jordan was so charismatic and funny and smart that I hung out with him and his sister a lot at home and at the bus stop. Their trailer was an absolute mess, but it had a chaotic warmth to it from the people there. Jordan basically ran the place. When his absentee single mother came home from time to time after work and whatever else she was up to, she'd be like, "Oh Lyn, hi! I've been out today due to motorcycle lessons. (???) Do you want a bagel? I've got bagels. Jordan, you should be more like Lyn, she's polite. She always says thank you. Stay as long as you want Lyn, sorry for the mess." And I'd be like, "uhmm, thanks!"
Jordan, who was two years older than me, taught me to play Magic the Gathering and Dungeons and Dragons, and got me into anime via Trigun and Cowboy Beebop; all sorts of nerd stuff at a time when I was kind of otherwise aimless. I was living alone with my 60+ year old single father at the time.
We then became a funny duo as teenagers; him as the charismatic outlandish guy who usually got into trouble, taught me all sorts of nerd stuff, got his girlfriend pregnant at age18 and started a family with her, barely got out of high school, and me as the total opposite introverted bookish polite one next door that would play Magic the Gathering or Dungeons and Dragons with his friends group, and that he'd trick his friends into fighting in his sand pit as a joke since they didn't know what they were getting into, but that was like clean as a whistle in terms of schoolwork and relationships.
Anyway, the point of this rambling post is that I first watched Fight Club in the best possible setting. I went over to Jordan's house one evening, and we started watching it. But then his mother called him and said to come to help with some shit she was dealing with, so he was like, "hey I got to go Lyn, but you can keep watching it, no problem." So I was there at night, in his messy trailer alone (???), watching Fight Club. The place was a mess, I felt weird that I was the only one in their home despite not living there, and Jordan was basically a more benign equivalent of Tyler Durden. So actually the movie hit a bit harder because I was both enjoying it but also constantly on edge because I was in a weird environment that didn't quite feel right, and yet felt oddly on-brand for the movie.
Can't really replicate that. And it's burned into my memory better than most movies.
#note1h5x…9jrw

2024-09-03 02:46:06

Of the four Pierce Brosnan Bond movies, the first one was great (Goldeneye, so good), the second one was decent (Tomorrow Never Dies actually has a lot of relevance today, as it's about the control of corporate media with misinformation, which is rather prescient for 1997), and the final two were bad.
Of the five Daniel Craig Bond movies, I differ a bit from the consensus. The consensus is that the first (Casino Royale) and third (Skyfall) were great, but that the second, Quantum of Solace, was the worst and the others were okay.
However, while I do think the first Craig movie (Casino Royale) was great, and Skyfall was the second best, I think Quantum of Solace as the second movie was underwhelming but not bad. It was kind of that middle-of-trilogy vibe. I rate it above the consensus. The true catastrophe of this series, which I rate below the consensus, was actually the fourth movie Spectre. Utterly awful in terms of plot, especially given Bond's greatest villain Blofeld played by Waltz, which is such a strong casting. They fucked the whole story up and it made no sense. Bond literally walked into the evil headquarters with no plan, and got captured. And then when the villain is drilling into his head to erase his memories, it just randomly didn't work, and he broke free via bad narrative. Made absolutely no sense. People were too accepting of it because they liked Waltz on screen and he distracts them from how weak his character was and how bad the plot was. And Blofeld was way too obsessive with Bond. Cool villains aren't as obsessive as that. And then the fifth one was solid and partially salvaged the catastrophe that was Spectre. Kind of mediocre like Quantum of Solace, but with a solid and surprising climax to the series, which elevated and completed it.

2024-09-03 01:50:37

I’m reading my first fiction book in four years, since Rhythm of War.
It’s called The Lost Metal and it came out a couple years ago but I’m behind on my fiction, since my financial work engulfed me ever since the pandemic.
Both of these are like deep sequels into stories I’ve been reading for a decade from Brandon Sanderson.
If anyone is interested in his universe, imo the best place to start is Mistborn.

2024-09-02 19:28:06

What are some skills that you don’t understand at all?
For me music is at the top of the list. My husband can hear a tune and then with a few tries he can play the tune on the piano.
He barely had any music lessons but can somehow do that. I had guitar lessons, and my teacher tried to get me to do that, but I was terrible. So not only can’t I do it, I don’t really even know where I’d begin. The inability to even see the next step.
Like if I see a pro athlete do something, I know I can’t do it, but I get the basic idea of what they did to get to that stage on kind of a step by step basis. But when someone can hear music and then just play the melody, my mind is blown.

2024-09-02 18:28:16

100 squats a day til 100k.
The 58k gang is going to get us in shape.

2024-09-02 17:34:40

The electronic project that I am most proud of from my engineering days, was also the most useless thing I ever built. I was reminded of it amid all the censorship in Brazil, because it’s about Embraer avionics, which are Brazilian.
A short story.
The background context was that I never considered myself to be a great engineer. I was more interested in finance but had gone into engineering instead, and basically what makes someone great in a field is whether they have the passion to do it in their spare time or not. The best engineers, after school or after work, go home and do more hobbyist engineering stuff. Like, they just live in it. I spent my spare time on financial research instead. I liked my engineering work, but was only a design engineer when I had to be, basically. My passion was elsewhere. So I knew I'd likely eventually go into engineering finance/management in that kind of hybrid role.
I went to work in an aviation simulation facility after college. Rather than being used for training new pilots as most airplane simulators are, this facility was used by corporate, academic, and government researchers to test new technologies and procedures with experienced pilots. So the simulators were more customizable than training simulators, but were less polished. They were always these cool work-in-progress machines.
We had Airbus, Boeing, and Cessna models in the early days. And we had a half-finished Embraer, simply because the manager of the simulation facility just wanted an Embraer due how cool and different they are. His higher-ups in the broader parent organization told him there wasn’t enough market demand for testing in Embraers and wouldn’t give him a budget for it, but he kept finding ways to gradually accumulate the parts anyway. Eventually he had the simulator shell, and genuine avionics, but still had to put it all together. The Embraer avionics and flight controls were just so much more interesting and sleek than the other types.
In our Boeing and Airbus simulators, we had genuine avionics, but interfaced them into industrial automation control logic and PCs, rather than what they normally connect to in the field. And it wasn’t hard because they used some standard communication protocols like RS-422 or RS-485. All the buttons and dials were easy to connect to automation control systems, and the serial communications were things you could buy a PC card for.
But the Embraer sat unfinished for years partially because there was no budget for it, and partially because it didn’t use those standard serial protocols. The serial communications coming from their flight panel and throttle were some custom method that none of our equipment could read. You could just rip it open and re-do the insides to talk to a PC more easily, but the manager forbade that; he wanted the Embraer avionics to remain pristine. We had incomplete documentation, and virtually no budget or labor to put into it beyond the pieces we already had. It was this hacky project. We didn’t even really have electronic design software other than a lapsed PSpice license, since we rarely did any sort of custom circuits and instead would interface various devices into automation systems.
So, getting the Embraer up and running was always on the manager’s pet project to-do list but not making much progress. He would occasionally put an entry level or intermediate level engineer on it for a few months and they’d eventually give up, leave the organization, or go back to something more economically relevant. It went on like that for years; it became the Kobayashi Maru for electronic engineers in this facility.
After my first couple years working there on the Boeing, Airbus, and Cessna, the manager was eventually like, “alright, I want you to see if you can get that Embraer flight panel connected.” Little budget, just me in the lab with an oscillator and multimeter. I knew this would happen one day- the Embraer avionics were always kind of looming in the lab, next to half-finished failed creations of my predecessors that tried to interface with it, knowing that eventually I’d be put to work on this thing. And I still had other duties to do, so this was like a budget-less side project I had to spend part of each week on, with insufficient equipment and documentation and with the knowledge that the Embraer simulator might not even be used if I somehow succeeded.
So I dove into it. The Embraer flight panel had a series of buttons, but unlike our other flight panels, they all went through a parallel-in serial-out (PISO) shift register. So they came out of the device in a fast custom serial communication stream. An external device had to give the flight panel a clock signal, and give another CLR signal that would be low for 24 milliseconds and high for 1 millisecond, and during that 1 millisecond there would be 256 clock signals, and the flight panel would output all of its current states of button and knobs within those 256 clock signals within the millisecond, every 25 milliseconds. And the CLR signal had to be shifted some microseconds away from the clock signal so that the signal edges of their square waves don’t occur simultaneously, which would cause reliability issues. The incomplete documentation we had only roughly outlined this; I had to iterate a bunch of oscillator tests to see what successfully worked as an input, and then more fully document where every button and dial showed up on the output data stream once I got it flowing.
And then once I figured out how it worked, I had to figure out how to connect it to a PC and/or our standard industrial automation interface.
At first I tried one of our 2 year old microcontrollers that we had on hand, which as of this writing are now nearly 15 years old so not the current generation stuff. I looked to see if I could program it to send in these signals and then read the signals coming from it, but it wasn’t nearly fast and precise enough. This project needed lower-level design than something software-based.
I wasn’t sure if FPGAs of the day would be fast enough, I hadn't worked on them before, and and we didn’t have any anyway. So I went the raw logic route instead which would be annoying but cheap and guaranteed to work. I researched crystal oscillators, logic gates, counters, flip-flops, and serial-in parallel-out (SIPO) shift registers. I then used them to build this whole digital clockwork circuit from scratch to basically reverse everything that the flight panel was doing. It would use a crystal oscillator as the initial frequency, and from that would generate the clock signal and the CLR signal to send to the flight panel, and would run the timing for a bunch of SIPO shift registers so that this stream of serial data coming out of the flight panel would load into the shift registers, then get frozen in place for 24 milliseconds which was fast enough for our slower industrial automation interface to read the data which was now in parallel form.
Then I bought all the cheap logic pieces, soldered together test circuits, troubleshooted it, and got the thing working. I came in alone on the weekends to do it since I had little time in the week; I was just caught in the flow of making this work. Rather than viewing it as annoying as I did early on, I now viewed it as something I had to beat.
And then the Embraer throttles were the second difficult piece. Rather than a normal position output as our other simulator throttles did, the Embraer throttles basically outputted sign waves, and as you moved the throttle, which was really well-crafted and smooth, the two sign waves would overlap to varying degrees. So I had to map that all out, build a circuit to read these sign waves and send that position data to the slower industrial automation interface in a way that it could read it. I then soldered together the circuits, and got that working too.
I then wired up all the more standard electronics in the Embraer which were not that different than the other simulators. And so, I was finally able to go the manager and say, “the Embraer’s flight controls and avionics are all connected now! ^_^”.
I remember being so proud, like, “oh shit, maybe I could actually be decent at this.” And the custom circuit interfaces indeed worked for the next decade and counting without maintenance, perfectly reliable. We then got the rest of the simulator fully set up.
But… the Embraer simulator was only used like one time, barely. No research teams wanted to test new technologies and procedures on Embraers; they would always test things on the Airbus and Boeing simulators. So this awesome simulator, with so much work poured into it, was a complete waste of time, which is what the managers’ higher-ups had told him from the beginning.
I went on to do a bunch of other projects including a business jet simulator and a helicopter simulator and an upgraded redesign of our Cessna before I went into management and out of design engineering, but nothing was quite as hacky as that Embraer simulator, so it was always the one I would look at fondly and be like, “I can’t believe this useless thing is still running.”
Rather than feeling sad that the work was wasted, I instead always kind of had a “journey before destination” mindset to it, like it was the most frustrating project that I had brute-force succeeded at, from research to design to physically putting it all together to troubleshooting, and gave me a bigger sense of achievement and got me into a higher state of flow than other engineering projects I had done. To this day, I always think of Embraer planes warmly.

2024-08-31 23:53:22

And somewhere in there I'd say there's a fourth decision: When you decide to change your status signaling from things like beauty, power, and material achievement, to things like integrity, competence, and helpfulness.
Almost everyone is geared toward signaling. As social creatures we're deeply wired to signal value to others.
But there's a lot of flexibility in how we signal that.
-We can signal it with shallower things like beauty, lambos, hierarchical dominance, etc. The details will vary between men and women but they have a similar short time preference that few old people on their deathbed wished they had focused more on.
-Or we can signal it with deeper things like integrity, honesty, helpfulness, friendliness, generosity, providing unique thoughts, or providing wisdom. The details will vary based on profession and skillset but they also have a similar long time preference that most old people on their deathbed wished they had focused more on.
#note1fjp…l820

2024-08-31 17:34:40

Lol, Brazilians are heavily searching for "VPN" right now according to Google. One does love to see it:
https://m.primal.net/KXYI.png

2024-08-31 10:42:35

Gm.
It seems that it will be very hard for Brazil to identify and enforce the fines on VPN usage for Twitter/X. But it’s a powerful scare tactic.
When the United States banned gold ownership in the1930s (which lasted for four decades all the way into the 1970s btw), they didn’t really enforce it at the household level. They just had large prison terms that were rarely ever applied, which effectively dried up liquidity in the gold market.
Some people have pointed out that Nostr relays could be blocked by Brazilian internet providers if Nostr was big enough to matter. However, more relays could spin up, so they’d have to keep adding to the list.
Brazil’s government could then say it’s illegal to use VPNs for any Nostr app around internet censoring. The defense against that is to make Nostr as ubiquitous as possible. The more apps that tie into Nostr in some way, the harder it is to ever ban it in practice. Some people might not even know their favorite app uses Nostr. Imagine if everyone’s favorite short form app, long form app, podcasting app, reviews app, wallet app, recipes app, picture app, music app, and tons of other stuff are tied into Nostr, and how hard that would be to ban.
If Nostr becomes big enough to really matter, it’s because it’ll be tied into so many different things. That’s super powerful. And the devs keep building rapidly.

2024-08-30 22:01:02

The fine for people using VPNs to access it is crazy.
And the judge really does look like a comic book villain.
#note1w0q…6vuu

2024-08-30 01:31:55

This is a good short story on how to not get engagement on Nostr.
#note1z36…qhj0

2024-08-30 00:51:05

One of the big macro questions is when will the US banking system run into the liquidity floor, requiring the Fed to end quantitative tightening? Due to current regulations and the "ample reserve" regime, banks generally have liquidity requirements relative to their overall size, and their overall size keeps growing nominally.
-Big banks ran into the liquidity floor in September 2019 at $1.5 trillion with the repo spike, and the Fed had to end quantitative tightening and resume mild quantitative easing (which was then overshadowed by the giga-liquidity-bazooka in 2020/2021).
-Smaller banks ran into the liquidity floor in March 2023 at $3.0 trillion (the new floor) with the regional bank crisis. Both the Fed and the Treasury provided liquidity in response, although the Fed has maintained quantitative tightening. Liquidity has been maintained above that level without being greatly elevated, which is probably what would have happened post-2019 if not for the pandemic/lockdown stuff thereafter.
The New York Fed thinks the liquidity floor will be reached sometime in 2025, and that they'll go back to gradual balance sheet expansion then. Andy Constan, formerly of Bridgewater, thinks it'll be late 2025. I debate him a bit on this since both of us cover this closely, and I generally think it'll be mid 2025, although there are enough moving variables that neither early 2025 or late 2025 would surprise me, so conservatively I say "by the end of 2025."
I was talking to a large institutional investor today, and he said that his contact who is a major repo operator at an investment bank, thinks the current floor is now $3.3 trillion, which is roughly where it is currently. That basically means any further quantitative tightening has to be offset by reverse repo drainage, or they'll have a repo issue and the Fed will need to end QT. My estimate is somewhere in the $3.1-$3.2 trillion range for the liquidity floor, meaning I think there's a bit more room than that repo operator. But either way it's pretty tight.
This is all kind of rambling but generally when that liquidity floor is reached and is responded to, it tends to be good for a lot of liquidity-driven assets, including bitcoin. And it'll probably be with a whimper more than a bang, kind of like the September 2019 repo crisis that nobody other than macro nerds remember.
https://m.primal.net/KURs.png

2024-08-29 14:47:03

Broken Money was published a year ago this week
Thanks to everyone who read it, shared it, and reviewed it! 🙏
I resisted writing a book for years since it’s such a tedious process, until finally a book formed in my head that I felt needed to exist, and that was too distracting for me *not* to write. And then I poured everything I had into it.
https://m.primal.net/KTlY.jpg

2024-08-29 14:34:39

GM. Fixed the typo.
https://m.primal.net/KTkj.png

2024-08-29 14:01:13

If you intentionally go out looking for problems and drama, you’ll surely find them.
If you instead focus on constructive stuff, then some problems and drama will still find you because life is life, but usually way less.

2024-08-28 14:54:27

- reply

I like it actually. XD

2024-08-28 02:03:57

I have another round of severe impersonators here on Nostr reaching out to credible people with scam opportunities.
Please ignore them. Always check the NIP-05 if available.
On my website sidebar, I link to my only valid social media profiles for verification.
For Nostr, the only one is the npub associated with primal.net/lyn, which is:
npub1a2cww4kn9wqte4ry70vyfwqyqvpswksna27rtxd8vty6c74era8sdcw83a
https://m.primal.net/KQsk.png

2024-08-27 23:32:42

My current vibe:
#note1wct…tf2a

2024-08-27 23:21:52

- reply

I appreciate your perspective.
And Tor is indeed the adjacent network that I think about critically and economically here as a first glance when I put my critical hat on for Nostr. Which is why, in multiple of my recent posts, I purposely brought to attention critical Nostr relay economics from Peter Todd and then quote-posted Odell about how questioning the economics is rational behavior.
I do think that Nostr has stronger ethical incentive mechanisms than Tor, as a starting point. Open socials and open data combined, is a stronger selling point than open data alone. I think the ecosystem needs to improve key management and some details, but assuming we hit product market fit and decent UX for big scaling, I think there's a lot of broad support here. Or if we fail, from whatever emerges better from our ashes could do decently.
Imo, unlike Tor, the biggest relays will be run by businesses as a loss-leader for their other business activities. In other words, data availability is a cost of doing business. It's more economic, given the broader audience.
Power-users of a given social app would indeed pay $10/month or $100/month or in some cases way more as a sizable business. Advertisements aside, they do so in order to reach an audience with minimal frictions of impersonators or data availability. This covers many free users.
I admittedly partly kept my post incomplete for a humor punchline, and commented elsewhere on my full thoughts. I don't just think "psychopath hobbyists" will run the relays. They are the relay runners of last resort. To the extent that Nostr grows users in any significant way (still a big "if"), I think businesses in multiple jurisdictions will run the big relays, and then there will be many smaller hobbyist ones to fill the gaps, as far as I can see currently based on how early this tech is.
If Nostr has trouble with relay economics and there is no better option on the market, I'd be willing to donate five figures per year in support assuming my own income-generating businesses are running well enough. And there are others that might be willing to 10x or 100x that kind of number. That number only increases as freedom is impaired by more jurisdictions.
When I was in my early twenties, not rich, overworked, and put like a thousand hours of voluntary work into that forum in my post that you referenced, I was earning like $40-$50/hr. That was like $40-$50k cumulative labor hours that I provided for free to a forum I liked in my early twenties. Like a psychopath. I earn multiples of that now, and am still a psychopath. Any ecosystem that gets a few whales on its team, and a few people that are willing to work for free part-time or work for scraps part-time, can keep a network running.
And as a partner in a venture capital firm that puts seven or eight figures into a company depending on its stage, including various freedom-tech if it's economical, I'd say we're indeed looking at Nostr for any economic angle should it materialize to our criteria, and all of us as partners support it conceptually.
Bitcoin itself is a combo of 1) voluntary donations to Core devs and its associations and 2) companies building on Bitcoin for expectations of economic gain. I expect Nostr to be similar. It relies on economics for big scaling, but donations for the cypherpunk margins, for which there are legion.
And these things tend to be responsive to input. If a network is running fine and everyone is engaging happily and without big pushback, people contribute less. If the network starts to be impaired by internal or external forces and there is no better solution available, people wake up and contribute more, and influencers wake up and convince people to contribute more.

2024-08-27 22:50:08

For those of you who are still on Twitter, I had a long debate thread today with Parker Lewis about Nostr. I'm a big fan of Parker, so I figured I'd share it here for shared learning.
Here's the latest post. I'm not sure it'll be the last or not but it's the latest one as of this writing. You can scroll up to see the exchange from the start.
https://x.com/LynAldenContact/status/1828553130717442443
Linking to my own post in isolation is bad form and the thumbnail is awkward depending on what client you're using, so I'll also provide a pic of the start of the debate too, with two posts of his and one of mine.
I'd be open to any thoughts about this debate.
https://m.primal.net/KQga.png

2024-08-27 21:16:11

#note1epx…50p4
https://m.primal.net/KQao.jpg

2024-08-27 21:12:05

- reply

There are big ones and small ones. The big ones are generally run by a business to better serve a client that they operate. I would happily pay them for premium performance. Not all would, but many frequent users would. Small ones are sometimes just run by people that like to host their own data and some other data. Because they like Nostr.

2024-08-27 21:10:08

Nearly a decade and a half ago, in my early twenties, I was an administrator for a small/medium online forum. This was before social media was super popular.
At first I just posted on the forum, and then the admins asked me to be a mod. And then as some admins left, they asked me to be one of the admins. So I did.
I did this for like five years, for free. I was working full time, going to grad school part time, running a dividend blog part time, and yet for some reason was also volunteering a lot of time to help run this forum. Because I liked it. After years eventually I left, and someone else stepped in to take my place. All the admins were just volunteering.
Anyway, that’s who runs the relays. The psychopaths.

2024-08-27 20:55:34

I think it’s important to analyze the questions. For an ecosystem to be successful, it has to be both technically sound and sufficiently incentivized, either economically or ethically.
In my opinion based on what I’ve seen and analyzed, Nostr relays will likely continue to be well-incentivized.
But I don’t fault people from exploring the questions as they seek to understand the protocol and potentially build a conviction about it. Instead I would only criticize those that start out with a negative conclusion before they explore the facts, and think in perpetually Malthusian ways about its prospects.
The fact that the protocol has bootstrapped to this significant degree for this significant duration, is already a rather positive sign. Too many people theorycraft rather than just observe what works, observe what fails, and keep iterating. Lean into what works. And so far, Nostr works.
#note1u9k…r478

2024-08-27 17:21:58

Literally a whole wall in the supermarket with nonfat yogurt and even nonfat plus non-sugar yogurt.
#note1k3w…kpll
https://m.primal.net/KQID.jpg

2024-08-27 17:14:03

Nonfat Greek yogurt is one of the saddest things.

2024-08-27 12:04:59

This is my npub.
There are many like it, but this one is mine.

2024-08-27 11:08:03

The issue with this is that whenever Bitcoin does go up like 5x, a lot of sellers *do* materialize. So it takes a lot more DCAing that one might think.
Like when the ETFs were gobbling up a lot of bitcoin, much faster than it was being generated, and people assumed it must go to the moon soon. In reality, there was also a lot of sellers out of cold storage from people who bought years ago.
#note19wx…ukgs

2024-08-27 00:46:58

#note1jul…f2xl
https://m.primal.net/KOkg.jpg

2024-08-26 23:56:47

Someone made a Japanese version of my Broken Money video, complete with brand new animations for that audience.
Looks pretty sweet:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0IsA7hZ5icQ

2024-08-26 16:19:16

Amplifying this for critical discussion.
Who will run relays in the future, and is there anything that Nostr as a protocol can tweak to improve future relay decentralization?
#note17jq…93l0

2024-08-25 03:02:16

What sparks your joy?

2024-08-25 02:19:50

-Treat the arrest of the Telegram CEO as an emergency.
-Advocate for his freedom and for all freedom tech providers.
-Support and build things that function without a CEO, like some aspects of Nostr. When authoritarian Europe or the US arrests you, be able to say, “I literally can’t control it, it’s already out there, and we are legion.”
-Tell me and others, as capital providers, how to accelerate this.

2024-08-25 01:43:36

The best way to say that Lyn is too bearish, is to go and tell all your friends that the Telegram CEO was just fucking arrested for allowing free encrypted speech, and to forge your new decentralized identity right now.
Anyway, good evening.
#note1wlm…7er8

2024-08-24 21:38:14

This needs more reporting but so far, this is wild. Terrible precedent.
#note1v25…jnhk

2024-08-24 18:35:41

- reply

That’s not how I would personally think about marketshare. I would measure market share more along the lines of “what portion of identity-based applications can I log in with via my nsec?”

2024-08-24 14:33:22

Great fireside between @npub1qny…95gx and @npub1sg6…f63m at Nostriga. I got a chance to listen to it now.
Regarding the question of whether Nostr will have more users than Twitter/X in five years (~500 million), my base case would be no, actually. And I say that as a huge Nostr fan and daily user.
In the long arc of time, Nostr's addressable market is nearly unlimited (basically everyone who uses the internet could be using Nostr in some form), but I expect somewhat of a slower burn. Infrastructure build-out type stuff. And breaching a network effect with a better solution is generally quite a long uphill climb.
To me, Nostr is successful once it starts serving tens of millions of people well. I expect it to be more of a quality over quantity thing for a while. Bitcoin is almost 16 years in and still isn't at 500 million users. But for many of those people, it was lifechanging.
I'd like to be surprised to the upside, but I also don't want people to think that if Nostr is "only" at tens of millions of people in five years, or 100+ million but still sub-Twitter, that it underachieved. It's tiny right now, and numbers anywhere approaching that would be a huge increase.
Nostr is a great improvement for everyone using it. But sometimes it takes people time to see why a given solution is better than what they have, or to realize they have a problem at all.
So in the meantime I monitor Nostr's success by the quality and quantity of developer activity, the capability of the protocol as a freedom tool or the shortcomings it still has for that use case, the quality of the conversations throughout the ecosystem, how many people consider it to be lifechanging tech compared to centralized social media, and in time, steady growth.

2024-08-24 04:35:07

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There’s kind of a bell curve. The smart move is to not pay. The mid curve (worst) move is to pay for the photo. That’s the trap option. An adult man pays to have an awkward photo with another man. The other smart move is to pay a comical amount for the dinner so you can inject the politician with a meme talking point. So that for example when Trump goes on stage and says verbatim “never sell your bitcoin” it’s not as though he thought of that line himself.

2024-08-24 03:19:48

At the Bitcoin Conference, people could pay for photographs with politicians. Or pay more for a dinner with them.
So when you see an awkward pic with some bitcoiner next to a politician, there’s a good chance they paid for it.
I think most people know that, but for those that don’t, keep that in mind.
All else being equal, the more awkward the pic looks, the more likely they paid for it.

2024-08-24 02:29:36

I resolved the situation by just not screwing it down for now, until I get the right screw. The M.2 drive is just kind of floating in there, connected on one side.
Didn’t want to close the case without at least partially completing my mission. Happily playing Baldur’s Gate 3 now that I have the storage for it.
#note1xwl…td9u
https://m.primal.net/KKJS.jpg

2024-08-24 00:50:17

Based on the comments here, Nostr is absolutely lit when it comes to meditation.
#note1uvy…2hd3

2024-08-24 00:17:30

I built my PC like 8 years ago or something, and kept all the boxes for the spare parts for like 7 years and never needed them, so eventually during spring cleaning I just chucked them out. I was like “this big box of boxes does not spark joy.”
And then… that’s when I finally need a spare part. Today I go to install a second M.2 drive and realize I have no spare motherboard screws on hand.
https://m.primal.net/KKCk.png

2024-08-23 18:03:07

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It gives a shock to your system. An acute stressor, kind of like exercise. It then boosts dopamine and other neurotransmitters for hours so you feel more energetic and positive, and some studies indicate it’s good for metabolism, sleep, inflammation, etc.

2024-08-23 03:48:45

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Some people here saw me do it for the first time in Norway. Best I have now is a picture of the icy tub before getting in.
https://m.primal.net/KIpz.jpg

2024-08-23 03:44:17

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Someone who's obsessed with cold plunges, I guess.

2024-08-23 03:34:11

I'm basically a cold plunge maxi now.

2024-08-23 02:39:35

In Cairo, they built a ton of elevated roadways throughout the city over the past 5-6 years to relieve traffic congestion, which was (and still is) among the worst in the world.
And they often put shops under those bridges. Cafes, fast food joints, etc. I think in most countries this would not be allowed due to safety codes, but I dunno. I just don’t really see it elsewhere.
This one is a little carnival under a bridge. Rides for kids.
https://m.primal.net/KImo.jpg

2024-08-23 01:01:06

Anyone here do meditation?
What kind?

2024-08-22 18:55:15

I saw a car with the license plate number “1” today.

2024-08-22 14:25:58

This too shall pass.
#note1mcr…cs6n

2024-08-22 05:55:16

One of my to-do lists is to fix Google Analytics on my website since it broke down a few months ago while I was traveling.
Normally this is a crisis but I was too apathetic to care. I posted the best articles I could write and didn’t care for analytics.
Naturally I should get this back and setup, but I found it interesting that 1) I didn’t check the numbers for 6+ months anyway and 2) it broke and I didn’t care for my website in 3+ months, before ultimately now I was like “okay let’s get analytics back, holy shit.”

2024-08-22 05:29:14

I’ve met Peter Schiff in person a few times.
He is super chill, friendly, usually sun-tanned on vacation with chad vibes, etc. He’s trolling us.
He might be our industry’s most prolific troll, but ultimately he is just that: consciously trolling us.
His only argument is that bitcoin has no “intrinsic value” while meanwhile I’m active in two continents and am thankful that my multi-signature money isn’t attached to either one of them like gold would be. He has no answer for this. Bitcoin is the best at what gold can’t do: be globally accessible.
He’s famous from two decades ago, is rich and happy, and wants to sell gold. He is closed to Bitcoin intellectually but is happy to engage with bitcoiners that give him marketing. He’s a Puerto Rico chad. That’s who bitcoiners debate against; someone who is going for marketing and is happy for the engagement.
https://m.primal.net/KHaF.jpg

2024-08-22 03:04:47

This is how I manage things now, tbh.
Vibes only.
#note1gr5…5ydr

2024-08-22 02:48:05

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It's both people and the algorithm. The dark side can get you more views.
It depends on whether you optimize for 6-12 month numbers or want to build a high-integrity 3-5 year+ brand.
The light side can keep your more in contact with a high caliber group of people that want to interview with you regularly, and you are more respected for business in general. In other words, I interview with my friend Walker despite lower views as a newer podcast because... I fucking like Walker online and in person. I just want to hang out with a friend and chat and the numbers don't matter and I know his thumbnails will be legit. Vibes first.
As podcasts broaden out, there's a middle ground of integrity and good marketing, but it has trade-offs. And if you go the more aggressive route regularly, it's nice to have both options, like a full interview and a conservative clip, so that if an interviewee like me wants to share it, they have the less-aggressive version to share. Like the main interview is more plain and optimistic, while other clips go for the algo.
With my almost 700k followers, whether I share one of my many primary interviews on Twitter or not is frankly based on how it turned out and whether the title and picture are embarrassing or not. I share based on a combo of 1) how much I personally like the interviewer, and 2) title/content/image, etc. I don't share a lot of high-volume Youtube clips from hosts I semi-like, simply because I find their titles and thumbnail embarrassing. They aim for the YouTube clicks so I'm embarrassed to share their title on Twitter.
But the key thing from your end, always, is to be known as a high-integrity interviewer. That's what I come back to four years in a row now for my favorites like Jack Farley. And you're in that category now.
Jack Farley is currently a top macro interviewer. His images and titles are sometimes aggressive, but at the end of the day he's known for pushing hard and being a great interviewer. And yet he doesn't get bitcoin yet. David Lin formerly of Kitco is similar. Natalie Brunelle is an amazing bitcoin interviewer. She's among my top five given how much preparation she does like David Lin does.
McCormack is similar for the bitcoin space. He's charismatic, popular, but will aggressively question things. And if you come at him like Grayscale, he'll rekt you.
For longevity, the interviewer needs a brand, imo. Something they stand for. Not just YouTube image memes. But serious character, which Walker has.

2024-08-22 02:08:42

If the Dark Side didn't give immediate results, then nobody would take it. It does have its merits. For years at a time. The Dark Side isn't retarded. Rather, they're rich.
Algorithms work because they base themselves on the weaker aspects of human nature. They get faster numbers while hurting their long-term credibility. The become wealthy but not respected.
If I aimed to build a business for the next 3 years only and cared not for things beyond that, I'd aim for the YouTube algorithm.
But if I aimed to build a business with longer-term aims, I'd be more cautious against clickbait and optimize for personal brand integrity.
Walker has high integrity, so much so that even as he messes with clickbait for experiments, I still know his integrity. His integrity is what led me to happily be on his show, for example. I like him as a person. Ultimately, I do vibes-based appearances. Walker has good vibes, so I joined his show over others that had 10x or 50x the following.
There is some balance between the forces. There's the hybrid approach of marketing clickbait + substantive high-integrity content once they click. Like, "I caught you with my clickbait, now let's talk philosophy!"
But at the end of the day, the more we stretch for audience reach, the worse we likely suffer in terms of audience substance.
And in the long run, it's nice to have a really based audience who understands us. Because we presented ourselves honestly from the start.
#note1gyg…6g2x

2024-08-22 01:16:23

Most websites have Google Analytics installed to help track their details.
I used to do this. It expired on my website some years ago, so I fixed it.
It then expired again. Always updating their tech. I was too busy to give a fuck that second time, so I still haven’t fixed it. My followers don’t care about Google anymore. And we’re not based on advertisers.
I don’t track numbers on my website anymore. I just post based on vibes. I write what I want to and I observe the feedback on any medium that people provide it. And now there’s Nostr.
So I go on vibes. Not numbers.
https://m.primal.net/KHOy.jpg

2024-08-22 00:26:12

Nostr is a protocol.
Good companies elect to build on top of that protocol.
#note1apa…7qkr

2024-08-21 21:11:21

Deepfakes are going to be so lit once this reaches the next step of realism.
Going to have to assume all content is fake unless it is signed by a reputable source.
#note1fxv…k7d7

2024-08-21 21:08:39

<3
#note1sk9…362m

2024-08-21 19:56:17

Checks out.
#note1gf5…gquv

2024-08-21 19:54:05

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My shower is retarded in that pressure and the temperature are the same dial. So in order to get the pressure up, I automatically have to bring the temperature up mid-way too. So I literally can’t do a cold shower. Ice bath instead.

2024-08-21 19:18:23

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I've just played tabletop.

2024-08-21 19:17:24

The other day I spoke on India's version of CNBC at like 11pm my time.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DARaMwUD8vI

2024-08-21 19:07:04

That's why I like to post so much about Egypt, D&D, cold plunges, politics, and other random stuff.
#note1uvj…7d4h

2024-08-21 19:04:22

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I loved the Ron Burgundy aspect to it, lol.

2024-08-21 17:20:20

#note1686…dhp6
https://m.primal.net/KGrF.jpg

2024-08-21 17:14:22

Did an at-home cold plunge in ice water today. 🧊
Nothing to see here. Just totally normal human behavior.

2024-08-20 05:14:45

One of the notable things in this exchange is that Jeff has a bigger following than British Hodl.
#note1v9w…zq8e

2024-08-20 04:35:20

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Fair.

2024-08-20 04:33:39

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I would do my best to make sure, yeah.

2024-08-20 04:32:52

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Fair.

2024-08-20 04:22:10

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I’m aware of this fact, my good sir. Perhaps one day it could materialize.

2024-08-20 04:13:40

I'd happily watch @npub1qny…95gx do any aliens questioning.
I'd be skeptical as hell but so would he, so I figure he'd ask all the stuff I would anyway.
#note10dl…lg2d

2024-08-20 04:11:53

As someone who plays Dungeons and Dragons regularly, if I were to participate in a D&D roleplaying livestream, would you watch it?
Like if I play the angsty sorcerer, or the frustrated cleric, or the happy-go-lucky barbarian that has very specific anger triggers, would you find this amusing?
There are a bunch of successful D&D livestreams out there. The best ones are run by theater and voice actor pros.
But what if you had a bunch of public bitcoiners in the event, and most of them are highly charismatic semi-pros, and then some of them like me are autistic but, like, trying our our best as nerds that like the game.
Would you watch that or nah?

2024-08-20 03:53:33

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You're in good luck. I did in fact dig the show, and I reviewed it here on Nostr as an exclusive:
https://primal.net/e/note1s2cplsa7p5gyz2wpgxf0ntwlgne3662we9z97qlkp0gkrg3me0kqnsjv2x

2024-08-20 03:36:13

When the first new Dungeons and Dragons player handbook comes out in ten years, as a once-in-a-decade-nerd-event, I'm like:
https://m.primal.net/KFMD.png

2024-08-20 02:39:53

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I've read a lot of sci fi and fantasy novels, and the secret is that there's always someone in the administration that you get to.
Let's get to Twitter's AI!

2024-08-20 02:38:15

Free enterprise is the default state of affairs. It's a complex and ever-ongoing negotiation of prices between retailers, product producers, commodity producers, employees, and so forth. It is a constantly-adjusting control system sorting toward Truth.
Authoritarian governments and the masses that support them can impede upon prices and thus rekt the ability for natural pricing to occur, which disrupts all trade and makes everything more inefficient and more expensive.
Notably, the handful of countries that have made social democracy work, all preserved the metric of "ease of doing business." In other words, if you examine Scandinavian countries, they do have high taxes and high support for society. That's how these relatively small and homogenous societies have chosen to govern themselves, and they consistently score among the highest global levels of happiness. But in terms of "ease of doing business," they still score very high. They tax and spend, but they don't interference with business operations to generate new value. They tax and redistribute the engines of growth, but they don't impede the engines of growth.
That's the key thing, in terms of variables not to mess with. Don't interfere with the flow of pricing, domestically or globally, which is ultimately just information. Maintain the ease of doing business, let pricing set supply/demand balances, and then sort out what sort of social contract exists independently of those foundational wealth-building engines.
#note170z…qqce

2024-08-20 00:28:46

https://m.primal.net/KFEf.png
#note1d7q…rnm3

2024-08-20 00:21:39

Grok knows I like user-customized algorithms now.
May the machines join us.
https://m.primal.net/KFEU.png

2024-08-19 23:44:22

Any D&D players here keeping up with the new fifth edition update?
New player’s handbook coming out in September.

2024-08-19 00:33:17

I looked into it a bit. The biggest change is that my local card shop pretty much only does Commander format now. Seems like that became the most popular paper format.
#note1jxc…tp6c

2024-08-18 05:04:39

Is it worth getting back into Magic the Gathering? Haven’t had time to play in 3 years.
I hear they have a lot of power creep lately to maximize profits for Hasbro.
Anyone here been playing it a lot recently?

2024-08-18 00:56:14

I used to be a gamer.
-Console games across the board, although Super Smash Bros was the one I put over a thousand hours into.
-For PC, I played a lot of Subspace Continuum, StarCraft I and 2, and Overwatch.
I hardly play any digital games anymore, mainly because I work on my computer all day and want to touch grass in my spare time, although I do play Dungeons and Dragons tabletop.
#note1kah…u8uq

2024-08-18 00:51:03

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I was into StarCraft 2 a lot as well. And prior to that, StarCraft 1.

2024-08-17 22:26:05

The complicated aspect about the Social Security system in the United States is that it was falsely marketed.
It's called an "entitlement" because people pay into it and are supposed to get it back like a pension, regardless of whether they are rich or poor when they retire. And so the Baby Boomer generation views any cuts to their social security as a rugpull, basically. It's not insurance or charity; it's an entitlement.
However, although it was marketed as like an entitlement/pension, that's not how the math worked out in practice. And it's because population growth is slowing. It was based on ponzi math, assuming that every generation will be bigger than the one that came before it. But the Baby Boomer generation was huge.
In addition, when Social Security was created, the retirement age was set near the average life expectancy. Many people would not live long enough to collect it, and most would collect it for a handful of years. Only a small minority of outliers would work for like 40 years and then live off social security for like 20+ years. But then over the decades, life expectancy increased by like 15 years, so the default assumption is indeed that someone can work for 40 years and then have 20+ years of retirement, even though the amount they pay into it doesn't really mathematically cover that. It's not designed for that en masse.
And so Baby Boomers had like a 3.5 worker-to-retiree ratio to support in their peak earnings years, while Millennials will have more like a 2.5 worker-to-retiree ratio or less to deal with. Which means they get a worse deal. Many Millennials don't even think they'll get it at all, despite paying into it.
That breaks up the social contract and sets up inter-generational political conflict. "Fourth Turning" stuff.
It's a big reason why "defined benefit" plans are inherently unstable; they rely on being able to predict the future.
And it's also a big reason why, when speaking about deficits, nothing stops this train.

2024-08-17 20:52:08

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I think there’s risk of overdoing it of course. However, our modern lives generally have low levels of acute stress (more common is chronic stress) since we have such powerful control over our environments. So we don’t normally fast, get too cold, get too hot, or get enough physical work, etc. Especially white collar workers. So from my research, when not overdone, cold plunges basically just help bring people back toward a natural state of stimulation.

2024-08-17 19:26:53

It seems there's strong support for cold plunges on Nostr.
If you haven't tried it, look through some of the comments in the thread below.
#note1j3r…rrkf

2024-08-17 03:20:35

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I have trouble wrapping my mind around the concept of anyone using an electric corkscrew. I’ve never seen it done. It’s so lame I have trouble imagining that they are real.

2024-08-17 02:51:41

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It's all in good fun.
But I do think he went through a period where he wasn't critical enough and platformed a bunch of bullshit.
Great show though.

2024-08-17 02:50:14

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The day we start doing price controls is the day we HFSP.

2024-08-17 02:39:51

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Double-whopper at the BK Lounge is my fav.

2024-08-17 02:36:15

I posted a bunch of evidence on Twitter for how 1) grocery stores have razor thin margins, 2) food producer margins are more average but haven't changed in two decades, 3) of course farmers aren't the ones getting rich so 4) no, the food companies are not gouging you on prices.
It's monetary inflation. Grocery stores and food producers are trying to keep up.
Most people agree due to the inherent audience selection, but the tweets kind of went viral and reached a broader political audience, so a bunch of people came in like, "How come they can put chips on sale for 50% sometimes!?!? Checkmate Alden." (it's because they don't understand fixed costs vs cost-of-goods sold) or "How do you know any of the filings are real? What if they're literally all just lying on their audited SEC filings?"
Post-truth, some of people are. The grasping for price controls is the short-time public and political instinct that ultimately makes things worse, every time.
https://m.primal.net/KBvf.png
https://m.primal.net/KBvm.png
https://m.primal.net/KBvn.png

2024-08-17 02:18:05

Kind of.
https://m.primal.net/KBvP.jpg

2024-08-17 01:34:42

I’m really bullish on the next six months of Nostr development.
I don’t know if it’ll generate user growth in that time period, but I’m more confident that it’ll improve UX and applications, and thus bring in more capital for the next stage, which can then be used for more user acquisition.

2024-08-17 00:55:32

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Based.

2024-08-17 00:50:17

If for some reason you were to find yourself in a knife fight, would you rather have a tanto knife or a bowie knife?
Any knife connoisseurs here?
Serious question though.