Nostr notes by Radivis

boring

2026-04-05T15:14:07Z

In reply to nevent1q…8407
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boring

Currently working on an educational Bitcoin wallet: ...

2026-03-13T16:57:36Z

In reply to nevent1q…udu4
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Currently working on an educational Bitcoin wallet: https://github.com/Radivis/bitboard-pwa-wallet

I suck at marketing.

I don't believe in "Proof of human". Just use your latent telepathic abilities and verify my qualia.

Done

2026-03-05T17:52:07Z

In reply to nevent1q…gj4r
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Done

I just committed my Cursor rules to my portfolio base repository. ...

2026-02-26T15:59:16Z

I just committed my Cursor rules to my portfolio base repository. That does feel like a futuristic milestone. There's no going back from this:

https://github.com/Radivis/zero2prod-axum/pull/12/changes

This feels like the begin of the technological #singularity

#agentic #development

Soul draining industrialism

2026-02-26T15:45:02Z

In reply to nevent1q…ha2z
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Soul draining industrialism

My canonical head cannon is $1M, because then 1 sat = 1 cent. ...

2026-02-26T15:43:20Z

In reply to nevent1q…6phl
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My canonical head cannon is $1M, because then 1 sat = 1 cent. Makes conversion easier. I just anticipate the future value of Bitcoin that way.

OpenFang looks like it's definitely one of the best ...

2026-02-26T09:55:51Z

OpenFang looks like it's definitely one of the best candidates for dethroning OpenClaw right now. Huge pros: Deep security + batteries included.

https://x.com/Akashi203/status/2026817793165779387

https://github.com/RightNow-AI/openfang

#OpenClaw #ai #agentic

My flight to Bitcoin Conference 2026 in Las Vegas starts in ...

2026-02-24T12:47:05Z

My flight to Bitcoin Conference 2026 in Las Vegas starts in almost precisely 2 months. It will be my first time visiting that convention, Las Vegas, or the USA.

I will arrive very early and leave very late, so that I can spend 10 days in Las Vegas.

This feels like a significant step since I walked out of my last full stack dev job. I've been doing a dedicated deep dive into Rust, Bitcoin, Lightning, Nostr and agentic development for the last three months.

My plan is to demo an educational Bitcoin and Lightning wallet there - mostly informally. So far, I've remained in brainstorming and planning mode on that, as I am still focused on optimizing my agentic development setup with Cursor.

I don't call myself a vibe coder. What I aim to do is "clean agentic coding", which is challenging, because agentic code tends to be quite messy without serious guardrails. Agentic workflows that produce clean, correct, and maintainable code are possible, but it does take some time to set them up properly.

Anyway, this is just an early announcement of my plans. There is much more to come.

#dev #bitcoin #lightning #agentic #vegas

Should be continued with headache and paranoia.

2026-02-23T13:35:51Z

In reply to nevent1q…vkmj
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Should be continued with headache and paranoia.

Getting into Rust and "clean agentic development" as I ...

2026-02-21T16:25:02Z

Getting into Rust and "clean agentic development" as I call it tentatively has absorbed me for the last months - in addition to getting into the Bitcoin, Lightning, and Nostr primitives.

I'm planning on turning this first zero2prod-axum project into a CRM for my own portfolio.

#dev #rust #agentic

I was quite fond of mathematical logic and associated fields like ...

2026-02-10T14:03:31Z

In reply to nevent1q…h9zn
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I was quite fond of mathematical logic and associated fields like model theory and non-standard algebra (hyperreal numbers). Using the hyperreal numbers in math education would actually be pretty cool.

Once I made a small fractal generator with JavaScript to make the fancy images I used in the Fractal Future Forum. But that was actually rather elementary. Huh, maybe I could turn that into an actual app. Migrating it to Rust and Wasm should definitely amp up its performance.

Mostly I focused on geometry at university: Differential geometry, algebraic topology, a little bit of algebraic geometry. In my last job in geoinformatics I actually needed about zero of that, but having had that background was still nice.

Ah, and I considered coming up with a "coviariant" notation for ordinary mathematics. The usual notation is actually "contravariant" in the sense that you need to read f(g(x)) from right to left. A covariant notation would be something like x|g|f (first apply g to x then f).

Actually, I am not doing much with math right now, but focus on getting into the Bitcoin / Lightning / Nostr dev space.

Technically, radivis.com is my homepage, but I haven't posted ...

2026-02-10T13:21:13Z

In reply to nevent1q…7zrt
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Technically, radivis.com is my homepage, but I haven't posted anything on it since 2015 in favor of focusing on the Fractal Future Forum at forum.fractalfuture.net, which is mostly used as archive now, but it's technically still a working forum. So, yeah, I've gotten rather silent over the last years with only minimal activity on Twitter / X.

What's also relevant is my GitHub at https://github.com/Radivis.

This desolate state of my online presence is bothering me somewhat. I still mostly use Telegram and Discord to stay in touch with people. Migrating everything to Nostr would be cool, but where should I even start?

Anyway, thanks for taking an interest. Is there something you wanted to discuss with me in particular?

I just found out that Claude 4.5 Sonnet is remarkably bad at ...

2026-01-28T16:15:31Z

I just found out that Claude 4.5 Sonnet is remarkably bad at simple refactoring and code cleanup. Splitting one file up into two while maintaining functionality turned out to represent a surprisingly difficult challenge for something that is mostly trivial copy and paste for humans. Amazing!

#ai #dev

I feel like I've hit the current limit of agentic development ...

2026-01-27T15:37:48Z

I feel like I've hit the current limit of agentic development - frustratingly early. I was just trying to add some very simple Playwright end to end tests to a React app with a Rust backend. Even after 6 hours of debugging, the success rate of those tests got stuck at around 20%! So much for the skills of Claude Sonnet 4.5 (thinking) in Cursor.

Well, back to manual debugging, I guess. At least this has been a very educational experiment.

#ai #dev

Really fascinating and useful report! Especially for those who ...

2026-01-27T13:38:20Z

Really fascinating and useful report! Especially for those who see a job in the Bitcoin space like me!

quoting naddr1qv…jpl4

Dear Bitcoiners, builders, founders, and friends,

We’re happy to present the second edition of the Bitvocation Annual Bitcoin Job Market Report.

When we published our first report a year ago, Bitvocation was still young — a fast-growing job feed, a Telegram group, and a conviction that the Bitcoin job market could be more transparent, more efficient, and more human.

Since then, Bitvocation has grown — and so has our understanding of what the Bitcoin job market actually needs.

Today, we’re building toward something bigger: human infrastructure for the Bitcoin economy, powered by people, data, and signal.

This year, our work took us deeper into the human side of Bitcoin careers.

Through our community, our datasets, and countless conversations, one thing became clear:

People aren’t leaving fiat jobs because they want to “work in tech.” They’re leaving because they want to work in alignment.

They’re looking for freedom, sovereignty, purpose, and a mission that actually matters. And they want to build alongside others who feel the same way.

Our mission remains the same.

What has changed is the clarity with which we understand the role we’re playing — and how that clarity has shaped our vision.

⭐️ Mission

To make the Bitcoin job market transparent, human-centered, data-driven, and accessible — so Bitcoin Professionals can build meaningful careers, and Bitcoin companies can find talent that truly understands and contributes to the mission.

⭐️ Vision

A global resource platform and digital Bitcoin Circular Economy for careers — where talent and sats flow, and people thrive doing work they believe in.

We are not just a job platform. We are not recruiters or headhunters.

We’re building infrastructure for:

Bitcoin companies looking for truly Bitcoin-aligned talent

Bitcoin Professionals seeking meaningful, mission-driven work

Investors who want to understand where talent and innovation are moving

Journalists and researchers who need reliable Bitcoin job market data

Students and early-career Bitcoiners entering the ecosystem

And most importantly, we’re building this for the humans behind Bitcoin.

Without this human layer, the network doesn’t grow. Without talent, adoption doesn’t scale. Without people, Bitcoin is just code.

This report is our contribution to mapping that human landscape.

Inside, you’ll find the most complete Bitcoin job dataset we’ve produced so far — alongside new insights into hiring patterns, employer expectations, and the lived experience of Bitcoin Professionals navigating today’s job market.

View the Report Here We hope this report helps you — whether you’re hiring, job searching, investing, building, or researching — better understand the human side of Bitcoin’s growth.

Please share it with your friends in our industry!

With gratitude and excitement for the year ahead,

Anja Founder, Bitvocation

Free Bitcoin job feeds here and here: @Bitvocation Bot

Yesterday I tried transferring some Btc from my #Binance account ...

2026-01-26T09:42:48Z

Yesterday I tried transferring some Btc from my #Binance account to my hardware wallet. In previous instances, that worked. But yesterday the transaction was flagged as high likelihood of a scam. Outgoing transfers were blocked twice for an hour!

I searched for similar stories on Nostr during the last 30 days, but didn't find any. What is going on?

I left my comfy full-stack dev fiat job for this: ...

2026-01-26T07:53:29Z

In reply to nevent1q…2ur3
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I left my comfy full-stack dev fiat job for this: Bitcoin/Lightning/Nostr. Currently learning and working on my portfolio.

True. The Max 20x plan costs just as much as Cursor Ultra. But ...

2026-01-20T18:48:14Z

In reply to nevent1q…w296
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True. The Max 20x plan costs just as much as Cursor Ultra. But the latter allows for all models.

Tough call. Probably depends whether I will be more productive with Cursor or OpenCode. Not sure about that. Have to experiment a lot, first.

Am I right that the implication of this is that retards with AIs ...

2026-01-20T15:03:44Z

In reply to nevent1q…0gwm
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Am I right that the implication of this is that retards with AIs will win?

I think a hard fork is likely in this situation. The result would ...

2026-01-20T15:01:12Z

In reply to nevent1q…arel
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I think a hard fork is likely in this situation. The result would be two different blockchains: Bitcoin Data (Bitcoin Core) and Bitcoin Money (Bitcoin Knots). Each of them would have a clearly defined role, keeping both of them relatively "pure". A lot of problems would arise from such a split, but it does make sense.

If we wanted everything to be located on a single blockchain, we would probably all end up on Ethereum PoW or something similar.

I hear you. Cursor has one interesting advantage though: If you ...

2026-01-20T14:24:29Z

In reply to nevent1q…mk5y
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I hear you. Cursor has one interesting advantage though: If you get the Ultra subscription, you get twice the amount of credits per $, so you go all out on rapid prototyping with premium models.

So, I see myself ending up using a combination of Cursor and Opencode, depending on what I am trying to build during the respective month. After all, paying for Ultra every month feels wasteful.

Just found this old post, and think that it's still relevant. ...

2026-01-19T14:18:00Z

Just found this old post, and think that it's still relevant.

Do you think the situation on Nostr has changed since back then? Are there any new insights?

quoting
naddr1qv…9zfj

The concept of value of value is one where information yearns to flow freely, transactions should be voluntary, unlimited and direct. In V4V model, people pay what something is worth to them.

Sounds great. On paper. There are some issues…

Free sucks

At least, that’s the perception. People don’t assign much value to free. Ask anyone who has ever ran any business and has not suggested a value for a product or service and they’ll tell you that they earned far less than when charging for the thing.

It’s true, some people will give a lot, some a little, and most none. Most - none. None.

Pricing is Signal

Pricing is a signal of desirability and quality. Of course, it is often incorrect and people manipulate pricing all the time. But for the most part, people don’t see much value in free. Unless a recommended price is offered, people will usually pay nothing. This is not a great model to thrive on if you spend years of your life acquiring knowledge and turning it into products that nobody ultimately buys.  I have very personal experience with free. I’ve created and sold digital products and ran many pricing experiments myself. The highest priced products usually generated the most revenue. Surprise! The middle cost product (same product, just priced less) decimated the revenue stream. When set to 0 (even with a suggested minimum price), I generated almost no revenue at all.

None of this is surprising. Pricing acts as a psychological anchor. “You get what you pay for” is ingrained in our brains whether we think about it or not.

People are clueless

The issue with price is that most people don’t have a clue what anything is worth. The only time people have any rough idea of what they should pay for something is when they have already purchased that thing in the past. But, introduce something they have never before purchased and they won’t have a single clue about what to pay. Take for example a set of professional photos of you and your family. Unless you’ve been to a photo studio in the last 5 years, you probably won’t have a single clue what that package of photos is worth. Does that mean the product is worthless? Of course not, but people don’t know what to pay.

In a value for value model, the absence of price makes it super difficult to determine the value of anything. You may take some social cues from previous payments from other people, but this could backfire for the content creator.

Suppose I created a UI framework that saved developers hundreds of hours. In theory, I should be able to charge at least a few hours’ worth of value for this product. If the developer’s time is valued at $100/hour, a $200 price for a product that saves you $2000 worth of time seems very justifiable. Not only do you get to use it once, but you can re-use the product for ALL future projects and employment.

Now, remove the price and see what people pay. Absolutely nothing. You may have a few people who pay $200 voluntarily, but it’s highly unlikely The vast majority will pay nothing, and some may “tip” in the 5-$60 range. Anything that approaches a $100 mark is seen as a purchase. Hey, I don’t make the rules, I just see what other founders have figured out long ago and combine with my own observations. Don’t kill the messenger.

Free is Expensive

If I am accurate in my assessment and recall my personal experiences accurately, then the majority of people who consume your value will do so for free. When that content is a product, you may end up spending a lot of time on supporting the thing that is not generating any revenue. You don’t want to be rude and ignore people so you’ll probably spend your valuable time answering questions and helping them troubleshoot issues. All of that time adds up. Startup founders who offer free tiers or near free tiers of services learn very quickly that free customers are the most painful and demanding. You are basically forced to charge just to avoid dealing with demanding people who expect everything for nothing.

Free is Noise

Price is not just a request for value, but it acts as a feedback signal for future content. If you have no idea what people are paying for, it’s difficult to know if what you create is worth anything. A situation where the vast majority of your content is consumed for free yield a lot of noise.

Well, why not focus on the people who pay? You certainly could, but it ends up being a tiny fraction of the sample size you could have had if you actually charged something up front.

Lack of forecasting

Businesses rely on predictible revenue. Forecasting is necessary for all sorts of decisions if you work with anyone but yourself. It helps with purchasing decision (expenses) and with planning of future products. Value for value makes it impossible to know what your revenue will be next month as you just have no idea if everyone pays nothing or a lot.

V4V could make you uncompetitive

In a model where one person charges a fixed price and the other is relying on the good will of the people to "see the value" in their work, the person with predictible revenue will most likely win out in a competitive environment - enabling them to get ahead of you and your business. They will have an easier time planning further content / products and hiring people to scale the business even further.

It’s not all hopeless

That’s not to say that I don’t like the idea of value for value. Of course I only want people to pay if they find the thing useful. The issue is that people may not know the thing is useful until they’ve already acquired it. At that point who is going back to pay for the thing they already got for free? Few to none.

Value for value may work. For some.

I’m not saying value for value doesn’t work sometimes, for some people. It is entirely possible that a person earns a living on v4v transactions. However, I think for that to be true there may be other factors at play such as social standing, personal brand, influence, likability, status within a community. The vast majority of creators do not fall into this category and will just struggle.

I’m cautiously optimistic about V4V and hope it works out at scale. But as it stands, I have not seen much evidence that it actually pays the bills. Yes, there has been some support for podcasts on Fountain, but it is unclear whether it is just as or more significant than traditional transaction model.

“Information is not scarce” is irrelevant

There’s some notion that information yearns to be free and cannot be scarce by nature. I think this may be a false argument from the start. When we purchase digital things, we are not paying for scarcity - it’s totally irrelevant. We pay for the experience and the feeling we get from that thing. In fact, the same is probably true for physical products (with the added benefit of personal sustenance). I don’t go into the grocery store to buy a dinner and fork over the money because it’s scarce. I pay because I’m hungry. There’s utility and there’s pleasure and fulfillment. If I’m having a dinner with friends, there’s also fun. Unless I am totally misunderstanding the argument, I’m not sure how it applies.

In Summary

Value 4 value may work at scale, but remains to be seen

It could be great fun money but not serious enough to pay the bills (for most of us)

Sounds good on paper but we humans have our own ways of thinking about value and what it's worth

May work well for people who build a personal brand or have status in a community

As always I look forward to your thoughts. Let me know if I’m overlooking something or should consider some point of view in more depth.

#v4v

Yeah, definitely have to check that out. What's your ...

2026-01-19T09:18:05Z

In reply to nevent1q…5770
_________________________

Yeah, definitely have to check that out. What's your preferred way of using opencode?

Today I experimented with agentic development with Cursor after ...

2026-01-18T18:15:10Z

Today I experimented with agentic development with Cursor after purchasing a Pro+ subscription costing $60 US, which pays for $60 US of tokens. The overall experience was relatively good, but checking the usage list made me think again whether Pro+ would suffice for any large project work.

Claude 4.5 Sonnet is really good, but burns $ at a rather rapid pace. For easy tasks, the custom AI agent Composer 1 by Cursor is rather sufficient.

Also, having long-winded sessions seems to push costs upwards due to ever increasing context.

Letting a second agent review what the first agent did and a third agent implement the requested fixes reduced costs to $0.50 for those steps. Compared to the roughly $20 I spent on the actual coding and debugging, that's a bargain. It was just about refactoring a small project to use a different library as dependency.

In the end, I didn't need to check the documentations of those libraries. But I needed to check the output of those agents very closely. They tend to drop functionality, if they feel it's difficult to maintain it!

#ai #dev

This is deeply fascinating! Economics seems to explain even more ...

2026-01-18T17:56:52Z

This is deeply fascinating! Economics seems to explain even more than just the parts of politics we usually think about. Long read, but really worth it!

quoting
naddr1qv…amuk

Kowloon Walled City stands as perhaps history's most extraordinary proof that spontaneous order needs no architect. Within six acres of legal limbo between British Hong Kong and Communist China, 35,000 people built a functioning society that confounded every prediction of social science. Without police, courts, or bureaucrats, this urban organism developed its own systems of property, contract, and justice that worked precisely because they emerged from daily practice and repeated interaction. Dentists operated next to noodle shops, workshops hummed above kindergartens, and through it all, an economy more complex than any planner could imagine sustained itself through nothing more than the repeated interactions of people who had nowhere else to go.

The theoretical foundation for understanding these spaces traces back to Hayek's devastating critique of socialist calculation, but the application extends far beyond economics. Just as no central planner can marshal the distributed knowledge necessary to coordinate production, no central authority can gather the local information required to govern human communities in their infinite particularity. The temporary autonomous zone solves this knowledge problem by abandoning the pretense of control altogether, allowing solutions to emerge from the ground up through trial, error, and adaptation.

The vast favelas that ring Latin American cities house perhaps one hundred million people who have built entire civilizations outside the formal structures of the state. These communities, dismissed by comfortable observers as mere slums, have developed sophisticated systems of property registration based on community witness and social memory. When a family builds a house in a favela, their ownership rests on the testimony of neighbors who watched the foundation being laid, who know which children grew up in which rooms, who can trace the history of every improvement and transaction. This social knowledge creates property rights often more secure than official titles, which can be voided by political whim or lost in bureaucratic shuffle.

The economic viability of such arrangements depends on a fundamental asymmetry that cypherpunks identified as essential to technological freedom: defense must be cheaper than offense. This principle, which explains why guerrilla movements can outlast empires and why encryption defeats surveillance, finds its purest expression in spaces the state has economically abandoned. The calculation is brutally simple - when the cost of extending control over a densely packed urban favela or scattered rural community exceeds any possible tax revenue or political benefit, the state withdraws its claims if not its rhetoric.

Medieval Iceland's Commonwealth period from 930 to 1262 CE demonstrated this principle across three centuries of stateless order. In a land where scattered farmsteads spread across a harsh landscape, the cost of maintaining permanent military occupation would have bankrupted any would-be ruler. Instead, competing chieftains offered protection services in a genuinely free market where clients could switch allegiances at will, creating a system of governance through consent that contemporary democratic theorists can only dream of achieving. The system worked not because Icelanders were especially virtuous but because geography and economics made tyranny unprofitable.

The implications of Hayek's knowledge problem extend beyond price formation to the very possibility of surveillance. No matter how sophisticated the technology, monitoring every transaction in a dense urban environment or remote rural area faces exponentially rising costs as communities develop countermeasures. Cash changes hands in ways that leave no digital trace, contracts are sealed with handshakes and witnessed agreements, and social enforcement mechanisms operate through channels invisible to outside observers. The dream of perfect surveillance founders on the same rock as the dream of perfect planning - the irreducible complexity of human interaction.

This observation leads directly to the cypherpunk insight that guides our digital age: certain mathematical truths can make surveillance not just difficult but economically impossible. Just as properly implemented encryption protects messages regardless of computational power, physical autonomous zones can structure themselves to make governance costs exceed any possible benefit. The state may possess theoretical sovereignty over every inch of territory, but exercising that sovereignty requires resources that quickly spiral beyond available budgets when communities organize for their own defense.

Property rights within these spaces emerge through what David Friedman brilliantly identifies as Schelling points - those focal solutions that coordinate behavior without explicit agreement. The first person to clear a plot and build creates a fact that others find easier to accept than challenge. The merchant who sets up a stall in the same spot each market day establishes a claim that competitors respect because challenging established patterns invites chaos that hurts everyone. These conventions arise from the natural human tendency to seek stable patterns that enable cooperation.

The Jewish quarters of medieval Europe, though born from persecution and exclusion, demonstrated how communities can flourish within autonomous spaces. Behind ghetto walls that were meant to constrain, Jewish communities developed their own legal systems, educational institutions, and economic networks that often surpassed those of the surrounding society. The kehillah structure provided governance, the beth din resolved disputes, and the tzedakah system ensured social welfare - all without reference to the gentile authorities who cared only that taxes were paid and order maintained. This autonomy, imposed by exclusion, created space for innovation in finance, scholarship, and culture that shaped European civilization despite originating in its margins.

Yet temporary autonomous zones face limitations that honest analysis cannot ignore. Without formal property registration systems, accumulating capital for major projects becomes difficult, as banks will not accept socially recognized but legally void titles as collateral. Long-term investment suffers when property claims rest on consensus that might shift with demographic changes or political pressures. The absence of final dispute resolution mechanisms means that conflicts can escalate into cycles of retaliation that destroy the social fabric essential to the zone's survival. These costs weigh heavily, but for millions of participants, they pale beside the costs of formal inclusion: taxes that confiscate earnings, regulations that prohibit enterprise, and bureaucratic requirements that make legal existence impossible for those lacking proper papers or pedigree.

The prohibited substance trade that finances some autonomous zones illustrates both the opportunities and dangers of operating outside state sanction. Prohibition creates economic niches that can only be filled by those willing to risk legal consequences, generating profits that fund alternative governance structures from security services to dispute resolution to public goods like festivals and community centers. Yet the same dynamics create violence when competing organizations clash over territory and market share, leading to the bloodshed that states then cite as justification for further intervention. The tragic irony is that autonomous zones do not inherently generate crime - rather, prohibitions create criminal opportunities that would not exist under legal markets.

Latin America's occupied buildings demonstrate another model of autonomous organization that deserves careful study. When organized communities take over abandoned skyscrapers, they create vertical villages with their own utilities, governance, and culture. Residents tap into electrical grids and water systems, paying fees to community technicians who maintain these jury-rigged connections. Assemblies meet regularly to resolve disputes, allocate resources, and plan improvements. Security teams patrol hallways, maintenance crews repair common areas, and social committees organize events that build solidarity. These are not chaotic free-for-alls but disciplined communities with elaborate rules, even if no legislature passed them.

Exit rights provide the ultimate accountability mechanism that democratic theorists perpetually seek but never achieve. Unlike states that claim territorial monopolies backed by violence, autonomous zones must compete for residents who can vote with their feet whenever conditions deteriorate. A favela where predators operate unchecked loses families to safer neighborhoods, while a squatted building whose leadership becomes corrupt finds its best residents departing for better-managed alternatives. This constant competitive pressure constrains exploitation more effectively than any system of formal checks and balances, creating a market in governance that aligns incentives with performance.

The Austrian insight that economic calculation requires private property and market prices finds vindication in how autonomous zones spontaneously generate both despite state opposition. Property emerges from occupation and improvement as surely as prices emerge from voluntary exchange. The resulting order may lack the aesthetic appeal of planned communities, but it enables the economic calculation that makes progress possible. Resources flow to valued uses, entrepreneurs identify opportunities, and capital accumulates wherever security permits - all without central direction or formal authorization.

Critics who point to violence and disorder in autonomous zones as evidence of failure commit the fundamental error of confusing correlation with causation. People do not choose favelas because they enjoy violence but because these spaces offer opportunity denied elsewhere. Violence typically results from state prohibition of normal economic activity, forcing disputes underground where they cannot be resolved peacefully. Where autonomous zones develop without constant intervention, they often achieve levels of order and prosperity that shame officially planned communities. The difference lies not in the people but in the incentives they face.

The necessarily temporary nature of most autonomous zones reflects political reality and the shifting calculations of state power. States tolerate autonomy when suppression costs exceed benefits but reassert control whenever calculations change. Kowloon Walled City thrived for decades until Hong Kong's return to China made its existence politically untenable. Squatted buildings provide homes for thousands until property values rise enough to justify violent eviction. Autonomous zones exist in the fluctuating space between state indifference and state interest, a margin that shifts with economic conditions and political pressures.

For those who would create or sustain autonomous zones in our current era, certain practical principles emerge from successful examples. The first and most crucial: begin with high-trust networks and carefully vetted participants. A reading group that meets in rotating locations builds the operational security habits and social bonds necessary for more ambitious projects. These early gatherings establish communication protocols, vetting procedures, and conflict resolution mechanisms while stakes remain manageable. The skills learned in organizing a book club - anonymity, compartmentalization, trust-building - scale to larger endeavors.

Location selection must balance accessibility with obscurity, following cold economic calculation. Urban autonomous zones thrive in industrial districts after business hours, in buildings awaiting demolition, or within ethnic enclaves where linguistic and cultural barriers discourage outside interference. Rural zones flourish on marginal lands, in seasonal gathering spots, or among communities with strong traditions of self-reliance. The ideal space achieves security through apparent worthlessness - a warehouse that looks abandoned serves better than one bristling with obvious defenses.

Access control determines whether a zone survives its first year or its first week. Physical tokens surpass lists for anonymity - a specific edition of a book, a piece of original art, a custom-minted coin that members recognize but outsiders cannot replicate. New members should know only their immediate sponsors, protecting the network from infiltration. Meeting locations must rotate unpredictably, with each gathering announced through different channels. Digital communications require end-to-end encryption with forward secrecy, ephemeral messages, and regular key rotation. Cash transactions leave no audit trail for forensic accountants to follow.

The internal economy must generate sufficient value to retain members despite risks. A metalworking shop by day transforms into a tool library by night, where skilled craftsmen teach welding and fabrication to those the licensing cartels exclude. Commercial kitchens host popup restaurants where immigrant cooks serve authentic cuisine without health department harassment. Warehouses store goods for import-export businesses navigating the edge of trade regulations. Each activity must produce enough benefit - whether monetary, educational, or social - to justify the coordination costs and security risks.

Dispute resolution systems must emerge from actual practice, developing organically as conflicts arise and solutions prove themselves. Reputation mechanisms work when communities are small enough for everyone to know everyone: the mechanic who overcharges finds no one willing to rent him workspace, while the cook who maintains high standards gets prime kitchen slots. Mediation by respected elders resolves conflicts before they escalate to violence or exit. Serious violations result in exclusion - a devastating punishment when the zone provides genuine economic and social value.

Defense strategies must make surveillance expensive and raids unprofitable. Multiple entrances and exits prevent bottlenecks, irregular schedules frustrate pattern analysis, and constant movement denies fixed targets. Digital systems employ full disk encryption with hidden volumes and duress passwords that trigger data destruction. Physical records should be minimal and combustible. Nothing stored on-site should justify the expense of a major police operation - raids should find only empty rooms and wiped drives.

Technology amplifies traditional security techniques when properly implemented. Mesh networks provide communications resilient to centralized shutdown. Cryptocurrency enables commerce without bank surveillance. 3D printers produce tools and components without supply chain documentation. Solar panels and battery banks reduce infrastructure dependence. Each technology that increases practical autonomy while decreasing visible footprint strengthens the zone's survivability. But technology alone never suffices - the human networks and trust relationships matter more than any gadget.

The most successful temporary autonomous zones provide goods and services that the mainstream economy cannot or will not supply. Skills that require apprenticeship flourish when licensing cartels restrict formal education. Device repair thrives when manufacturers design for obsolescence. Alternative currencies facilitate trade among those the banking system excludes. Art that challenges orthodoxy finds audiences hungry for authentic expression. The zone succeeds when members would sacrifice significant resources to maintain access - the ultimate test of genuine value creation.

Common failure modes teach hard lessons. Greed corrupts when profit maximization displaces community building, leading to corner-cutting and conflict multiplication. Growth beyond natural limits breaks informal coordination systems, requiring formal structures that attract unwanted attention. Publicity seeking - whether through social media boasting, journalist cultivation, or academic collaboration - brings scrutiny that no security measures can withstand. The most durable zones remain invisible to outsiders, boring to authorities, and valuable only to participants.

Beyond specific techniques lies a deeper principle that anarchist theory has always understood but rarely articulated clearly: the state is not the source of order but its enemy. Order emerges from voluntary cooperation among people pursuing their own purposes within frameworks of reciprocal respect. The temporary autonomous zone demonstrates this principle not through argument but through daily practice, proving that humans can build complex societies without coercion, create prosperity without permission, and resolve conflicts without violence - at least when left alone to do so.

The economic logic points toward an inevitable conclusion that statists cannot accept: where defense costs less than attack, freedom finds footholds from which to expand. Where local knowledge exceeds central planning capability, spontaneous orders emerge that surpass designed systems. Where exit remains possible, governance must serve its constituents or face abandonment. The temporary autonomous zone embodies these principles as lived experience and daily practice, creating spaces where human flourishing proceeds on its own terms.

As surveillance technology advances and states seek ever-greater control over their subjects, the techniques of autonomy must evolve in response. The cypherpunk toolkit - encryption, anonymity, distributed systems - merges with older traditions of community organization and mutual aid. Physical spaces enhanced by digital privacy tools, communities existing simultaneously in geographical and virtual domains, economies flowing seamlessly between official and unofficial sectors as opportunities arise - these hybrid models point toward futures where the rigid boundaries between governed and ungoverned space dissolve entirely.

The invitation stands before each reader: not to await some revolutionary moment that will never arrive, but to begin creating spaces of freedom wherever opportunity allows. A garage where neighbors fix cars without ASE certification requirements. A kitchen where grandmothers teach cooking without health department interference. A workshop where electronics get repaired despite manufacturers' legal threats. A garden where food grows without agricultural department permission. Each tiny zone of autonomy teaches lessons, builds networks, and demonstrates possibilities that inspire others to claim their own freedoms.

The temporary autonomous zone offers no permanent solution to the problem of human governance because permanence itself is the problem. Instead, these spaces provide laboratories for experimentation, refuges for the oppressed, and proof that order needs no orderer. They teach the most radical lesson of all: that free people can cooperate without coercion, create without permission, and prosper without masters. In teaching this lesson, they threaten every justification for the state's existence, which is why states fear and destroy them whenever possible.

Yet they persist, adapting and evolving, because the human drive toward freedom cannot be permanently suppressed. Where exit remains possible, where defense stays cheaper than attack, where local knowledge trumps central planning, the temporary autonomous zone will emerge again and again, each iteration teaching new lessons and inspiring new experiments in living without permission. The state may be eternal, but so is resistance - and in the margins where power meets its limits, human creativity forever finds new ways to flourish.

Hell yeah, why not? I already just followed you recently!

2026-01-18T09:45:02Z

In reply to nevent1q…dhkd
_________________________

Hell yeah, why not? I already just followed you recently!

Wow, finally zapping via Primal (or anywhere on Nostr) via NWC ...

2026-01-14T17:00:53Z

Wow, finally zapping via Primal (or anywhere on Nostr) via NWC worked for me. The last days I thought I had distributed a dozen zaps or so. I still don't know what the underlying issue was. A combination of creating a new NWC connection, deleting the old one, and opening Primal in a new tab finally did the trick.

I don't know how I should feel about that. My feelings are quite mixed. My general user experience with Nostr has been one of much confusion and frustration. On the other hand, I feel some elation about finally having mastered the basics.

It would have been nice to add the URL to the note directly. For ...

2026-01-14T09:53:41Z

In reply to nevent1q…0hxu
_________________________

It would have been nice to add the URL to the note directly.

For readers: It's https://syncstr.shakespeare.wtf/

This technology seems quite useful for many applications running ...

2026-01-14T09:26:42Z

This technology seems quite useful for many applications running on the #nostr network!

quoting
naddr1qv…ln93

Nostr's distributed architecture is a feature, not a bug. No central server harvesting your data. No single point of failure. No corporate gatekeeper deciding what you can post or who can see it. Events flow across hundreds of independent relays, replicated unevenly based on where users publish and subscribe.

But this design creates a surprising challenge: How do you get network-wide analytics when there's no central server?

Each relay sees only a fraction of the network. Events spread unevenly—some relays hold millions of events, others just thousands, and the overlap between them varies wildly. Questions that any centralized platform could answer instantly become genuinely hard. How many people use Nostr? What content is popular? How healthy is the network overall?

Take a simple question: How many daily active users does Nostr have? On a traditional platform, this is trivial—count the sessions. On Nostr, we can't see people browsing. No login event, no session tracking. We can only count users who publish something. So "daily publishing users" on the dashboard will always look lower than centralized services report. I'm measuring people creating, not lurking.

When I talk to people about this, the reaction is the same: everyone wants data, but nobody has done the work to get a complete picture. Most assume it's too big a problem—one you'll never quite solve. But the Pareto principle applies. We'll never get a perfect view of the network, but a very good picture is within reach.

Before Pensieve, most people relied on stats.nostr.band. But that project isn't open source, so there's no visibility into how those numbers are calculated. Over time, I found myself trusting those metrics less and less. I wanted something transparent.

Introducing Pensieve and Nostr Stats

I built an open-source solution: Pensieve, an archive-first Nostr indexer that aggregates data across relays, and Nostr Stats, a public dashboard that visualizes network health.

Pensieve isn't just another indexer. It solves the aggregation problem: pulling events from across the network, deduplicating them, validating them, and storing them both for the long-term and for analytics uses. The stats dashboard sits on top, but is just one way of making the data accessible.

How Pensieve Works

I took an archive-first approach. Rather than piping everything directly into an analytics database, Pensieve first stores canonical events in compressed archive files using a format called notepack. Notepack was created by @jb55 and is a fast and highly compressable binary data format for nostr events. Why the extra step? Durability and portability. These archives can be backed up, shared with researchers who need historical data, or used to bootstrap a new instance. They're the source of truth.

Only validated, deduplicated events make it into the archive. Events get checked for valid signatures and proper formatting before they're stored—garbage doesn't get in.

Pensieve pulls data from multiple sources:

Live relay streaming with intelligent relay selection, maintaining persistent connections to relays and receiving events as they're published

Historical backfills from JSONL and protobuf archives—I've already processed over a terabyte and a half of historical data, including the full archives from Primal's relay

Automatic relay discovery via NIP-65, finding new relays as users update their relay lists

Negentropy syncing with the Damus relay for efficient event reconciliation

That last one deserves an explanation.

Imagine you have a million events and a relay has a million events. How do you figure out which ones you're each missing? The naive approach: request everything and deduplicate locally. But that's expensive—you're transferring vast amounts of data you already have.

Negentropy, created by @Doug Hoyte, solves this elegantly. It's a set-reconciliation protocol based on range-based comparison. Both sides compute short fingerprints (hashes) of the event IDs within a given range. If the fingerprints match, those ranges are identical—no need to check individual events. If they differ, the range gets subdivided and compared again, recursively narrowing down to just the events that are actually different.

The result: Pensieve asks for only the IDs it's missing. No redundant transfers. And when a relay connection drops, negentropy lets Pensieve catch up efficiently on everything that was published while it was disconnected—no need to re-fetch the entire history.

I also built a relay quality scoring system. The logic is simple: not all relays are equally valuable for data collection. Some relays surface events I've never seen before. Others mostly send duplicates of what I already have. Some stay online reliably; others drop connections constantly.

The scoring system tracks all of this—novel event rates, connection success, uptime—and dynamically prioritizes which relays to focus on. Resources flow toward relays that consistently deliver unique data. It's naive right now, but even simple heuristics help when you're trying to efficiently cover a network of hundreds of relays.

ClickHouse is the secret weapon here. It's a column-oriented database built for real-time analytics on massive datasets. Traditional row-based databases struggle when you ask questions like "how many unique users published each day for the last year?"—they have to scan entire rows even when you only need two columns. ClickHouse stores data by column, so aggregation queries that touch billions of events come back in milliseconds. It's open source, battle-tested at companies like Cloudflare and Uber, and designed exactly for the kind of time-series analytics dashboards need. When you're slicing and dicing millions of Nostr events by kind, by timestamp, by author—ClickHouse doesn't break a sweat.

I built it in Rust for a reason. When you're processing terabytes of messy, inconsistent data—files with invalid formats, malformed tags, events that claim to be from January 1970—you need a system that's both fast and reliable. Rust gives you both. Its memory safety and type system mean that once the code compiles, you've got a pretty good sense it's going to be stable. Edge cases get handled. The program doesn't crash at 3am on a Sunday.

What You Can See Today

The dashboard is live at stats.andotherstuff.org. Here's what you can explore:

Publishing users tracked over time (excluding ephemeral keys)

New user growth and retention patterns

Event kind distribution: see what types of content dominate the network

Zaps and Lightning activity: real money flowing through Nostr

Relay distribution from NIP-65 data, showing which relays users prefer

Time-series charts for all metrics, letting you spot trends

One insight that surprised me: the sheer number of users with dead relays still listed in their relay preferences. If you haven't checked your relay list lately, now might be a good time.

The data tells the story of a nascent network. New user numbers are noisy—there are plenty of ephemeral keys and profiles that never get filled out, which might be bots or might be people who tried Nostr once and bounced. There's work ahead to prove Nostr's value to a broader audience.

But that's exactly the point. Seeing real numbers—honest, transparent, calculated from verifiable data—is what the community needs to make good decisions about where to build next. No more guessing. No more trusting opaque metrics from closed systems.

What's Next and Getting Involved

Pensieve is currently live-streaming roughly one million events per day into the system. The historical data goes back to what I call "Nostr genesis"—the creation of @fiatjaf 's original design document—and I've already backfilled archives from Primal.

I'm looking for more historical data. If you're a relay operator with archives, I'd love to backfill from your data. The easiest format: JSONL files (one event per line), compressed with standard compression (gzip, zstd, etc.). Send me the files or share a link, and I'll handle the rest.

On the roadmap: deeper event kind breakdowns, more relay analytics, and eventually a BI tool that would let researchers run custom queries against the full dataset. I'd also like to see multiple Pensieve instances running, tuned for different geographical regions or relay types, with negentropy syncing between them to ensure comprehensive coverage.

The code is fully open source:

Pensieve: github.com/andotherstuff/pensieve

Nostr Stats: github.com/andotherstuff/nostr-stats

For developers who want to contribute: the relay discovery and quality scoring system needs work. The current heuristics are naive, and there's room to make them smarter. I'd also love to expand how we're using negentropy syncing and sync with more relays.

Built as part of And Other Stuff, an open-source collective focused on public infrastructure for Nostr. Having a large analytics data source doesn't just serve researchers—it opens the door to services like aggregation APIs that let client developers get fast counts on followers, likes, and replies. That's the kind of shared infrastructure this network needs.

Check out the live dashboard at stats.andotherstuff.org, explore the code, and if you've got historical data to share—reach out.

The idea of quantifying trust as threshold amount of money you ...

2026-01-13T16:14:15Z

In reply to naddr1qq…7uxj
_________________________

The idea of quantifying trust as threshold amount of money you expect someone to embezzle or not embezzle is quite innovative. But in a pseudonymous context large amounts of trust can only be reasonably established via reputation or personal trust.

While the idea of personal trust and its implications of transitive trust are the subject of web of trust systems, I have been thinking about decentralized reputation system for quite a while - shortly after the emergence of Bitcoin in fact.

I have developed a theoretical reputation system called Quantified Prestige, which is based on quantified esteem attributions. Only rather recently, I realized that Nostr provides a suitable basis for this system in a decentralized context. Those esteem attributions can easily be implemented as custom Nostr messages. It's just aggregation across relays and Sybil protection that require some relatively elaborate mechanisms.

The result is indeed "merely" a reputation score, but as a global starting point for interactions with unknown pseudonymous actors that's certainly a good starting point.

Here is a recent introduction to Quantified Prestige: https://yakihonne.com/article/naddr1qvzqqqr4gupzqn3rp2esmvczf7md3vmemc2u82mxwjzsttag8scc0g2myhz9cujfqy2hwumn8ghj7un9d3shjtnyv9kh2uewd9hj7qq4w4352dj2w3gxunm2g364s6zpwfexjjm6tqt2dsd9

Linking my #introduction article: ...

2026-01-13T14:05:01Z

Linking my #introduction article:

https://primal.net/e/naddr1qvzqqqr4gupzqn3rp2esmvczf7md3vmemc2u82mxwjzsttag8scc0g2myhz9cujfqq25z4632uux26n9ffzhxan5f34rw6r0wpuh5rjm0gn

It seems to me that articles need to get mentioned in notes to reach significant attention. Anyway, the #nostr learning curve is still quite steep in 2026.

This approach is similar to the ideas I had for Quantified ...

2026-01-13T13:28:47Z

In reply to naddr1qq…88s5
_________________________

This approach is similar to the ideas I had for Quantified Prestige. In the basic version of that system there are only esteem points to be allocated to others. But I considered adding "special esteem" to the "general esteem", which would allow for rather specific contextual information about the implied reputation.

Here is a recent general introduction of Quantified Prestige: https://yakihonne.com/article/naddr1qvzqqqr4gupzqn3rp2esmvczf7md3vmemc2u82mxwjzsttag8scc0g2myhz9cujfqy2hwumn8ghj7un9d3shjtnyv9kh2uewd9hj7qq4g9t4z4ecv44x2jj9wdm8gnr2xa5x7ure0gd34djq

Nostr event nevent1qqsgmgz8qwvw9yy0hrsg7c0z5vwugyfxssps6nlalyeer86jmeufm5szyp8zxz4npkesynakmzehnhs4cw4kvay9qkh6s0p3s7s4kfwyt3eyjuq5v3e

2025-12-21T18:42:36Z

Test. My first post on Yakihonne.