I tried very hard to develop for Nostr with the idea it was an inclusive communication commons. Turns out it was a Lightning Network payments promotion project. All of its users (aside from its creator) were very much more interested in Lightning than in Nostr. Dismal experience, still bitter about the effort I wasted on it.
In its early inception, it wasn't so bad about that. As it grew, though, it became insular and favored those who were going to the conventions for bitcoin and shouted things like "Pura Vida". My "done with it" moment was when there was a lady from some Latin American place who was asking for donations so she could go to one of those Bitcoin talks in Costa Rica, and everyone ignored her. It was weird to see people going to her basic geography, and completing ignoring and leaving someone behind who was "very into" the ethos, but said much about the project.
You really don't understand what is going on in places like Latin America with Bitcoin do you? Let me enlighten you a little. People with a ton of Bitcoin go there to have fun, while trying to sell poor villages on the idea that Bitcoin will free them from poverty the rest of the world puts them in. The woman in question was in one of those villages, believing their idea that Bitcoin could free her and her village. They ignored her, and instead showed epic pictures of how carnivore and stuff they are. It's disgusting.
If they actually walked the walk, her going there would be a sign they were going to do what they were proposing. Them ignoring her was an indication they were full of it, hence why I left.
If you’re talking about who I think you are, it’s because she is a scammer and a stalker and everyone on Nostr is completely fed up with her. The community is extraordinarily welcoming of honest people producing honest content.
That is really not doing it justice. Some people say the same about podcasting 2.0, but it is so much more, even Apple is starting to pick up features from it (chapters, artwork, transcripts). Not the Lighthing/boosting no. But that's ok right?
Many people get all emotional around crypto and blow it out of proportions imho. Sure there are many bad things about it, but to let your opinion of crypto taint so many nice tings is sad imho.
This is about the structure of metadata, why would you want to tie this to a file format? Even Apple realizes that is not the way to go. And what about transcripts then, Person/guest metadata, Chapter artwork, Live tags (so you can tune in live in a podcasting app)?
"Some subset of these features is in MP3" is not a valid response.
I think you'll need a more sterling critique than 'why would you wnat to tie this to a file format', to the most successful open source media technology of all time. Aside - yes there are or were legal issues with the fraunhofer patents for MP3, but these weren't enough to stop the LAME project and expired in 2017. The combination of MP3 and RSS should be studied as quite likely the most popular open format ever. They've kept podcasting out of the hands of wannabe privatisers from spotify to apple for twenty years.
If you really think that crypto people invented podcast chapters and transcripts, you might want to do a reality check.
These have been around in podcatchers for a long time, see e.g. [1] for chapter markers. Apple lagging behind on podcasting features/quasi-standards is also the norm, not the exception.
Crypto-people? As in that that other part of Homo Sapiens that is about to split off, or what? (Yes sarcasm) What are you even talking about? Please do some research before coming with such a response.
Anything that is crypto-adjacent or sometimes even "not actively opposing" cryptocurrencies is heavily disapproved of here. I get some of it, and agree with much of it, but it always goes too far. Always leads to conclusions not grounded in truth because as soon as the term comes up there is a heavy emotional reaction.
Podcasting 2.0 seems to be a cryptocurrency project. Saying that Podcasting 2.0 invented chapters and transcripts is saying that cryptocurrency people invented chapters and transcripts.
"Anything that is crypto-adjacent or sometimes even "not actively opposing" cryptocurrencies is heavily disapproved of here."
That couldn't be father from truth :) . Tokens are very much liked and often used by the HN crowd and by the IT workers in general. But there is a crucial nuance - most people using tokens, are using them for tax/customs avoidance. So in the topics where people are discussing how to pay for this or that and avoid taxation or or avoid sanctions etc. tokens would be shown in a positive light and those comments upvoted. What you've stumbled upon is the case of "selling" tokens to people for any other task, and that is widely ridiculed for a reason.
It’s been 18 years and there are still no useful blockchain projects that go beyond trading and speculation. It hasn’t even produced a compelling currency, <2% of households use it for goods and services. I have no idea how or why anyone is still hanging on.
How would you anonymously pay for a VPN or donate to whistleblowers or get cash from an ATM without having to identify yourself? What is your backup plan to pay bills when your bank account is frozen by identity theft (can take months to resolve)?
Only those that believe privacy and sovereign control of wealth has no value, can assert cryptocurrency is useless.
> How would you anonymously pay for a VPN or donate to whistleblowers or get cash from an ATM without having to identify yourself?
"Anonymously paying for VPN" seems a bit ironic given that almost all VPN users then immediately proceed to completely deanonymize themselves towards the VPN by accessing it from their (not anonymous) home Internet connection and/or to access sites that deanonymize them. Add to that the fact that most blockchains are very much public, and I couldn't think of a better way than crypto to deanonymize my entire payment and Internet usage profile in one go if I tried.
I do agree that payer (not necessarily payee) anonymity is really important and most existing payment methods fall short of what's arguably the absolute minimum in a non-surveillance state.
Still, this seems like a problem largely orthogonal to crypto. It's possible to build a payer-anonymous payment system based on regular centralized databases just fine, see e.g. GNU Taler.
> What is your backup plan to pay bills when your bank account is frozen by identity theft (can take months to resolve)?
Mine is to live in a jurisdiction where banks aren't allowed to get away with stuff like that (and where "identity theft" is not really a thing because knowing a 9-digit number and maybe having a photo of somebody's driver's license is not considered a valid KYC method), but I realize that this is not an option for nearly everybody in the world, and I do see some value of crypto as a forcing function in those.
> Only those that believe privacy and sovereign control of wealth has no value, can assert cryptocurrency is useless.
I didn’t say it was useless, it seems to have a niche value to speculators and investors.
All of the examples you gave either don’t matter to 99% of everyone (“hey mom, how do you donate to whistleblowers”) or isn’t the most practical way to do a thing. E.g. bank account-related fraud is vanishingly small (the vast majority is credit card-related); in the US it affects ~10k people per year. Is the average person more likely to lose their savings to fraud or lose a crypto wallet due to human error?
I did not say it was ready for the average person yet. It took over a hundred years to build our fiat systems and it may take as long to fully replace them. But for technical people that need privacy, the types of people that use tor, it is an invaluable tool, today, for which no viable alternatives exist. The actual cypherpunk crowd using it as intended for privacy and sovereignty absolutely exists. The noise of the traders and grifters just drowns it out.
Also I have legitimately purchased things in person all over the world with bitcoin, including at major department stores. A great way to meet the rare actual cypherpunks though are places that are crypto first, like the pubkey bar in NYC.
I do not trade, and have no interest in trading.
Decentralized payments will be as easy as paypal soon with Silent Payments allowing you to pay someone by email -> dns -> private one time use address, all automatically.
You don't want people to actually use it because like all cryptocurrency it's got quite limited maximum throughput. The problem is worse than usual with Monero - because it's so secure, no data can ever be proven to be unused, so no data can ever be removed from the blockchain.
All of that can be solved or worked around. The much bigger problem is that it's a bit "too anonymous" to ever be tolerated even in most democracies, for better or worse.
I think the only thing that stands a chance is something that partially anonymizes one party to the transaction but not the other, or something that can deanonymize a given transaction only by very publicly and verifiably "breaking glass".
Fortunately, not all governments have completely normalized warrantless wiretaps yet. I think requiring a court order and retroactive notification of suspects whose privacy has been invaded is a good model.
I'd rather have my money work in a way that allows that than in the current status quo, i.e. a complete lack of privacy for anything other than cash (which has different issues and doesn't work so well online).
And even when it's not drugs, I sometimes use it to pay for things online because Visa randomly doesn't want me to use my Visa card for unknown reasons.
I was under the impression you were referring to the Podcasting 2.0 <-> Lightning monetization history. (Podcasting 2.0 includes a few Lightning-related extensions as far as I understand.)
My point stands also if you weren't: Podcasting 2.0 did not invent chapter markers, it only added them to the RSS feed.
> Anything that is crypto-adjacent or sometimes even "not actively opposing" cryptocurrencies is heavily disapproved of here. I get some of it, and agree with much of it, but it always goes too far. Always leads to conclusions not grounded in truth.
I can't deny that I'm coming into crypto-adjacent discussions with some preconceptions, even though I'm sympathetic to many of the ideas, and don't treat the ecosystem as a monolith. There are well-intentioned folks in it, but also libertarian fanatics, corporate short-term-profit maximizers, social media grifters... I really wouldn't say that only crypto critics are at fault for the lack of grounding in truth. (And I say that as somebody that's been somewhat involved with it for a very long time.)
If you're one of the remaining well-intentioned folks in what has largely become a sea of grift, I do feel for you, but I also understand where people here are coming from.
Ok, yes, that is true (some podcasting 2.0 features are re-implementations, but there is much more and I wouldn't call them "crypto-people", that's just a term that paints those people in a bad light, especially here on HN, where "crypto" is a loaded term.
Yes part of podcasting 2.0 is lightning payments (which address a lot of issues people here have with crypto and has the potential to support indi devs and creators more fairly), but I admit I played with it and it is not there (yet).
Edit: And thank you for your thoughtful answer. There are some real lunatics on the crypto side indeed.
These things have more effects than you think. IPFS just lost all funding because the NFT craze is over and they didn't find any alternative grift. That means the public gateways and general knowledge of the project will fade away and there won't be maintenance on the software.
IPFS did not lose all funding. Please check your facts.
IPFS has largely failed to find adoption as a protocol because it was over engineered and did not give users what they want.
People don't want decentralization. What they want is the downstream effects of decentralization like privacy, disaggregation of powerful entities, and permissionless participation.
For a protocol to be adopted it needs to give individual users these things in practice, not simply be "decentralized" in design.
That is an unfair judgement. There are people there using LN, just as there are others using Monero, BCH or whatever crypto rocks their boat.
I develop for NOSTR and use zero cryptocurrencies because the communication aspect is what matters, especially the account with npubs which are basically universal entry cards to avoid anyone having to create separate accounts just to use some website or app.
NOSTR is a protocol so there's no entity for you to be bitter with... You can be annoyed at the people who were on there, but that's a different subject.
There's probably a better analogy than this, but what you're describing would be like playing soccer and being annoyed that your teammates are furries. Go find another team to play with.
But now imagine that the regulating body of your favorite hobby sport is deeply corrupt and fundamentally profit driven, so while playing with your friends is still fun, just thinking about ever competing at the regional level makes you shiver. [1]
Sure, you can always fork a protocol/not federate with who you dislike etc., but you might find yourself fighting an uphill battle against other people’s experiences and preconceptions. Protocols are ultimately always designed by people too.
[1] Note that I have no experience with either Nostr or professional football, so take this as a purely hypothetical analogy with no relation to real organizations. I have to assume both are lovely passion projects by people that just share a common passion.
Sure, Fifa is quite corrupt. I still like to play soccer with my friends and organized sports in my town. I don't refuse to play the game simply because of Fifa.
if the protocol were to change, clients and relays would have to also be willing to adopt the change, almost if not all of which are open-source and easily forked if a large population did not care to pull in those changes. Sure there's always someone guiding the direction, but I don't know how much better you can get than that.
I honestly think it would be completely legit to build a completely separate ecosystem on top of the same protocol. A separate set of relays, separate apps which connect to those relays by default, no lighting payments, different defaults, marketed to a different audience. Ultimately it is not just a single network. If users need interoperability eventually they can easily add other relays. But it's true that many people are put off by the current community.
Nah, you didn't understand it. Lightning is a layer-2 protocol on top of bitcoin. Nostr is the so-called layer-3. Good luck trying to build Nostr without Lightning.
It’s easy to have Nostr without it. Lightning support was an afterthought and you can just choose not to implement that NIP in the client. On the relay side you could just filter out that event type. Not hard at all.
The amount of ignorance about Nostr (by both pro and antis) is astounding for such a simple concept. I feel like literally nobody reads the very short specs.
False. Nostr is not “Layer 3” in any standard technical sense. Nostr is an open, decentralized protocol for exchanging and publishing messages/events. It doesn't sit on top of Bitcoin or Lightning in the way Lightning sits on Bitcoin. You absolutely can build/use Nostr without Lightning. Stop with this (anti-crypto)-bro fear mongering (yes anti-crypto in brackets as 1 thing). It's not helping FOSS, it's doing big-tech's work.
You're just lying because you hate crypto. That is as bad as the blind evangelizing of cryptocurrencies.
If you have any other proposal for true micropayments (as in fractions of cents of value that flow freely) please, indulge me. I for one would prefer to give value via lightning over forcing my eyeballs on ads everywhere I look.
Same goes for the agents I deploy, I'd like to have methods of returning value for whatever value they extract (in the form of information).
I indeed misunderstood, didn't realize that was you yourself you linked to. Sorry we are on the same boot it seems. Still, you're wrong about Nostr being useless without Lightning. And it is unhelpful to suggest it is.
You stand corrected, and I stand corrected too because I just watched https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tbt3jL1Ms0w (as suggested by other user in another comment) and it finally clicked.
Imo any fair future economy should embrace decentralized 9ie without a company taking a cut Apple style) frictionless sharing of value. Either that or we must have strive for a fair post-scarcity economy (Star Trek like). The way things are going I'm even more skeptical about achieving that.
Have we not learned that there's nothing money can't corrupt? Friction is probably a good idea or the network will be overrun by some kind of micro-scam demanding $0.00001 every millisecond from every user.
You can still send money without integration, but you have to copy-paste an address into a separate bitcoin program and click a few buttons.
You can't blame the protocol for the user it attracts. It is in early development. Just imagine the year is 1996 and you are complaining that WWW, IRC and the USENET is full of male tech nerds with a STEM background and a taste in SciFi/Fantasy culture. It will take some a while for the evolution to happen until you can get your beauty and makeup styling content.
>you are complaining that WWW, IRC and the USENET is full of male tech nerds with a STEM background and a taste in SciFi/Fantasy culture
that'd be a big step up because when I tried Nostr the last time I didn't even see people discussing computer science or pulp literature, but just random cryptocurrency nonsense, the equivalent of a room full of high school dropouts trying to sell you Tupperware at the door
I do think you can blame a protocol for the users it attracts. The medium's the message. A protocol is designed with intent, if there was no relation between a protocol and its users, what's the point of inventing it, just use an existing one.
'Writing' covers a lot of creative tasks. You might very well enjoy creating plots, characters, ideas, situations, but find the actual business of putting thousands of words down on a page tedious.
Yes, but then you are just an idea guy. Why bother, when you are not interested in the act of writing, or worse, don't enjoy the experience of writing at all, including the struggles that come with writing? There are no stakes in writing as a hobby. Once fiction exists in abundance as a product, the question arises all the more as to why one should adopt a production-centred perspective on writing.
The actually act of writing is a lot of raw time sunk doing something that might not be very enjoyable. Time that can be spent doing other things, like preparing the plot, etc for another book or just enjoying reading other works or whatever. The LLM handles that bulk of tedium that the author doesn't want to deal with, where in the past they were forced to whether they enjoyed doing it or not. Nothing wrong with being an ideas person; heck this is now the age of the ideas person.
So a book that was “stunningly good, everyone fell in love with it. It’s a book that appeals to absolutely everyone.” now won't be published because AI was used to create it?
Personally I prefer stunningly good over exclusively human created.
I'd want to read it before passing judgement on the quality of it, not trust the word of the author's agent, one Marc Gerald of 'Europa Content', who you are quoting here. It appears a lot of people in the chain up to the editor failed at their job here, probably because they are submerged in slop submitted using LLMs and maybe the first chapter was good and had work put into it.
Clearly the editor didn't think it was stunningly good, or they wouldn't have flagged it up.
Gen AI is at a point now where it can write good chapters. You still need a human editor to make it coherent, plug plot holes and tie it all together.
So if you can write a good book, but can't write good chapters, a Gen AI ghostwriter is an ideal tool.
Output quality will vary.
Oh good. I have a spare spot in my front yard to place it. Or maybe I'll just set it down on my dining room table.
Wait...I might want something more secure than that. And if I have a lot of gold I might need to pay people to protect it. These storage costs are going up.
Ridiculous. Gold takes very little space. No individual really has a lot of it where storage becomes a constraint. It is obvious when someone has an agenda against it.
Yeah which is why I added the "and platform your buddies" and the "but the people that give them death threats should" bits but they probably were too parenthetical to come across.
Most recently in my case: "$3.5 million scam victims compensation fund".
People who want me to hear them belong to one of two groups: I want that, or I don't.
The second group may be expected to be overwhelmingly spammers and scammers, with a smattering of tankies and kooks, because the ability to reach the largest possible audience is attractive to them, right? So what you think, should each recipient maintain his/her own filter, or should the platform include some sort of common filter?
My local grocery store discontinued the use of plastic bags entirely. They now do a tidy trade in reusable bags at $1 a pop. Many of which are used only once.
Those fakes are a real scourge. People lose their data in addition to their money.
Very easy to spot fake listings but the platforms allow them to proliferate. I consider the platforms to be criminally culpable because of the wilful neglect.
These ones are fairly obvious as though they adopt the same model name and colouring than the original, they do not show a Samsung or WD brand. I suspect they do that to avoid giving standing to these companies to sue them. If the distributor (ebay) doesn't care, and the buyers are individuals who will not sue, they act pretty much with impunity.
