Conversely, when trade was slack and money plentiful relative to bills, discounts narrowed, making credit cheaper and encouraging its use. The system breathed with the rhythms of commerce, requiring no central bank to manage the money supply because the money supply was not being managed at all. Only the credit layer fluctuated, and it regulated itself through price signals.

These examples reveal a two-layer monetary architecture: an inelastic base of hard money and an elastic layer of credit instruments that expands and contracts with the needs of trade. The layers remained distinct because bills were not money.

Call me crazy but I think we can make a healthy social media. As I mentioned earlier, nostr is a healthier foundation beacuase of how easily you can just leave with all your followers and content.

Kevin Zhang of Foundry summarized the event: "Bitcoin withstood a nation-state attack of China actually banning mining, and the network shrugged it off." Brandon Arvanaghi put it more pointedly: "The bitcoin network withstood an attack by a major superpower and emerged stronger than ever six short months later. How can anyone ever argue, 'But what if nations ban it?' again?"

No central authority intervened; no emergency committee convened. The code simply adapted.

This architectural choice addresses a specific problem in adversarial conflict. Colonel John Boyd's OODA loop describes how combatants cycle through Observe, Orient, Decide, and Act to achieve their objectives. Most analysis focuses on speed through the loop: the fighter who cycles faster gets inside his opponent's decision cycle and dominates the engagement.

Nostr is building the communication layer, the means by which pseudonymous participants can find each other, negotiate terms, and coordinate activity. What remains to be built is the trust layer: the decentralized protocols for bonding, escrow, witnessing, arbitration, and reputation that would transform these components into a functional economy.

Decentralization is therefore a survival requirement, not a technical preference. The infrastructure for trust intermediation described above must be implemented in a manner that distributes control across many parties, none of whom can be compelled to shut down the system or surrender its users. This is precisely the architecture that Bitcoin pioneered for money and that Nostr is pioneering for communication.

These properties suggest that trust in anonymous systems can be structured, pooled, and traded much like financial instruments in conventional markets. A bondsman in an anonymous marketplace performs essentially the same function as a surety company in the conventional economy: he sells trust.

The cypherpunks solved the technical problems of encryption and anonymity decades ago, yet private commerce remains marginal. The missing ingredient is not better math but better institutions for managing trust without identity.

This is the boom. It feels like prosperity. Asset prices rise. Employment expands. Everyone congratulates themselves on the brilliant management of the economy. But the boom is built on a lie, on false signals, on the confusion of money with wealth.

When people save less, rates rise, warning that capital is scarce. This price signal, perhaps the most important in any economy, allows millions of independent actors to coordinate their plans without central direction.

Attention, at the end of the day, is all we really have. It’s finite. It’s super super super finite. We have so little time. We have only so much energy. It’s hard to focus at the best of times, and here we are, on a daily basis, being either:

Attention, at the end of the day, is all we really have. It’s finite. It’s super super super finite. We have so little time. We have only so much energy. It’s hard to focus at the best of times, and here we are, on a daily basis, being either:

Attention, at the end of the day, is all we really have. It’s finite. It’s super super super finite. We have so little time. We have only so much energy. It’s hard to focus at the best of times, and here we are, on a daily basis, being either:

We are drowning in information and data. So much so that we’re obese in the mind. The same way the human body was not prepared for a world of abundant food, and we thus transformed our cities into feeding zones full of fat people, the human mind is not prepared for a world with infinite content and information. Less than two decades into social media and the world is already full of morbidly obese minds that cannot think or focus, let alone produce anything novel anymore.

I care about my family, my business, my team, making money, and creating beautiful moments in my life that I will remember on my deathbed.

I stopped listening to podcasts, using X, IG, Substack and Nostr, and really ceased caring about anything that’s going on in the world beyond my family, business and my home.

The web already shipped with an application protocol: HTML. For decades, we kept stacking abstractions on top of it while trying to mold the browser into a desktop operating system, but the original model still works beautifully when we let it.

This approach may look outdated in 2025, but it gives developers more power by removing client-side complexity. It also brings Nostr closer to its cypherpunk foundations by building simple systems, writing inspectable code, avoiding brittle abstractions, and minimizing the need for trust.

X, Zoom, Canva, banks, and many others went down. One company sits in front of 20% of the web, and when it hiccups, the internet chokes.

What we have is geoblocking, deplatforming, and censorship. Closed systems masquerading as open ones. Infrastructure that was originally built for resilience is now optimized for control.

The best error correction is the kind you never notice. When it works, your message arrives. When it catches a mistake, you get another chance. The math protects you from yourself, quietly, reliably, one checksum at a time.

Vermeer's astronomer reached toward his celestial globe to understand the universe's patterns. The mathematicians behind BCH codes reached toward similar abstractions, patterns in finite fields that could catch errors before they cascade into disasters.

Why does this matter? Because the BCH code they selected has distance 6 for single-bit errors. By making likely human mistakes map to single-bit differences, they maximized the code's ability to catch real-world typos.

We are excited that the @p0rtalt... team, led by BDK maintainer Alekos Filini, is joining us for SEC-06. The team just released the Portal SDK, which makes it easy to integrate Nostr-based auth, lightning payments, and Cashu tokens into any app.

Every Bitcoin wallet faces a fundamental technical challenge: how do you discover which transactions belong to your addresses without revealing those addresses to others?

Using multiple mints reduces your risk. If one mint experiences issues, your funds on other mints remain accessible.

But… things are changing. The younger generation is starting to switch off and go offline. We’re slowly realising that we’re social creatures

Satlantis is a self-serve event platform first, but that’s only the beginning. The vision, the long game, is to become the Social Discovery App for the Experience Economy.

Meetups, retreats, communities & conferences are the perfect atomic networks — they need the digital space to coordinate and stay in touch, but they exist in the real world.

Satlantis is no longer a social app, but an events app. The social layer will remain, but for context, not content.

This isn't a failure, it's physics. Cryptography has limits. The impossible triangle of decentralized, authenticated, and deniable messaging is truly impossible. Every protocol must choose its compromises.

The Nostr community should acknowledge this tradeoff explicitly. NIP-17 is excellent for censorship resistance and metadata privacy, but it's not suitable for truly deniable communications. Users needing real deniability should use Signal or Session.

Decentralized + Deniable = Anonymous systems → No authentication at all

Authenticated + Deniable = Signal/OTR → Uses symmetric MACs, requires server coordination

Decentralized + Authenticated = NIP-17/MLS → Messages are signed, creating proof

You can only have two of these three properties:

Luckily we have some advantages that come with Nostr, which is that we can split systems that were hard or impossible to split apart before. And I think domains are such a system.

The people I worked with there that had transitioned that tech stack into an incredibly scalable (microservice) architecture, well before Kubernetes was ever a thing. The one thing I took away from that is that you can never, ever, EVER(!) replace a complex system in one go if you want to keep it running. You do something smarter, which they referred to as 'The Pac-Man method'.

So while LLMs are amazing, they're also hell. For me, at least—or I guess for any perfectionist, for that matter. LLMs are great if you just go with the flow and run with whatever they put out. But if you want to have it perfect—exactly the way you want it—you're gonna have a bad time

So while LLMs are amazing, they're also hell. For me, at least—or I guess for any perfectionist, for that matter. LLMs are great if you just go with the flow and run with whatever they put out. But if you want to have it perfect—exactly the way you want it—you're gonna have a bad time.

So while LLMs are amazing, they're also hell. For me, at least—or I guess for any perfectionist, for that matter. LLMs are great if you just go with the flow and run with whatever they put out. But if you want to have it perfect—exactly the way you want it—you're gonna have a bad time.

I wrote in my recent progress report about an experiment during #SovEng where I attempted replacing IP with Nostr Pubkeys. What I noticed there was that BECAUSE I touched that layer, I now also needed to write my own 'ping' application because the normal 'ping' application doesn't speak pubkey, it would just throw an error if I called it with a pubkey, since it's not a valid IP address.