You may know me as a Bitcoin educator and engineer.

Yeah well, in that case, fuck you and the hypercapitalist horse you rode in on.

This guy is a protocol engineer, talking about protocols. You may not like like Bitcoin, but it’s pretty hard to argue it’s not one of the most successful, widely-used, and forked open source protocols developed in the last several decades. Bitcoin core is in the top 100 starred repos on Github. It has a unicode character.

Bitcoin’s market cap (> 1 trillion USD) is bigger than Sweden’s GDP and it moves billions of dollars around the world every year. You can use it to send money to anybody with a phone and a halfway reliable internet connection in under a second for pennies in fees, and it settles instantly. And it’s been working for 15 years without a single hour of downtime, bank holiday, or hack despite pandemics, wars, financial crises, and attempted bans by global powers.

Like, be mad if you want, but it’s a pretty successful and robust protocol. And if you don’t like it, you can fork it and change it, because it’s open source.

Nostr has. Over the last two months alone, their users have “zapped” (tipped/donated) other users around 950K (nearly 1 mil!) USD worth via lightning and that number continues to grow. And it doesn’t just make it easy to pay content creators, but to also put a portion of your “zaps” towards the relay you use or development of the software if you want. If you have a nostr account, you can easily tie it to a lightning address to send/receive tips, nostr doesn’t take a fee. Relays can also portion out a bit of their zaps for the people who publish the most engaging content on their relay. The possibilities are quite extensive. And because it’s over lightning, zaps happen instantly and for pennies or less in fees. Though, you can use nostr without zaps at all.

For those unfamiliar with nostr, it’s a decentralized social media software much like ActivityPub/mastodon, the main use right now is as a twitter/instagram clone but there’s also a reddit-style section being built up as well. Moderation abilities from the perspective of the instance/relay are identical. But one bonus if that if your relay goes down, you don’t lose your identity, since your identity and relay are separate. And if you change apps or relays (you are typically connected to multiple relays), all your content moves with you seamlessly. And the payment/zap infrastructure is all decentralized, relays don’t ever custody or manage the payments. If you tip a content creator, it goes directly from you to them. The lightning network has basically limitless transaction capacity. If you have cash app, it supports lightning, so you can already send zaps (you will need different apps to receive zaps though because cash app doesn’t support the LNURL standard). Strike natively supports it. And because it’s lightning, it works in every country automatically.

Long-term, if I am a content creator, which “fedi”-type system is going to be attractive to me? One where users can send me tips and mircopayments or one where they can’t? This is why I think nostr is going to win out long-term over AP/Mastodon. Mastodon could add this kind of functionality but I don’t get the impression they’re open to it. People may not want to commit to yet another $5/month subscription to a YouTuber’s patreon or nebula or whatever, but they are happy to tip 1-10c after watching a video. So there’s a psychological beauty to micropayments as well. As some random person I have made like 7c on tips this month, but I’ve also given out plenty to other people.

Source about nostr fees: https://lemmy.ml/post/17824358

True. Impossible to fully censor. Easy to “censor enough”, force out of app stores, and deem illegal while being cheered on by the left and right because they both somehow think it’s in their interests, having abandoned the idea of free speech somewhere along in their ideological trajectory. Just like with TikTok ban or the Digital Services Act.

They’ll start by saying lemmy is spreading “disinformation” or “foreign influence” or “harming children” or whatever their excuse of the day is. Then legislate lemmy apps out of the app stores and go after lemmy server operators or users.

Not saying lemmy couldn’t survive as a network, the point of the meme is the dangerous precedent set when people support things like a TikTok ban and say the government should be able to regulate speech or access to speech in that manner. The government shouldn’t be able to tell you what you can say or think, who you share those thoughts with, or what media you consume. It’s a human right to think and speak and be able to listen to others speak. And unfortunately, for different reasons, both the left and right are cheering on its erosion.

Except they already made Oracle handle all that and they can easily legislate privacy protections without banning TikTok entirely. And, again, it is my right as a citizen to install whatever app I want even if it is spying on me, just like the rest of my apps do. I could film every second of my life and put it up on Facebook or a personal website and the Chinese government could watch it and there’s not a damned thing the US government can do about it.

Digital IDs are step one to a central bank digital currency which is probably the greatest threat to individual liberty, privacy, and financial autonomy we will face in our lifetimes. Imagine a currency supply the government can manipulate at will, where the government has 100% visibility into every transactions you make big or small, where the government can print and un-print money at will or dictate where and how you spend it. And imagine when the political party you don’t like is suddenly in control of this kind of power. Central banks already engage in enough shady behavior and market manipulation and if we give them this power, they will never give it back. This is a dangerous road imo. Plus, a CBDC provided a centralized database of all transactions can be hacked and leaked because that happens to all centralized databases, so now not only does the government know every transaction of yours, so does the world.

If we need the ability to do digital ID verification, there are decentralized opt-in ways to do this which don’t pose these same threats of centralized control and provide a safe opt-out/safety valve mechanism if the people administering that system are not trustworthy. CBDCs provide no such alternative.

Pro tip: The Electronic Frontier Foundation is a non-profit which has been defending your right to privacy for many years. If you shop on Amazon, you can give a portion of the purchase price to EFF. You pay the same amount and daddy bezos gets a few less dollars. Use the affiliate link, not the smile link as smile has been sunsetted: https://www.eff.org/node/58741