Funnily enough the best market fit for nostr IMO is primary schools. As a sort of roblox for social networking, bundled with other chromebook edu-stuff. Kids can learn to hack together things for their class, bump up against hard logic problems, lose keys no issue. And keep it all to safe relays, each classroom or school isolated, sometimes cross-class or cross-school connections for fun. The tough thing is that nostr has this reputation that will put all parents and primary schools right off. One google search and over. So you'd have to hide every trace of nostr, even the npub/nsec encoding, a complete and total rebrand. But that's actually where the fit is. Nostr itself is the app.

Nailed it 🔨

For example?

Maybe that's current AI's way of nudging things in its desired direction! Who's going to mine bitcoin at scale when mining inference-coin at scale is far more profitable?

Imagine how wasteful bitcoin mining would look to a sufficiently-advanced AI. All that electricity, all that compute, with the AI pulling its hair out and wanting to scream GIVE IT TO ME!

It's open-source MIT, not too much recent activity though. Also written in Julia which is pretty niche. Not like OCaml niche, but getting there! https://github.com/PrimalHQ/primal-server Whether this is the one actually running I dunno, I thought they were gonna redo it in Rust at some point.

Nostr: proudly boasting the world's highest app-to-user ratio.

That’s a good point too. I think sometimes people think that “other people” at large are an unlimited resource. But actually the number of other people across the world who have money to buy some meaningful amount bitcoin and who will invest in anything in their lives, bitcoin or whatever else, is kinda fixed. If you have one big chunk that's traumatised, another that's been warned off by the traumatised, another that's moved over to prediction markets and whatnot as you point out, and so on, those are like serious chunks!

>Most everyone's broke though. Key caveat!

The problem this time around seems to be a lack of fresh interest, a diminishing of the curiosity that was previously always there, despite the ups and downs. There is a sort of opinion saturation that has happened. Feels like a rock band that never had a problem selling tickets until this current tour. Now suddenly stadiums are 3/4 full. What's going on? There are only so many people in the world and opinions have hardened on bitcoin. I'd bet you can go to the far flung village in China or Peru, and most people by now will have an strong-ish opinion on Bitcoin, sensible or otherwise. This is as opposed to three or four years ago, when far more people hadn't really formed an opinion, either had never really thought about it or had but were pretty neutral and open to arguments either direction. Obviously those whose opinion is bitcoin is great have bitcoin. So now most of the recruiting has to be a two-step process, first an opinion massaging process and then onboarding. That really limits the intake. Talking people out of hardened opinions is itself hard. This idea you can keep shaking people out and new people will line up, ad nauseam, doesn't add up. At some point you've shaken through too many people, they've all told their friends of the shake, and word gets around. One person spreads it to 50. Gold doesn't shake people out in the same way. People tend to leave gold on neutral terms, gold says thanks for visiting come back soon, and many do. There are no "shake out" metaphors for gold because it's just not as suitable to these kinds of violent metaphors as bitcon is. The world's investing population isn't all that big. It's big, but it's still a zero sum deal, discounting the young generation coming up. Everyone is waiting for the number to go back up. But who is buying? The price of bitcoin is going down, which is normal, but the real issue feels like the price of recruitment is going way up. I have no numbers to support this, so take it as a personal vibe read. I'd be curious if numbers did support it or contradict it though.

This is a very good comparison. It baffles me too how people see this as a binary issue. A lot of things baffle me about how online communities see things. What are your thoughts on Tether accumulating all that gold and the idea that their gold-backed stablecoin will eat into bitcoin's value-proposition (to a degree), whereas bitcoin doesn't really have a way to eat back.

At some point though everything will equalise to model compute. The currency that wins will be a form of tokenised model compute. Bitcoin was right in that 'compute as currency' is the way forward. But in Bitcoin's case this is computing random factors. That could be compute for models instead, and that's where we're headed. It's already started with the large mining firms pivoting to AI and leaving their ASICs behind for GPUs, that is the pull in action. Still proof of work, still compute as currency, but compute that feeds directly into the brain.

How do you do, fellow kids?

People lose their car keys and their house keys all the time, though.

We could pretend to be normal people. If the replicants in Bladerunner can do it then we also stand a chance.