“Means what they say” is too low a bar.

How does it work? I thought the identity _is_ the pubkey, which is determined by the signing key, and so irrevocable.

(Tried viewing the demo but browser saying can’t connect.)

That is interesting. I also sense the difference but until your post, just took it as X having more compelling content. I still think that’s true, but you’re right that maybe “compelling” isn’t the right yardstick. Nostr is closer to a digital version of real life. Not so much the bitcoin part (I don’t know so many bitcoiners IRL), but just the “randomness”.

What are the gaps in Nostr’s censorship resistance?

It seems that Nostr is becoming a backbone for decentralized versions of multiple centralized applications — app store (ZapStore), VPN (Nostr VPN), and now model inference.

I want to like Nostr. And from a technical perspective I find it fascinating. Especially how its design makes institutional insertion much more difficult.

From a user perspective, less so. It feels like attending a dinner party where everybody else knows each other, talking about random things, and I’m just observing.

I get the complaint that X generates addictive behaviors. But there’s a middle ground between mostly viral posts and mostly random posts.

I wonder whether “relevant posts” is just something that decentralized platforms have a hard time doing.

The “open protocols” they mention have institutional insertion points.

It looks like it’s sats — the left phone says it received 420 sats — but yeah the right phone has the bitcoin symbol.

Now that’s a new angle

The fixed supply solves one kind of unfairness, which is the world inflating away your money.

I take Green to be pointing out that the moat builds against that counts as its own type of unfairness and temporal Cantillon. I think he’s right about that.

One place where I would push back is the idea that the entrenchment is permanent. Over time the holdings are distributed to heirs and in the fullness of time, they make their way out into society more broadly. Also we see that OGs do sell their bitcoin when the price runs.

I’m not so sure he’s wrong. What’s interesting is that his argument against the ideology presupposes the investment case.

Michael Green’s recent Substack “Bitcoin Is Not Sound Money” was thought-provoking. Unusual in that he acknowledges the investment case for bitcoin while challenging the ideological case.