I plan on going though all these points you have cause while I agree generally there’s some aspects I think are too strong.

First one — “the trade-offs in an African environment are slightly different from the trade-offs in the western world”

The trade offs referenced are usually around infrastructure, intermittent internet connections, electricity, transport (shipments and land).

Additionally the income opportunities, education/exposure and earnings are factors which impact the way technology is built.

These factors aren’t so differnt from rural American or other opportunity places though.

Useful isn’t the result — it’s need for the other parts of the solution that people are flocking to. People don’t care about how the public and private key stuff work, but they’re so much more dissatisfied with what they have now that they are looking for hope and feel like Nostr can be a solution. To take power away, and protect them from cause they’re scared of getting canceled.

This makes Nostr super critical in many ways cause with all the UX difficulties it as a solution means more to them that they’re willing to learn about private keys or pay attention to where they store their data (replays).

It’s great that we have this level of development interest in things adjacent to bitcoin — I really hope to see a next generation of bitcoin wallets that integrate these social tools since there’s such a lack on innovation in that area with current products. Multisig, lightning channels, privacy via payjoin or coinjoins are all social but have shitty UX.

Also agree with all your points. Fantastic article. This is a great opportunity for the development ecosystem of bitcoin — we’re seeing people come into Nostr building on it who are not even bitcoiners. We’ve been stuck in this hamster wheel of developing the same kinds of applications for a while — wallets wallets wallets, now it’s time for building vertically as Roy puts it. Use cases on bitcoin that show off how it is going to be the native currency of the internet.

I would argue that we have seen this kind of interesting development before, Twitter in the early days attracted designers and developers to create all sorts of things on top of its API.

Services and companies were built around that ecosystem. Do you remember twitpic, klout, buffer, foursquare? The difference is now the API will remain open, payments can be integrated natively, and as you stated no central authority.

FUN times ahead for bitcoin!