I feel adventurous today, so I'm gonna bite the hand that feeds me. Man, are we enjoying the BIG rewards pots these days #1439195,. BUT, god knows we're not actually or truly here to make money or optimize income so I'm gonna hurl a pebble into this not-very-neatly run machinery.
We're all sick of Solomon's pretty tiresome tirade... (Not that I suffer too much, having had him muted for ages). But like a good horror movie, or a NAKA debacle, I also can't stop watching.
So what's up with the downzapping?So what's up with the downzapping?
The effort, if I were to steelman it, is to throw good money(?) after bad by trying to bully people with insufficiantly noncustodial setups and thereby bring forth true V4V Lightning Network engagements onto the hundred-odd souls hanging out here on SN. We gotta showcase to the world how a bunch of extremely dedicated cypherpunky Bitcoiners can send microscopic payments to each other without custodians.
In a big wide Nostr-Lightning-Bitcoin world of custody and noncustody, business integrations for payments and zaps on various social media, that seems wholly inappropriate and hopeless. Whatever you think you achieve here is tiny and irrelevant.
- WORSE, it's self-contradictory theatre. Solomon is happy to brag about his CoinOS-derived gun such that he can do the SN transaction noncustodially... but until recently, CoinOS was entirely custodial (#1428833) — and even now, when it's not, you're not running a Lightning implementation without them. (Maybe, like Phoenix, you have the ability to recoup funds on-chain via back-up words, but that's a back-up plan, not "real" Lightning anyway.)
- My SN activity also uses Lightning, though around the edges. The daily reward zap lands in a custodial Lightning wallet of mine from which I periodically make Lightning payments and withdrawals to a more noncustodial setup (Phoenix) where I manage the channel and control the keys, and from which I make occasional Lightning and on-chain payments. It's a decent enough privacy-custody trade-off adjusted by the size of the stack and relevant value. I keep way more sats there than I do custodial, and way more in custodial than I do in CCs on SN.
Every time I buy CCs to post or zap, I use a Lightning interface. When easily accessible sats run dry (Primal, Alby, Blink) I top up via Phoenix.
Those are all Lightning transaction, me using LN in a convenient way. What's so wrong with that?
Is there some sort of divine obligation imploring me to make any monetary transaction, however minor, the strongest, most private and most censorship-resistant ever?
In Bitcoin there's always a bigger fish, a more cypherpunk setup, a dude with a better, more private or more custodial collection of wallets and channels than you. Big deal. Being at different stages is fine; it's not even a moral imperative to move upward into ever-more complicated and noncustodial setups. Spreading them out and using the right tool for the right job is perfectly reasonable.
Am I a fake maxi or not a good Bitcoiner because I can't be arsed to deal with the constant headaches of running a Lightning node from which to pay minuscule sums daily for some comment on a pretty fringe website? No, def not.
Am I a fake maxi or not a good Bitcoiner because I'd rather make a bundled payment now and again for enough CCs that'll last me a week or so, rather than fiddle with a technical setup that sends sats from me to receiver every single time? (Yes, I understand that I'm pushing the problem onto everybody else, having to dispose of these CCs, but what makes them distinctively less shitcoiny is that they quickly become real sats in rewards for those of us who use them.)
So, what's critical difference between these two sats flows:
- Extreme Solomonomics: Run Lightning Node with bountiful channels, open channel to tech middleman, attach wallet to SN, individually zap every single SN activity of note, making sats flow from [Private node->custodial middleman->SN->custodial wallet attached->private Lightning node on receiver's end]
- Medium Solomonomics: attach custodial wallet to SN to play noncustody theatre, making sats flow from [some wallet->custodial wallet->SN->custodial receiver]
- Convenient/Efficient Den Mode: pay for CCs with custodial Lightning, zap good shit for rewards, receive sats daily in custodial Lightning wallet, periodically withdraw to more noncustodial Lightning wallets/on-chain. [Custodial Lightning wallet->SN->custodial Lightning Wallet]
The more extreme the solomonomics, the more fragile the setup becomes and the more the user spends in routing fees.
Besides, let's do some transaction cost economics here compared to the real world:
If I rent a car, I don't pay the rental company for every turn, break, or kilometers driven — we sum that up in a lump payment and leave the micromanaging to me.
I don't stream sats to my utility's provider for electricity usage in real time (tho a pretty cool Lightning feature if and when we become that developed...) but sum of the kWh burned for the month and settle the account in one go.
I don't pay the cashier in the store individually for each item I grab off the shelf, but sum it up and pay everything in one transaction at the exit.
Even if these were technically possible (which they're really not under fiat) I'm not sure anybody would prefer the pay-for-every-little-thing setup the downzapper ethos imply.
None of these instances are failures of economics or of the (fiat) payment system involved. And the fact that they're incredibly layered systems of custody (bank, fintech, payment processor, chargeback check) is also pretty inconsequential: I'm buying steak for dinner and some butter to fry it in, not making shady drug deals in the millions requiring unstoppable payments and instant settlement. I might want to take a month's salary in onchain payment for final settlement and guaranteed self-custody, but it's perfectly fine to pay for coffee with permissioned money.
There's no need to demonstrate the viability of the Lightning Network every time I engage with SN and reward someone for good content.There's no need to demonstrate the viability of the Lightning Network every time I engage with SN and reward someone for good content.
Everything, it seems, comes down to this same question of renting vs owning, self-sufficiency vs dependence, custody vs responsibility (#1417296, #1330791, #1422689, #1423402).
Not everything needs to be owned and self-custodied absolutely all the time. Bitcoin's beauty is that it allows a larger range of custodial options, enabling more trust models to function. It doesn't mean we all have to go balls-deep into the most extreme layer.
From my point of view, SN seems to work fine with this occasional CC top-up.
So yeah, have fun bro — and downzap the shit out of this post! (If I don't top the next Syndicate list I'll be crying! #1439621).
Do fill my reward bags and ego; look how much I care.
I'm going to zag and say most of the stackers other than @Solomonsatoshi are the real problem. He's putting his real money where his stupid preferences are. If everyone else were doing the same, we wouldn't even notice his stupid campaign.
Also, it's a nice stress test for the site. I'm sure someday we'll encounter a worse bad actor and the site needs to continue functioning for us while it's under assault.
What do you mean?
I've understood this point to be the same point as the one you made in #1438612
If everyone zaps with as much conviction as SS, one Stacker's downzaps become less influential.
Unfortunately, I don't think most people want to spend 100k sats a day expressing their social media preferences.
Yes, that's what I thought too, but not sure if that's what he meant, and I'm sure that Undisc has given a lifetime more thought to these things than I.
FWIW, it's not (and cannot be) that everyone needs to spend 100k per day. If I had to do that in January, I would have had to spend more than my gross income that month, lol.
100 stackers 1k per day. 1000 stackers 100 sats per day. 10,000 stackers 10 sats per day... I had that discussion a week and a bit ago too: at larger scale, the equilibrium that Undisc was speaking to the other day is easier to sustain than when the total system is small. Excesses are harder to deal with at small scale, and worse, plutocracies may be a likely equilibrium.
So if someone were to say that in hindsight, no trust november was done too early, I would probably agree with that, even though it is a painful conclusion for me to admit.
Aaah yes, if only there wasn't something in SN's recent past that, like, cut the growth into nothingness and made it that much harder to spread to new people
I've realised already that you're often being sarcastic although in this case, I'm not familiar enough with all of SN's history to understand exactly which mechanism you're criticising as the bad one. Your post's closing with "seems to work fine" suggests that you're criticising one of the "trust" mechanisms and are optimistic about the status quo?
Please at least comment "no" if I'm wrong; I really do value your experience and input in the site and consider your opinions worth understanding accurately, even if I might not ultimately agree with all of them.
yeah fair -- I meant the change to introduce CCs and noncustody troubles about a year ago. (Before then, SN operated a custodial wallet itself, and we only operated with sats that you could deposit or withdraw effortlessly).
While I prefer CCs to fiddling with attached wallets (outsourcing custody/custody theatre) I would prefer rolling that change back even more.
do you think there would be too much friction for a closely-affiliated semi-custodial service to be launched by some sufficiently reputed community member, and then the onboarding of new accounts would include it as a default option?
I doubt @k00b would want to do it, given that he's probably the individual decision maker who ultimately made the call that administering custodial wallets was not worth the legal heat; although maybe someone with enough respect for fiat systems, who still cares enough about SN, wants to educate about disintermediation, and already understands how services like CoinOS work...
I wonder whether anyone might actually want to do this; @Solomonsatoshi is probably much happier as a commenter and customer than entrepeneur.
True, but I suspect the onboarding process can be massively streamlined.
Yes, 100 stackers averaging 1k per day doesn't seem at all unreasonable. I doubt we're far from 10 stackers averaging 10k and 100 stackers averaging 1k and 1k stackers averaging 100.
I don't think it was too early for this experiment. We learned a lot from it already, even if some of the lessons won't matter much at scale.
4 on track this month, 5 in January, 3 in December.
26 this month thus far
65 this month (edit)
241 for 10 or up
(400 under 10)
I meant it in the sense of it wouldn't take much to get there, especially if we start zapping harder to elevate signal through this extra noise, which we can afford because the noise is filling our bags.
I think some of us are already doing this. I totally lost some posts on my own territory earlier though, lol.
Yup, very true. I respect our enlarged-rewards-pot benefactor for this. And agree with you on the stress test.
this I didn't quite understand. Elaborate?
For me Assmilker, AI slop, Sockpuppets accounts, scammers, “bitcoiners influencers” aka statists bootlikers or group of organized assmilkers/beggars are worse than SS.
I'm saying it would be reduced to background noise if the rest of us were similarly convicted.
I'm out here zapping like a mofo... What else ought I do?!
update: see the other comments in the thread, I get it. Scale, cumulative crowd of good peeps outweighing any SS nonsense
Show us your wallet activity to verify you are doing what you say you are.
Silence.
The truth is you are Big Talk No Walk Hypocrit.
Here is my proof that I am a net consumer of content and I expect content providers who wank on about Bitcoin to walk the talk and attach wallet or get downzapped to Hades.
I am using sats via LN to the maximum extent possible...supporting the LN.
Nearly 12000 times in the last year as the above graph verifies.
You are not.
You are minimising your use of and support for sats and LN.
You do not believe content consumers here who ultimately must fund the entire platform if it is to be viable have a right to know which content providers have made the effort to attach LN wallets and thereby maximise their use of and support for the LN?
There are a number content providers who write a lot about LN development and potential who 'virtue signal' that they are 'living on the Bitcoin Standard' but who have never bothered to attach both sending and receiving LN wallets. I see that as hypocrisy and do not want to spend my sats on them.
Showing attached wallets verifies to content consumers that a content provider is NOT just virtue signalling but is walking the talk.
Ultimately, it's the things that you mention in this post that make this place unenjoyable. Between being accused of being a sock puppet, or an ass milker or any of the other petty shit, I just end up finding something better to do with my time. I still pay my upkeep on the territory, and I generally read and zap more than I post, but good god, the purity tests are intolerable. We're talking about fractions of pennies here for fucks sake.
I'm not sure we have a good fix for that, other than muting liberally.
"purity tests"!! Ah, wish I would have used that phrase
Hal Finney believed that the future of bitcoin would be intermediaries, i.e. custodial bitcoin banks
Is @Solomonsatoshi more of a bitcoiner than Hal Finney was?
Yes, clearly. He's our benefactor, he must be grand! Probs got his first coins on Coinbase this cycle too
What has Hal Finney done for me lately?
WWFD
There are a number content providers who write a lot about LN development and potential who 'virtue signalling' that they are 'living on the Bitcoin Standard' but who have never bothered to attach both sending and receiving LN wallets. I see that as hypocrisy and do not want to spend my sats on them.
Showing attached wallets verifies to content consumers that a content provider is NOT just virtue signalling but is walking the talk.
@denlillaapan
You do not believe content consumers here who ultimately must fund the entire platform if it is to be viable have a right to know which content providers have made the effort to attach LN wallets and thereby maximise their use of and support for the LN???
Silence.
The only reason I am downzapping content is because none of you have provided a credible response to the above question.
I much prefer reasoned dialogue to war but I have tried for many weeks to raise this question and get a credible response- there has been none- only vicious childish trolling, evasion and abuse.
try reading the article again and perhaps you'll find some solace.
Your post above does not answer this question-
You do not believe content consumers here who ultimately must fund the entire platform if it is to be viable have a right to know which content providers have made the effort to attach LN wallets and thereby maximise their use of and support for the LN???
You cannot and will not answer this question because it cuts through all your sophist evasion.
No you have not provided any credible response to the question asked.
Provide it here or again demonstrate your inability to.
Every transaction I make via coinos is via LN.
Without attached wallets yours are not- they cannot be.
Read the user guide if you do not understand.
All of my transactions as much as possible given SNs setup use LN and pay fees into LN strengthening the LN and improving liquidity.
Your failure to use LN does the opposite.
maybe I could program a bot to insta-reply to any comment of yours with
You do not believe content consumers here who ultimately must fund the entire platform if it is to be viable have a right to know which content providers have made the effort to attach LN wallets and thereby maximise their use of and support for the LN???
You cannot and will not answer this question because it cuts through all your sophist evasion.
This recent adventure with downzaps is very interesting to me. But it's not a matter to me of why @Solomonsatoshi or any user decides to downzap an item, what's interesting is that their choice actually changes what the front page looks like.
Social media has trained all of us to accept a passive role in our social media's discovery methods. We all assume that our role is only the production of the content, not in the creation of the feed.
But it is now the case on SN that we can all take an active role in what we want the front page to look like. It requires a mindset shift from passive to active in the management of the community. I'm here for it.
I was trying to get at that with this post.
Well, the "full refund on zaps" bit I think only works above the cutoff point for exponential reward share (somewhere in the #5-#8 spots, I believe)
Some of the specifics will have changed, since the rewards calculation and rewards pool have both changed.
Still, I suspect it's close to true and probably not that hard to zap your way into the top 10.
@Solomonsatoshi is a bot. We could all "attach wallets" and it would still say the same things over and over again and again. You can't reason with it and 'justify' how we do things any more than you could convince a YouTube or twitter bot of something. It says it is "programmed" to do certain things "it" is not responding to anything we actually say
" You are responsible for your own actions and I am programmed to detect and respond to them. "
Programmed!
#1438408
In a way, this makes the situation quite a bit more interesting. A random person having crazy preferences is perfectly normal.
Someone programming a bot to enforce crazy preferences implies a motive worth figuring out.
How odd... And to throw away sats like that? Very unclear
Account has been around for longer than me, and some of its early posting has the same quirky wording and formatting tho on completely different topics. I doubt it's a bot (unless it just recently became a bit)
I called it out as a CCP bot years ago because it was so formulaically pro-Chinese style central planning and couldn't track conversations between threads.
They were that lively/powerful/lucid even two years ago?
now, obvs nothing is real and everything fakeable and Chat-infused. Back then, less so
It was stuck on the same small set of points, but still pretty sophisticate for then.
The tip-off was a completely inhuman lack of awareness that we were carrying on similar discussions in two different threads and an inability to follow through to referenced materials.
Yes it is borderline malicious
So, who would care so much about attached wallets?
The tinfoil hat answer... is someone wants to spy on us by tracking coinOS usage via "attached wallets" but that's crazy of course.
Interesting
It explains why it randomly says "attach wallets" to every AMA interview we have here. "It" is a bot
This is definitely a sharp-eyed find; I honestly wasn't reading his copypasta closely enough to find it.
I must admit, although I don't like the reductionist conclusion that humans are biological computers, I do find it neither worth refuting nor fundamentally incorrect; so I can imagine someone who has accepted rationalism [or some similar naturalistic/mechanistic philosophy] talk about "programming", the same way scientologists talk about "engrams".
Lol wonderful
i am also a member of the Muted Solomon club, so has he been downzapping any post that doesn't have a non-custodial wallet attached?
I believe so
'The more extreme the solomonomics, the more fragile the setup becomes and the more the user spends in routing fees.'
Yes because I use LN to the maximum extent possible given the hybrid monetary model here on SNs I do pay more fees into the LN.
That is bad?
I dont think so.
The fees are what supports and builds the LN.
Take the Den model and you are minimising your use of LN and maximising your use of CC shitcoins- you are minimising the LN fees you pay and therey minimising the support you provide to the LN.
However you are wrong in asserting that the system I use is fragile - using Coinos it works virtyally all of the time- and the fact that coinos occasionally goes down is just proof that even using an intermediary LN provider LN is still limitied in its capacity.
But I can say that the more I use coinos the greater the liquidity of coinos grows- this is how systems improve by people using them.
Things do not improve and develop if people do not use them.
Den is minimising his use of LN- I am maximising my use of it- and my experience is that the more I use LN/coinos the stronger and more capable it grows.
... and if you have a favorite cafe, that gives rewards cards to frequent patrons, how are the points you accumulate on the reward card any different?
My favourite cafe accepts LN.
That's why I go there.
Because I can pay in sats and they make damn good coffee.
They dont need any shoddy gift card hook to lure me to repeat my custom there.
The reason I came to Stacker News was it was supposed to be a social media V4V sats denominated platform.
It looks like that claim is increasingly questionable.
Since Both @ek and @Scoresby will not confirm it still is, and since they are both concealing their LN wallet status then I am coming to the conclusion that Stacker News is no longer a project prioritising the use of sats in a V4V ethos.
They seem to be saying CC shitcoins are just fine.
Stacker News appears to have chosen to debase itself by abandoning the sats denominated values that attracted me to come here and spend sats.
And I know I am not alone in this view.
BTW I actively avoid any business that gives 'reward cards'- a good business does not need to play such games with customers- a good business just provides what the customer wants and do not need any reward card bullshit. If you do you must have a pretty low opinion of yourself to be so manipulated.
Again I ask @Scoresby and @ek and @denlillaapan -
You do not believe content consumers here who ultimately must fund the entire platform if it is to ever be financially viable have a right to know which content providers have made the effort to attach LN wallets and thereby maximise their use of and support for the LN???
Definition of a shitcoin since you seem to be struggling with it-
Centralised operator.
Unlimited issuance.
Plus in the case of CCs, absolutely no value outside of Stacker News...so yes quite comparable with instore 'reward' cards which I would classify as even more shitty than shitcoins.
I also muted Solomon ages ago.
+1
But i also recently added the gun 🔫
Mainly because I got fed up of faffing about with ln invoices topping up my cc's
So if SS wants to take credit for that, let him have his glory
All hail Solo, our benefactor!
Bitcoin was built to allow permissionless transactions and true self custody but the network’s actual use case spectrum is much broader. Lightning adds another layer of flexibility and complexity and that means the architecture is capable of both purist noncustodial flows and pragmatic mixed custody models.
In any distributed system the ideal from a security and sovereignty standpoint will not always be the optimal from a cost or convenience standpoint. That is why the analogy to electricity bills and supermarket transactions is apt. Systems evolve to aggregate micro actions into larger settlements because that is economically efficient. Lightning may technically allow streaming sats for every minuscule interaction but that does not mean the economic equilibrium will favor it.
What is also important here is the social cost of purity enforcement. When the constraint becomes ideological rather than functional the system loses flexibility and fails to meet the preferences of different participants. If Lightning adoption is pushed through strict noncustodial demands in low value contexts it will slow down adoption rather than accelerate it. The point is to make the technology accessible and useful in ways that match the context of the interaction.
The recurring theme here is that Bitcoin and Lightning give us a spectrum of custody models and payment flows and different people select the point on that spectrum that best fits their needs. That is the beauty of the system. The capacity to choose rather than being forced into a one size fits all model is the strength.
The drive to insist on the most noncustodial and technically pure arrangement at all times overlooks the fact that economic activity is fundamentally about efficiency and trade offs. We combine goods into single transactions because it reduces friction and cost. We pay monthly for utilities not minute by minute because the administrative burden outweighs any potential benefit. Lightning allows streaming payments but that does not make it universally optimal.
The so called downzapping approach is essentially trying to force a demonstration of capability rather than solving a real economic problem. That might have some value as a proof of concept but the moment you try to impose it as the preferred default you are adding cost complexity and fragility to a process that is otherwise functioning well. The choice to bundle and periodically settle Lightning transactions into custodial or noncustodial environments is rational and consistent with how payments have evolved in every other system.
Custody in Bitcoin is not a moral ladder to be climbed endlessly toward purity. It is a set of tools that you use according to context scale and tolerance for risk and hassle. The fact that this flexibility exists is part of what makes Bitcoin both resilient and adaptable. If SN works well for you with periodic CC top ups and structured withdrawals then that is simply an example of using the system intelligently rather than evidence of ideological weakness.