[15:51]: It's So Early!

I'm your host, Will Schoellkopf, also known by my name, @realBitcoinDog. I've written The Bitcoin Dog, following descent to the Bitcoin C++ source code, and I'm author of the novel Bitcoin Girl Saved the World. Welcome to my podcast, It's So Early. I'm excited to talk to all of my followers today. In particular, I want to discuss my latest obsession,

Wow, have I just been hooked ever since I found this website and seeing fellow stackers, @grayruby and @Undisciplined, start their own podcast, the ~Stacker_Sports Podcast, which I highly recommend. It inspired me to get back in the saddle as a cowboy and record my own episode. Keeping it brief, I'm on my commute right now to the Bitcoin Peer-to-Peer Festival in Santa Monica and thought, why not? Time to share my thoughts with you all. Thank you for your support. The reason I'm so hooked on Stacker News is definitely the

for @k00b, for @ek. That's really what's so magical about Bitcoin is we're able to see everything completely under the hood. There's nothing hidden. Whether or not you can understand is different from what you're capable of understanding. The code is right there. Everything is right there. The discussion boards, the original email lists, the white paper, anything that you would want to know to understand how Bitcoin works is all there and all transparent. How mining works, the block templates made, the history of every transaction. I think it's so important that in Bitcoin, we can audit where every single Satoshi has come from all the way to the Genesis block. You can't say the same of other cryptocurrencies. You certainly can't say the same about fiat currencies. That's what really gives Bitcoin value is people's ability to don't trust, verify. In social media, that's so important. A lot of criticism of Facebook or Twitter or Reddit is that they're a closed source, proprietary source. Companies, a lot of elements of their algorithms are hidden. Kudos to X for offering a following view instead of a for you view so that you really do only see posts of people you follow. Even then, there's a lot of influence because how you know what accounts to follow in the first place, they have a lot of influence in that. Stacker News, we're really fortunate. It's an incredible thing for @k00b to just have all that code available in GitHub. Like @k00b said to me a couple days ago in my post, I'm brand new to Stacker News and I'm here to break it. Real Bitcoin dog tips and tricks. For all the promise of Stacker News being free open source software, he has never promised that it's decentralized.

It does run on centralized servers. It's up to @k00b to actually host all of the images, all of the content, and serve all the clients, all of us, the pages we're seeing. But he did confirm that in the long term, that would be a vision of how to make Stacker News more resilient, not just by offering completely peer-to-peer lightning transactions, but to decentralize how Stacker News is hosted. I do find it compelling how even us fellow stackers, a lot of us are on ~Nostr, are taking advantage of that decentralized social media, but there's still just so much noise. If anything, ~Nostr might have even more noise because there's no cost to spinning up more accounts and no check to making more posts. It could be even harder to know whose posts you're listening to. I do have belief in it. I think the relays will get better. I will admit that the Primal iOS app gives way faster loading times and response times for me than the Damus iOS app did. But still, there's work to be done there. What I love about Stacker News is it just works. It works right now. I've had fun talking to @DesertDave about founding a territory. I think it's important, if we can as Bitcoiners, to really

It's okay. For example, for Reddit, I was just a lurker for the longest time just reading the posts on Reddit. I would have been a non-person, not contributing, not offering anything new, but just finding humor in the posts there. Of course, that's fine. That's okay. But in Reddit, I had no higher calling. For us Bitcoiners, we have a higher standard. We have a Bitcoin standard. I really do feel we have a responsibility and obligation to push Bitcoin forward. That's the thing. Some people think hyper-Bitcoinization is inevitable, but it's only happening because of human action. It's only happening because we have fellow Bitcoiners writing posts, starting websites, developing lightning wallets to actually make Bitcoin work. It's very important. I'm just having so much fun on Stacker News, just tearing it up, like what is possible, what is capable, like a new toy almost. Really, the most engaging part for me is that instant feedback. Like I said, going on ~Nostr, going on Twitter, it could be talking into an abyss, into a black hole of sorts. I have been able to contribute. I've been fortunate enough to contribute articles to Citadel 21, Bitcoin Magazine, StackChain Magazine, Satoshi's Journal, and be part of those communities, especially those contributor communities. But there's nothing quite as responsive, clearly, as the comments on Stacker News. Really not have people just retweet my articles for the sake of their own clout chasing, boosting their own notoriety. I do have a sense on Stacker News that we have a special group of stackers actually reading the articles we have, which, again, gives me encouragement. Like I said in my Real Bitcoin Dog Tips and Tricks post, that post really did take me two hours to write, but

I had over 100 comments on the post. People really said they got a lot of value from it, and it was funny. Like I predicted, I actually didn't even hit 2,100 sats zapped at the top of the post, which is fine, which is okay. Definitely there were plenty of zaps in all of the comments. If you're on Stacker News to get the sats, get the zaps, it's going to be tough as compared to the time you spend, the effort you spend, versus the sats you get. But that community, that community is the draw, that community is the feeling, that community is what made @Undisciplined and @GrayRuby make a first episode of ~Stacker_Sports and ultimately inspired me to get back to recording my own episode. A huge goal I have is to actually

to the code of Stacker News. I've contributed to the RoboSats Bitcoin project, and I've also just barely touched on the Caravan open source Bitcoin project. So Stacker News, to see how much @k00b and @ek absolutely welcome people developing, I want to be a part of that. I appreciate @grayruby and @Undisciplined saying the way they contribute is by trying to get new recruits. Clearly @grayruby recruited me, but to help on the code would be a big deal, and I just had my latest inspiration from my first pull request that I'll do. Knowing that TurboZap mode exists, knowing that you can set it to randomly, well both exist, you can randomly send between one and a thousand, or ten and a thousand sats in a zap, and then also TurboZap mode to double that. Make a YOLO mode, just for fun, just to prove that it can be done, that people can make changes to the GitHub besides @k00b and @ek. I know people know that intuitively, but to show it off, like, hey we talked about something in the comments section, and I've made a YOLO mode, I've left my mark on Stacker News.

would be a random Satoshi zap amount, but the range would be from 69 to 420, because of course, and then double that with TurboZap mode. So at the most, if you did a double click on your zap, you might accidentally zap 4200 Satoshis. So if you did that, it would be YOLO! Anyway, one of my very first successful posts on Stacker News was tongue-in-cheek, it was titled, I forked Stacker News and it felt so good. And of course, @grayruby was very concerned at first, like, was I going off and leaving the range and making my own Stacker News, making my own social media site to draw away the other stackers? And I said, no, no, this is part of regular GitHub code development. I fork off my own version, I make my code updates, and then I merge them back into the master branch. But let's do it! Let's do it!

the real Bitcoin dog Stacker News, a better one, with blackjack and hookers, of course. I've learned how to launch websites off of GitHub before. There was a lightning startup that I think went out of business called Mash, or GetMash, and they had the ability for me to host my books, Bitcoin Dog and Bitcoin Girl, on a lightning-enabled website, so it was a very neat idea. If readers wanted to read the book, instead of committing to buy the whole book, they could commit to just pay to read one chapter at a time and have a little lightning withdrawal happen as they advanced through the book. As an author, I would have to become a better author, a better writer, to get them to keep reading. I got to get them hooked to want to read the next chapter, to keep getting paid. But by only charging one chapter at a time, they didn't have to commit to purchasing the entire book. So it was a very fun idea, a very neat idea, and it taught me how to take a repository on Git or GitHub and host that for free on Netlify. So Netlify is a website that will take your GitHub code and render it. So I definitely, as a test, first of all, just want to see what happens. If I pull the latest changes to the Stacker News repo out of Git, and that repo is just ready to go, and I point Netlify to my forked Git repo, what renders? What shows up? I'm expecting a lot of error messages, ultimately, because I think, and I want to learn more, how does Stacker News actually work under the hood? But I think there's ultimately a database holding all of the content. You see it in the item numbers in Stacker News. Every single little thing in Stacker News has an item number associated with it. Every post, even every comment. So you could link absolutely anything and everything to Stacker News. The nice thing about Stacker News is it actually loads very quickly. So I would want to see what it looks like if I forked Stacker News in my own GitHub repo, and I pointed Netlify to that, and then I ran the website, free open source software. Does it come up blank? Does it come up missing every single territory that has been founded by the various nyms? Is it completely devoid of any users? Do I have just no users? Is it just no accounts, no users, no posts, no territories? Just how broken is this website? I'm guessing also there's no web server actually running the custodial lightning node. So could I even generate a lightning invoice? Could I even send a bitcoin? I'm not trying to take away from the existing Stacker News. Really, if I could pull it off, it would just be a demonstration of the power that Stacker News has in network effects, which is a parallel to the power of bitcoin and bitcoin's network effects. So just because you can fork bitcoin and make your own cryptocurrency doesn't mean anyone gives it any value. Just because I can fork Stacker News and make my own real bitcoin dog Stacker News doesn't mean anyone's going to come to my website and sign up and make content and make posts or write posts. So we're seeing Nostr get this bootstrapped in real time as well. So I think it would be a fun demo. It would definitely, I can tell already, it would take a lot of time and effort to set up just for the sake of proving a point. But yeah, Stacker News, they always show the

of new technologies or new things. We are definitely, even three years in, if @k00b started this in 2021, and I know 2022 was a big year, a lot of people joined, but three years later in that adoption curve, I don't even know if we're in the early adopters. We have yet to cross the chasm. I think we're still in the downright innovators phase of just who are the people with the passion and the enthusiasts who just are diehard, the remnant, who want to join and stick around forever. But to really succeed and take off, we'll have to have even more users grow. But for sure, just appreciating all these early days, appreciating all these personalities, it's a testament to the Stacker News community that I know that rather than absolutely nobody listen to this podcast, my referrer, @grayruby, will hopefully refer to this podcast. And I hope he too makes a clickbait post on Stacker News saying, I just listened to the latest episode of @realbitcoindog's It's So Early! and I have thoughts, dot, dot, dot. Anyways, that's all for me. I know to cut it short and not ramble on forever, @realBitcoinDog signing off and saying, It's so early!