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111 sats \ 0 replies \ @jb55 OP 12 Dec \ parent \ on: Hey ya'll, I'm jb55, bitcoin core/lightning/nostr dev. Creator of Damus. AMA AMA
C is the goat
stop trying so hard and just talk to people without trying to get anything out of the situation. if you hit it off, shaboink and continue on then great. if not you made a good friend along the way. worse thing is trying too hard for the wrong person.
yes i still work on lightning stuff. i recently put together the rust version of lnsocket:
which powers:
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notedeck_clndash: a cln dashboard notedeck app
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lnurl-commando-rs: the fastest lnurl server (maintains an open lightning connection to your node to fetch invoices)
i love lightning and will continue to hack on it and integrate it into damus products.
I'm also working with spiral on bringing a graduated wallet to all damus clients!
I built nostrdb specifically to support the outbox model (which is now fully integrated into ios, android, and desktop), since i wanted the client to only talk to a trusted local relay, as connecting to random relays can cause DoS/verification issues.
It's better to just dump data in from remote relays without trusting if the results actually match the filter or not.
We don't support it yet, but it should be pretty soon. We are building a DM app in notedeck. This is where outbox is really important so that you don't sent giftwraps to public relays, only the users inbox relays.
i think we can make the unfakable by construction, although I haven't though too much into it yet. they will always be verifiable as real to yourself since they will be sent by a trusted node that is covered by a signature. lightning zaps work the same way.
canada is pretty chill until:
- someone breaks into your house and you go to jail for defending yourself
- going to jail for buying raw milk
- going to jail for selling medium rare burgers
- go to jail for misgendering someone (hate speech)
- not being able to leave your province or go to restaurants during health lockdowns
yes pretty cucked when you want to do something that the libs don't like. otherwise pretty chill.
It's a quantum state of simulatenous being overhyped, underhyped and oppropriately hyped. I find I can't use it for low level C stuff without it messing everything up and slowing me down, while simulateneously producing really good code for fixing bugs and writing tests.
I hate it and love it. I hate fixing the slop but I like that it is getting the code written that I don't want to write.
One things for sure, it's not going away, and it's only going to get better.
zimbabwe, botswana, south africa, mauritius for african bitcoin conference. favourite things:
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feels like you're on an alien planet, its like a snapshot of the earth before humans built cities
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ABC was once of the best bitcoin conferences I've been to in a long time. The currency and banking is so broken in africa, and the connectivity is really poor. This means you have real builders building bandwidth-sensitive applications that are trying to solve real problems. This is so different than recent north american or asian bitcoin conferences where all they want to talk about is treasury companies.
least favorite things: god damn mosquitoes. honestly suprised i made it out without getting malaria.
they won't scale, but people will bounce between them depending on where fees are at. anything I can do to help contribute to a healthy fee market! at least people would be using it for monetary use cases to price out spam.
there's nothing wrong with lightning zaps, but onchain zaps are simpler to custody and don't have liquidity issues.
I had this thought recently since the blocks are so empty, could starting using onchain for actual payments against instead of just jpgs.
this is nostr's greatest weakness. I suspect we will have something like one key per app you use, and you simply broadcast all of the keys associated with your account. this way you don't need to copy your nsec everywhere. I think all other solutions are just way too complicated. having a single key is a huge weakness, and I've never had a really good answer to this question.
maybe the identity key is never used for decrypting any secret stuff just in case, and we use device keys for encrypted content.
maybe we eventually switch to frost-based keys for multisig.
maybe we just have a key-rotation spec for when your key leaks. this spec is already mostly done as of a recent in person nostr dev meeting. the problem is getting everyone to adopt it which will take a long time for each app to implement this logic.
for now we out here yoloing keys into apps or using bunker/remote signing. don't put money in your keys 😅
File storage. Luckily, nostr devs haven't been slacking here. We have multiple solutions:
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blossom which is an http spec for plug and play blob storage to get around the centralization of media and file hosting
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martti malmi has been working on p2p file storage techniques. just last week he was showing me his new app called hashtree/filetree, which allows you to share merkle trees of directories/files that can be replicated using webrtc.
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I have been interested in integrating bittorrent v2 more tightly into the file sharing solutions on nostr
There are lots of promising things in this area, as long as it isn't ipfs. ipfs is terrible.
We need to create solutions for people to find their own communities. Stacker news has done this well with their equivalent of subreddits.
At damus we have been working on a topical community spec which implements something like a decentralized reddit.
We need to keep expanding use cases to attract more users. Once this starts snowballing with viral apps that interoperate, we have a much greater chance of success.
even though he's not very well liked in the bitcoin community, i think more mainstream podcasts like lex friedman or of course rogan would be huge for nostr. We haven't really broke into the mainstream yet and normies keep talking about bluesky which is horribly centralized. it's a bit sad, we should be working harder to reach outside the bitcoin community.
I think the biggest problem is the community thinking the general population are going to install a separate signing app to use nostr apps. the nostr dev community loves complicated technical solutions to things. there are more and more nips every day that is making the protocol very complicated. if we keep going down this route, it will turn off new devs. we need to re-focus our efforts on keeping the protocol as simple as possible.
the biggest headache is getting people to care about decentralized social media. turns out most people don't really care. people do care about getting paid, so that has been a key marketing point for us.
it's a tradeoff though, because lots of people don't like that it appears to be a bitcoin-only social network, which is of course not true. This is limiting growth as bitcoin still turns lots of people off for some reason.
Other than that, the biggest headache is trying to split my time between maintaining three major products: damus ios, nostrdb, and damus android/notedeck. luckily there are lots of people helping these days, even our product manager who is vibe now coding solutions instead of just filing issues 🤣