You may know me as a Bitcoin educator and engineer.

Yeah well, in that case, fuck you and the hypercapitalist horse you rode in on.

This guy is a protocol engineer, talking about protocols. You may not like like Bitcoin, but it’s pretty hard to argue it’s not one of the most successful, widely-used, and forked open source protocols developed in the last several decades. Bitcoin core is in the top 100 starred repos on Github. It has a unicode character.

Bitcoin’s market cap (> 1 trillion USD) is bigger than Sweden’s GDP and it moves billions of dollars around the world every year. You can use it to send money to anybody with a phone and a halfway reliable internet connection in under a second for pennies in fees, and it settles instantly. And it’s been working for 15 years without a single hour of downtime, bank holiday, or hack despite pandemics, wars, financial crises, and attempted bans by global powers.

Like, be mad if you want, but it’s a pretty successful and robust protocol. And if you don’t like it, you can fork it and change it, because it’s open source.

Domains aren’t free and I don’t think it’s worth it for them to buy a new domain to just be able to spam for a short time again.

Literally what e-mail spammers do.

Agreed defederating can help solve obviously malicious instances, it doesn’t solve spammers abusing good instances. E-mail and AP are very similar at a protocol structure level.

Good to see Julian free, he paid a high price for giving people access to relevant, important information about the corruption of their governments.

I really expected the crypto bro problem to be much worse than it was, perhaps it was worse before, or maybe it has something to do with which instances I’m connected to or the auto-filter? Crypto stuff often shows in “trending” for me, but has never ended up in my feed as a dm, reply, etc.

The “trending” functionality in both mastodon and nostr has been pretty lackluster imo, it’s always like “did you know FIVE WHOLE PEOPLE tweeted about #caturday”. I imagine it works well on some instances, but getting a “trending across instances” metric seems like a software engineering problem neither platform has solved well yet.