#12: The Windy Lawnmower Stuff w/ Pete — No Solutions

“Nostr is what the internet could’ve been.”

Pete & Gigi try to talk to lawn mowers.

Websites & other stuff mentioned:

In this dialogue:

ECash fixes 402
Eucalyptus in Madeira
Pete’s time at Fedi
Lighting equals Swift, ecash equals payments
Chaum’s paper
ECash for Localism, farmer’s markets
Square terminals accepting bitcoin
BTCMap and merchants in Madeira
It’s normal to pay in bitcoin
Bitcoin for babysitters
1st Lightning Conference in Berlin (2019)
Australian Bush Bashes
BTCPay terminals (with NFC and stuff)
Costa Rica: Bitcoin Jungle
Super easy, super fast, green checkmarks everywhere
Cash-only shops are incredibly based
Credit card fees
ECash to replace APIs
Subscription Hell aka the Netflix Problem
Open Router, Routstr, ppq
LAWNMOWERS
Dumb models vs smart models
Economics of LLMs
ECash fixes subscription hell & sign-up barriers
NIP-60/61 as pocket money
Corner stores and consumers taking the risk
Stripe excludes half the world
Aaron Swartz & RSS
Pieter Levels & his dad’s credit card
“You can just charge for things”
DHH vs Apple & his Rails keynote
KYC payments = begging for permission
Sovereign Engineering: build something new every week
Lemonade stands in cyberspace
Relocalization
Moving from AWS to bare metal
MORE LAWNMOWERS
Rent your excess compute & earn ecash
“The internet is fucked” - do regular people actually agree with that?
“nostr is what the internet could’ve been”
Old ladies cleaning up phones
UK’s child protection law: scan passport to watch YouTube videos
EVEN MORE LAWNMOWERS
Ideological use vs necessity
Sideloading apps & Zapstore
“Asking for permission is not a good pattern”
Payment deplatforming in the US: gaming, porn, gambling
“Fix the money, fix the internet”
We’ve come far!
“If bitcoin wouldn’t work I would literally starve”
The fact that nostr works is amazing
The norm in nostr is that there’s no global view
Nostr came incredibly far, considering it was only 3 short years and had very little funding
Funding: how could it be solved?
“Funding implies the wrong thing”
Benefit of AI: cost goes down, cheaper and easier to build useful stuff
Cost of experimentation needs to be low
If people are getting paid you don’t need to fund them so much
BitChat is a great example of a useful tool built on nostr
“Zaps are bitcoin?” —Normies
Compute is a scarce resource, as is storage
Paid relays, paid blossom servers, paid video hosting
Nostr is the largest bitcoin circular economy in the world
Still too small for businesses to move in though, probably
“There’s lots of ways to earn money and also be on nostr”
SoapMiner, Leathermint, Isolabellart, etc.
WIND
MORE WIND
Arbitrage opportunities in businesses & the value trap
Agents doing paperwork vs agents doing coding work
Using agents to create open-source mashups
Allen Farrington’s take: Vibe Capital Accumulating
LLMs and atom bombs
Vervaeke, Meaning, Salience Landscape
Abundance, Radical Life Extension, and Meaning
The Meaning Crisis & the Suicide Epidemic
The train meme
Pessimism vs Optimism
LLMs allow us to get away from the computer
Strong local communities, shake your farmer’s hand
Bitcoin is local & global at the same time
SovEng: good vibes, good ideas, good people
Shipping things, vibing, and getting the idea right
“I’m not as married to nostr as a I am to bitcoin”
No Solutions spawning The Good Stuff

Related dialogues:

Recorded at 914,219.