Last Notes
I think they're a very bad idea UX wise and am very surprised bitcoiners don't remember fees being higher than 5sat/vB
Curious, what your take is on on-chain zaps?
I agree with a caveat. If you are a practitioner or engineer, you need to at least go through the process at least once to appreciate the ‘magic’. I had a really interesting experience earlier this year when I let loose a coding agent on my codebase that I had handcoded over the years. Since I knew (and built) everything from scratch, I could very specifically direct what the agent should do. Now I hardly handcode, but I review everything that goes into production.
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when you multiply or divide complex numbers, nobody expects you to do it in your head. reaching for a calculator is normal, not lazy and widely accepted. the reason is simple. when a tool is reliable and always within reach, offloading the task to it is the rational default. doing it manually buys you nothing. ai now meets those same conditions for a huge range of tasks. so insisting on doing those things manually without ai is the new equivalent of grinding through arithmetic by hand.
I am really excited about silent payments to a npub.
The undeniable fact is that your npub has a Bitcoin wallet waiting to be discovered (whether you choose to use it, it is up to you).
With Silent Payments, your npub can provide a static address that can be used to generate an untraceable transaction and UTXO, that only you, with the knowledge of your nsec can locate and spend.
As with anything, there are a few tradeoffs, you need to scan the blockchain and test the outputs to see which UTXOs are yours for the taking. But here again, #nostr rises to the challenge - a bitcoin wallet using silent payments could also send a gift-wrapped message with the txid to look for. Now no scanning is required, and the receiving end needs only to scan for incoming DMs and when a payment comes in, locates the txid and sweeps the funds to another UTXO.
I know this works, because I have implemented the same mechanism for #nostr #safebox - what looks like a payment to a lightning address, if the payer knows that it is being sent to another safebox, it skips lightning entirely and sends the funds via gift-wrapped ecash tokens, which the receiver redeems and puts in their wallet. The user thinks it’s a lightning payment - it is not - the clearance used ecash tokens behind the scenes, no lightning channel updates.
This is all great for private payments - the downside is that you need trusted infrastructure to make this work, namely mints and an application service. With silent payments to a npub you get the same privacy, a default wallet, and none of the setup required. The downside is higher fees, which is OK, but most don’t realize the reason lightning payments are cheap, almost free is because someone invested in and is operating an infrastructure to give you those ‘free’ zaps.
Onward!
#nevent1q…n4zc
Below, is a short AI-generated summary of Niklas Luhmann, one of my favourite philosophers, whose principles have guided me in this space - of the dangers of mixing morality and methodology. Not that either is bad, but if you are not aware of whether you are arguing the former or the latter, that’s when you get into trouble.
Further, morality usually needs to catch up with the times: you might think you are arguing from a point of moral virtue, but things might have moved on since. That’s usually how wars start.
Enjoy. Luhmann’s works are really tough slogs to read, but the gems are invaluable, so I give you this AI-shortcut with apologies.
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Niklas Luhmann argued that much of the social sciences failed to achieve genuine scientific rigor because they allowed moral judgments to infiltrate their analytical methods. In his view, sociology repeatedly confused description with prescription: instead of explaining how social systems actually operate, scholars often smuggled in assumptions about how society ought to function.
Luhmann believed morality is itself just one communicative system among many — alongside law, politics, economics, and science — and that science loses clarity when it adopts moral categories such as “good,” “bad,” “just,” or “unjust” as analytical foundations. For him, modern society is too complex to be understood through moral binaries. Once researchers moralize social phenomena, they stop observing systems neutrally and begin participating in ideological struggles.
His systems theory therefore tried to construct sociology as a second-order observational science: a discipline that studies how social systems reproduce themselves through communication, without treating morality as the ultimate measure of truth. In this sense, Luhmann saw moralization not as the solution to the weaknesses of social science, but as one of its central methodological problems.
I stand corrected - on-chain zaps are verifiable.
Excellent essay! Thanks for sharing!
Satoshi, we have a problem. Zaps are not verifiable.
#nevent1q…qrkx
I spent years fighting structure.
Schools. Jobs. Society's endless boxes. All of it felt suffocating.
But here's what broke my brain: nature is ALL structure. Atoms. Cells. Seasons. Orbits. Life can't exist without it.
So what's the difference?
Natural structures support life. Then get out of the way. Trees die. Forests shift. New forms emerge from old ones.
Human structures do the opposite. We build them to serve life, then sacrifice life to preserve the structure. Governments murder citizens to stay in power. Religions kill to protect beliefs. Lives destroyed over lines on a map.
Our structures won't let themselves die.
That's the sickness. Not structure itself — but our refusal to let it evolve.
https://vryfokkenou.com/2017/06/08/struggling-with-structure/
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Gang Bitcoin 🔥🔥🔥
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