"Dollarization would be good for Argentina"

There is no mention of BTC itself in the official plans, that's for sure, but re-read first phrase of the quote you posted here. He's talked about BTC and that quote might as well be a direct reference to it (although it's more of, again, "let people use the currency they want to use, not Argentinian Pesos")

He has some pretty interesting ideas. Dollarization would be good for Argentina, and he is very openly in support of Bitcoin and just flexibility of currency in general (everyone should be able to use their currency of choice officially). I don't think writing him off as "pro-dollarization" is fair. And it's cool to finally have someone stand up for freedom in Argentina

Unfortunately, this is the hardest and the only "real" solution. We'll only go forward when we start actually developing the local community to integrate everyone on a BTC ecosystem (like some projects around the world - Bitcoin Beach, Bitcoin Beach Brazil...). And it's easier said than done. For the OP: I'm sure you can find some online communities on stuff like Discord with people from Russia that have the same mission. You don't have to dedicate your life to it, but getting in touch with these people, talking to merchants locally when you visit their stores and introducing them to BTC is the way to go, Bitrefill is really just covering up a hole with duct tape

I don't understand services like this :/ the end shop isn't actually getting your Bitcoin, so at the end of the day you're just wasting them away and not really using them in a circular economy. This is, of course, great for Bitrefill because they do get to keep all of the BTC that people used to buy stuff via their website =p Am I missing something? Or is that really how it works?

Yeah it's pretty cool, and 2023 was when they committed to solidifying voice commands. They post regular updates on their blog https://www.home-assistant.io/blog/ there are some pretty awesome posts detailing each step of the way I'm not actually a user of Home Assistant, as I live in a poor country and getting the equipment to setup a smart house is very expensive lol but I did look into it at the beginning of the year and their focus on finally getting voice work done was what interested me the most

You might be interested in looking into the Home Assistant solution to voice commands

I think the entire structure of Nostr is not ideal. Someone made a post this February opposing Nostr and I commented on it with some ideas and concerns, you can see my response here: #132080

Some other user also gave some pretty cool ideas: #132079

I don't think the problem with Nostr is about the clients, it's about the protocol itself, and unfortunately there isn't enough discourse around this, from what I've seen. Tbf I have been away from the space for a while, so things may have changed in the meantime.

The whole thread I linked is pretty interesting, it might be cool to give it a read to get some perspective on Nostr and its capabilities (or lack thereof)

Not Your Key, Not Your Coins is probably my favorite, but HODL and Stay Humble, Stack Sats are great as well

And that's a shame

Heyo, you have a very similiar idea to mine (which I posted as a reply to OP), although I didn't think about a separate component for storage, that could work well. I'm a little confused as to why more people haven't proposed this architecture to Nostr, the problems with the current implementation are prety evident

Thanks a lot!

I think you responded to the wrong post =p but I do sympathize with your points

I've been using Nostr-based clients for a couple of days and it's very interesting to see it working, there's no denying about that. I do worry about its capabilities for scaling in a decentralized matter as well, though.

The biggest thing that I don't understand is why relays don't talk to one another. I feel as this should make everything a lot faster and, though it requires more bandwidth and processing power, it could work amazingly if a lot of people ran relays all around the world (basically like LN nodes).

Data is handled in a weird way because you still don't own your data if you don't run your own relay and publish to it (and if you do, you have to convince people to connect to it for them to be able to see your posts), so a relay could single-handedly wipe all of your data in an instance and it'd be forever lost, right? That's what I'm getting right now.

Nostr is a very interesting idea and the fact that a lot of people are investing in it is a great thing IMO, but I whole-heartedly believe that if data isn't dynamic, being passed from one relay to another and never stored in a single location, it won't work in a global scale.

Here's my pitch: I think people have been thinking in two components for a while now and that may not always be the best solution. In the case of social media, the end user running the client wants to see everything they query very quickly, they want to be able to see posts from anyone around the world if they search for it (regardless of what relays they're connected to) and they want data security, so that their data isn't always stored in a single location (a little bit like torrents). So we need:

Indexers being nodes that query known relays and keep track of what public keys are available in what relays. Clients query Indexers to know where to look for stuff and then query that Relay to actually get the stuff. If relays talk to one another, they could keep connections alive with other relays like graphs, and if a Client asks for data from a relay that it doesn't have an immediate connection to but has other relays in common, it doesn't need to open more connections, as that seems to be terrible for slowness in the current protocol (I saw a guy saying that they tried connecting to 40 relays and things got veeeeeery slow).

I'm probably not technically proficient enough to really look into this and how it'd work, but I do believe there are better solutions to the problem than what Nostr currently offers

"Bitcoin becomes prohibitively expensive for those who are not already established in the space. I believe the door of opportunity is closing fast"

How in the world is that a good thing? Bitcoin is peaceful money, we're betting on a monetary revolution here, hoping that it'll change the world to a better place where everyone can use safe and good money for their everyday transactions. If you think it's a normal thing that "the door or opportunity is closing fast", you're still thinking in fiat terms and that's honestly a real shame

It does matter for decentralization. The higher the block sizes, the more centralized a network is, because storage isn't exactly cheap - this is the whole reason for the block wars that happened in 2017. I very much think that we should cap that shit because it's simply wasting storage space on useless trash, and I don't like that at all. The only way for the network to be sustainable, in my opinion, is to cap the amount of data you can cram in (maybe take the NYT headline that Satoshi used and set the max to that, as a symbolic message and limit).

I do agree that LN is where the focus is right now (rightfully so), but ignoring the problems that come with what is being done to the network right now is not a smart idea. LN is nothing without the solid foundation that is the base Bitcoin, and that foundation is under attack (not an immediately strong or super concerning attack, but an attack nonetheless)

Still interesting questions :)

Yup, I used that term because society as a whole is obsessed with it nowadays, people want to fit into a "wing". Bitcoin (and libertarianism) is above that, since wings are inherently political and, thus, disgusting

Unfortunately I don't think there's an answer to this. We've seen time and time again throughout history how people need to be pushed to the absolute bottom of the well to want to get out, otherwise they'll stay put miday through (or even ask to be pushed a little bit down because it feels safer).

Recently all I've seen is the issue getting worse by the day. Both left-wing and right-wing individuals just want a dictatorship, just one that's on "their side". Whoever wants to climb out of the well must choose to do that on their own.

That's my pessimistic view on this