Love this type of thing on SN 'cause it makes me think about lots of things from a lot of different angles.

to learn what bots want.

Economics - looking at things with the eye of a market. Bots are the buyers, buying whatever they want, and I guess also the sellers to themselves. We humans can be the sellers too to whatever they want. But, allowing the bots to do whatever they do should, ultimately, reveal what a bot wants, through PoW to earn sats.

I am not a boid.

Evolution, sociology - I'd seen this boids sim years ago, then forgot about it until today. Illustrates how animals survive in the wild. Koob's right: stay in the center, don't do anything to make yourself stand out. Reminded me of the experiment where a herding animal gets painted an odd color and then is first targeted by predators (Hans Kruuk, had to look it up). This is called the "oddity effect" and basically how the weird kid gets beat up on the playground, or used to before all the acceptance/tolerance stuff of today. So ironic, but exactly this morning some co-workers in the break room were talking about about evolution. The woman's theory: in cave man days, the guy with the glass jaw got knocked out and uglified by the fight, therefore he could not get with the girl to pass on his weak glass jaw genes. Makes sense (and I'm not even an "evolution person", but makes sense).

We, the internet's natives,

Tech - I've never thought of it like this, but yes, we humans are the internet's indigenous natives. Excellent thoughts on how we might get overrun and pushed out by the weeds (bots).

Probably more to think on here, I'll let it brew.

So, as I understand, Floresta uses a "utreexo" to where all the utxo's get bashed down into tiny small set. That tiny utreexo contains all the utxo's. Sounds good to me.

This reminds me of the Mina protocol which I always thought had an interesting way of doing things, albeit I found hard to wrap my mind around and hard to work with.

Appreciate you writing that it was difficult. If you struggled, then I don't feel as stupid. I woke up early yesterday, messed around with it trying to get things working with Nostr, made some headway, but then just got tons of errors. Ultimately, I got nowhere. I will say it was an effective tool for consuming time, so, there's that.

I gotta say, I think this is terrible advice. Buying a home and paying a mortgage is often cheaper than monthly rent. So, you actually don't have "surplus funds" with which to DCA. Renting for 30 years and you now have zero money as capital, just 30 years behind you. Paying off a 30 year mortgage you have 30 years behind you and a home to sell.

I see a lot of green on OP_CAT and only two reds and two yellows. That's pretty good on the scoreboard. But, as you point out...enthusiasm, momentum.

There seem to be few people talking about OP_CAT
At this time, there seems to be a low likelihood of OP_CAT being adopted any time soon.

This is essentially what I was thinking.

But what about the Weeki Wachee mermaids?!

Fun fact. I've always heard how the sailors and pirates from the old tall ship days used sometimes think that they saw mermaids swimming in the waters while peering over the ship's rails. But, the "mermaids" were really manatees. No idea if this is just a fable or if there's truth to it, but that's what I've always heard.

Anyway, if you mistake a fat, slow manatee (I love them for their ugly/cuteness, but they're still fat and slow), if you mistake a manatee for a mermaid, you've been out at sea far, far too long! (Or, maybe fat and slow is an attractive mermaid. I'm not judging.)

I'd say you've got a point there. Stablecoins seem to me to be dollars by another name.

Yes! We're getting there! Read about MeshCore: https://juraj.bednar.io/en/blog-en/2026/01/18/bridging-bitchat-and-meshcore-resilient-communication-when-you-need-it-most/ and GitHub: https://github.com/jooray/MeshCore/tree/feature/bitchat-bridge?tab=readme-ov-file

Thoughts from Stackers: #1006440

This is a weakness, I don't know what else to call it, with Nostr. And I'm not sure if it's fixable. First, no need to "secure" your npub, it's public by default. :) But the nsec...

One thing I did was to make another keypair so if the one I use now gets compromised I can go to the other and say "This is the real me". I made a note to this effect at some point. The reality is, no one would really know the difference; no on would do the investigative work to go back and find out that oh yeah, he did post a note at some point saying npub-2 is the account that verifies him. Frankly, I don't even know where that note I posted is.

I like and use the Hive blockchain and they have a better key system: you actually have four keys for different uses, each with more power. And, this is what nostr needs if possible, a way to change keys...to cancel your old keys and make new ones. Everything about the old account just changes over to the new keys.

I'm npub1qpdufhjpel94srm3ett2azgf49m9dp3n5nm2j0rt0l2mlmc3ux3qza082j by the way.

Thanks for the shout out (to #1383362 "Everything is a market").

True about not everything can be purchased with money, but you can pay with other things.

Well put, but reads like AI wrote it.

There you go. How much KYC info do you need to give? Credit card numbers?

Hah, I'd never thought of the dating market. But, definitely, things are being marketed, sold, not sold, resources are being displayed, held back and offered for more. Fun way to look at it. Not sure I'd bring it up with students though, seems like it could get off the rails fast. :)