Hey, this is Matt Hill from Start9, here to answer any and all questions.
Start9 has had a crazy year trying to get StartOS v0.3.6 out the door, and we're getting closer.
We also announced that we will be building a router next!
Today we began our migration away from Telegram and onto a private, self-hosted Matrix server for community support.
this territory is moderated
One of the reasons why I've stalled on getting set up with a truly sovereign computing setup is that I am a full-time traveler.
Would you agree that the equipment required would make it difficult for digital nomads to make the most of Start9's suite of products, or am I wrong?
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Mine has traveled with me to 4 countries this year (2 continents). Of course, I had to unplug it while traveling between destinations, but there have been no problems. I do not have a LN routing node running on the system.
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... but it does have open channels.
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Definitely harder, but totally doable. You just need to make sure your server is around someone you trust who could restart it if needed, etc
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I know it's maybe a bit against the whole idea (?), but did you consider launching the cloud service, where StartOS can be installed on some server, but encrypted so only I would have access?
Many people do not have enough internet connection or are nomads like @benwehrman
Kind of like @Alby model now.
Thank you!
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201 sats \ 2 replies \ @ek 30 Oct
Do you think ISPs will also be LSPs at some point?
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No, but LSPs might become ISPs :)
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115 sats \ 0 replies \ @ek 30 Oct
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131 sats \ 1 reply \ @kepford 30 Oct
What thing that you are working on now are you most excited about?
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StartOS 0.3.6 and the Start9 Router are all I think about!
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17 sats \ 1 reply \ @OT 30 Oct
When will phoenixd make it into the start9 market place?
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That woudl be cool to see. We are largely not in the packaging business anymore. The new Start SDK makes it super easy to package for StartOS. We will help promote efforts and even offer bounties though
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Good alternative communication protocol to email?
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Not really haha. I have hopes for SimpleX
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Are there any particular people or books that serve as guides or inspirations for software architecture design? Which would be some of those?
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Tough one, not really. It's all a mess
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I found Alan Kay's lectures on the topic very intriguing as well as the STEPS write-ups and the other paper I linked to in that comment. There's a whole lineage or tree of ideas that seems not to have caught on, perhaps for good reason, but that is not clear to me, but it does seem to be clear to Alan (that it wasn't for good reason, that CS behaves more like a pop culture, and not a real science or real engineering field). And it's not like he doesn't have relevant credentials and accomplishments The STEPS project seems to have been his last attempt at trying to breathe life into this largely neglected part of the history of computing / lineage of ideas in software design. I sincerely do hope you'll look into it. Actually kind of excited about the prospect to be honest
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49 sats \ 2 replies \ @k00b 30 Oct
What’s the coolest app in the start9 that more people should use?
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SimpleX
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then why is support moving to matrix? your support is so killer I have fears that matrix will shittify that record with cumbersome UX. really hope I'm wrong.
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49 sats \ 3 replies \ @k00b 30 Oct
wen NAT hole punching?
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2135 sats \ 1 reply \ @start9 OP 30 Oct
v0.3.6 will have simple commands for exposing services to the Internet on custom domains via router port forwarding OR wireguard reverse tunneling for people who want to hide their home IP. v0.3.6 is currently in alpha testing
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Thank goodness I’m tired of tor!
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Seconded!!
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21 sats \ 1 reply \ @k00b 30 Oct
What’s something you believe about bitcoin that few bitcoiners agree with you on?
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It won't be a fun ride and will take many decades to get where we want to be
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21 sats \ 1 reply \ @k00b 30 Oct
Other than your own product, what’s your favorite software product in bitcoin?
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BTCPay server
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21 sats \ 1 reply \ @k00b 30 Oct
Do you all plan to make other devices like phones?
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Someday, router is first
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21 sats \ 1 reply \ @k00b 30 Oct
Smartest person you’ve ever met?
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Andreas
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Great AMA. Great product looking forward to the router
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Since you mentioned Andreas as an example of a highly intelligent human and perhaps actually the smartest you've met. Which parts of Andreas' communications or perspectives would you wish to become more prevalent in the zeitgeist? Are there any in particular that seem neglected?
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Andreas uses language, analogies and humor perfectly, all of which are important for clear communication. He is perhaps the best communicator I have encountered, and that is a heuristic for intelligence. He is also an exceptional public speaker. Andreas understood Bitcoin and its potential more than anyone, and it is becuase of him that so many of us understand it as well as we do today. He is the reason I fell so hard into Bitcoin and was able to understand some of it. I read Mastering Bitcoin 4 times.
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IIRC you've got a degree in literature, or was it philosophy? Assuming that's the case any recommendations of books or authors?
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It was film with an emphasis in writing. Clearly not what I do today.
Some of my favorite books are, in no particular order:
  • Fountainhead
  • Gone with the Wind
  • Battlefield Earth
  • Red Rising series
  • Moon is a Harsh Mistress
  • Stranger in a Strange Land
  • Lisey's Story
  • The Stand
  • The Power Broker
  • Dune
  • A Deepness in the Sky
  • The Count of Monte Cristo
  • Pillars of the Earth
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router to use with which OS? Compatible with openWRT?
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We met in Prague and i'm trully sorry i didn't know that you are the Matt ( head of the start9 ), we talked tho, that's plus :D ...
I am concerned about security and i am gonna buy the server when BTC goes to 100k, my question is: Do i need the one with intel ? Is it safer security-wise for me - pleb - that doesnt understand the concept of a hardware ( locking something ) ? Is it worth 200EUR for us ? Or is it more for high profile people, like you for example ?
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Keep up the great work guys. Looking forward to whatever 3.6 might bring. Barely new community support was a thing, I'll probably need to give you guys a call, I switched routers and the node is having trouble connecting to the internet..........I'll be one of the first to jump on the router btw.
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I'm waiting for two services to be developed and published in Start9 marketplace:
  1. An reliable and secure (properly isolated from the sensitive Bitcoin stuff) solution for self-hosting public (not Tor) websites;
  2. A service which will enable self-hosted Fedimint federation server.
Are there any current packages that can help me achieve those goals or at least plans in those directions?
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  1. Start9 Pages will support clearnet websites in the future.
  2. There is someone already working on Fediment package.
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Can you provide any estimates?
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What excites you most about the next year?
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StartOS 1.0 and the router!!!
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Why did you choose a bloated venture capital controlled project like Matrix instead of a grassroots community platform and proper IETF standard like XMPP?
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I don't care ho a project is funded, only that it works. How it's funded may impact how it works in the future, but that's a problem for the future. RIght now, self-hosted matrix works great, especially if catering to a non-technical community. Basically only something like Telegram, Slack, DIscord, or Matrix satisfies our requirements in terms of features and UX, and of those, only Matrix is open source and self-hosted. So it's a no brainer.
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Are you using synapse? I tried that one and it's really a burden to maintain.
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How do you expect developers to package their products for Start9 if the support access will now cost $100?
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We have an entire developer space on a different Matrix server that is open to anyone. We have independent rooms for every service anyone is working on and Start9 developers standing by ready to help.
We don't have to worry about scammers there.
Here is the link to the space and all the rooms:
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Silence, music, or sounds of another kind when writing (code or otherwise)?
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I exist in silence - driving, coding, running, sitting, you name it. Though I will sometimes listen to an audiobook when I drive.
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Any interesting developments in mesh networking?
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Not really my area of expertise. We keep a passive eye on developments there, but I think it's about 10 years too early for real commercial use. At some point, we will need to mesh around the ISPs, so it's in our future, but not yet.
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Have you tried the carnivore diet?
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No, but my diet is mostly eggs, meat, smoothies, chocolate, and the occassional vegetable or salad.
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Why are you migrating away from telegram?
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Becasue it's a cesspool of scammers. It's also someone else's house, and we prefer to interact in our own house where we make the rules.
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List of most powerful ideas known to man today. Let's say 5.
Same for inventions.
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Yikes, tough one. Let's just say I'm super interested and inspired by decentralized computer system, open source everything, interplanetary travel, unschooling, consciousness as an axiom and primitive of physical reality, and personal responsibility. Might change if I thought about it longer
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PoW helps alot in protecting the past / giving us credible guarantees about immutability. Are there some scenarios or trajectories you see which might endanger the immutability guarantee? One thought I've had over the years is this: what if in the future the hashrate is that much greater that it would be trivial to reconstruct a different past because the hashrates of the past were puny. A few seconds could create the same amount of PoW that took decades to generate in the past. Then again to construct an alternative past you've got to remake all the more recent blocks as well which would be more difficult so it's probably not feasible but it's been a thought that has occurred a few times over the years.
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About 7 transactions per second on bitcoin, is it? 7 * 60 * 60 * 24 * 365 = 220752000 So about 220 million transactions per year. At 7 transactions per second every one of 8 billion people could have an on-chain transaction every 36 years.
What are some bitcoin lightning scaling scenarios you see as realistic / practical / workable in the current tech landscape? E.g. increase the blocksize 10-fold and have every person move funds between checking account and saving account on average every 4 years. Or an uncle Jim model where most people never touch on-chain. Or a model where large trusted stores offer lightning banking functionality and most people never touch on-chain. Or ...
Another question: What innovations or inventions would be most convenient in the context of bitcoin scaling which also are not out of the question / totally implausible in your view? Which constraints that exist today might conceivably or even likely be weakened significantly in the coming years and decades? e.g. some new way to compress trasnaction data some way to very efficiently batch lightning channel open or close etc
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This is the topic of many long form debates. In short, almost nobody thinks you can scale layer 1 to support the entire planet without undermining decentralization. That is why so much effort is being put into layer two solutions like Lightning and Liquid and others. In my opinion, there will be many viable layer two networks, each with their own use case and tradeoffs. The chain itself should only be touched in rare circumstances.
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0 sats \ 1 reply \ @Cje95 30 Oct
As someone venturing more and more into self custody of things how hard is it to move your stuff from say Microsoft’s OneDrive to a Start9 server?
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Depends on how much data you have, but basically just as long as it takes to download then upload.
Upload is fast becuase it is done over the local network and doesn't need to travel around the Interet.
The hardest part is getting used to the new network configurations needed to access your private cloud from various devices. It can take a few hours to set up
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Is anyone selling working-out-of-the-box / ready-made btc and btc lightning payment terminals for merchants? What would be the easiest and most user-friendly (both for merchants and their clients) way to transform a smartphone, tablet or laptop into one of these things? Been thinking a little about this myself but haven't put pen to paper, or finger to keyboard, on this yet myself.
Let's say I find a willing merchant who wants to add btc and btc lightning as payment options. How could I transform an android smartphone or tablet into a payment terminal? Particular apps? A web interface? (I'm talking about physical merchants like coffee shops)
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Nobody has really solved POS system yet. BTCPay server is a great interface but is not itself hardware. That said, Rockstar Dev over at BTCPay has devoloped a cool mobile device that works great and has been used at many conferences. It's just not really commercialized yet
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0 sats \ 3 replies \ @ek 30 Oct
Why the name Start9? What’s the origin behind it?
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15.2k sats \ 2 replies \ @start9 OP 30 Oct
Pokemon is a game for Gameboy. Twitch is a live video streaming app. “Twitch Plays Pokemon” was a popular phenomenon where Twitch users would collaborate to play a SHARED game of Pokemon on Gameboy. Here's how it worked:
Participants would use the Twitch message board to enter commands that then got executed in the gameplay. For example, if someone entered the command “right”, that would cause the player to move 1 space to the right. Commands would execute immediately after they were received, and anyone could enter a valid command at any time. You can think of Twitch Plays Pokemon as the more practical equivalent of placing a Gameboy in the middle of a crowded room and telling everyone to push buttons at the same time. As you might expect, the gameplay of Twitch Plays Pokemon was quite “twitchy”, but in a very “infinite monkey theory” way, progress could eventually be made.
In an effort to streamline play, a new game mode was devised in which players would “vote” for the next command and, every 4 seconds, whatever command received the most votes over the previous 4 seconds would execute in the game. Also introduced in this mode was the ability to attach multipliers to a command, such that the command would execute that number of times. For example, “right2” would cause the player to move 2 spaces to the right. “right3” would cause the player to move 3 spaces to the right, and so on. The highest number any participant could place after a command was 9, meaning whatever command they entered would execute 9 times. As you might expect, gameplay in this mode was less chaotic, more efficient, but it also meant each participant had less direct and immediate influence over the game. If a group of even 5-10 got together and colluded on their votes, they could practically take over the game and make contrarian ideas irrelevant. The new game mode was called “Democracy”, and the original game mode became known as “Anarchy”. Which game mode was engaged was itself governed by a democratic process: if more participants wanted to play in Democracy mode, then Democracy mode engaged; if more wanted to play in Anarchy mode, then Anarchy mode engaged.
To summarize: in Anarchy mode, everyone had equal influence over the game, but progress was slow and clunky. In Democracy mode, progress was fast and efficient, but colluding groups could marginalize individual participants and ruin the game for them.
So… individual participants discovered a means of effective protest whenever Democracy mode became suffocating, but they could not garner enough votes to switch back to Anarchy mode. Someone would type the command “start9” into the comments. This command meant “open the start menu 9 times in a row”, which, as you might imagine, would be enormously disruptive if executed. The entire screen would be blocked by the start menu, over and over. Typing “start9” was a participant's way of signaling to other participants that they felt marginalized by Democracy mode, and they were ready to fight back. If others felt the same, they could also begin typing “start9” - then, sure enough, “start9” would finally receive more votes than the colluding group's command, and the menu opening would begin. Every 4 seconds, the menu would open 9 times…again, and again, and again…until finally, the colluding group would be forced to either cooperate in reverting the game mode back to Anarchy mode or quit altogether.
Playing in Anarchy mode was impractical, but people did not want to play a game where they had no voice, where a group of insiders had taken total control. And so “start9” became the battle cry of the individual, the out-group, a means of signaling to other individuals that it was time to fight back against the usurpers - to use their own rules against them, until there was no alternative but to return control to the individual participants.
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Ah, I remember twitch plays Pokemon.
Here, have some satoshi's
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0 sats \ 0 replies \ @ek 30 Oct
omg, thanks for sharing this story, I love it!
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Wen Start 9 Router? It's all we think about also!
By the way, another interesting router project: https://github.com/OpenTollGate/TollGate
Pay ecash (offline), and get online.
Start 9 + Tollgate = free internet
(freedom, not price)
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We've already begun work and are making great progress. So hopefully in 2025.
Will check out TollGate
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Pre orders?
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Thanks! Ordered.
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0 sats \ 1 reply \ @ek 30 Oct
What is your bitcoin price prediction for 2024 and 2025?
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At least $72,000
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Thoughts about Erlang? And relatedly thoughts about Joe Armstrong's (the main guy behind Erlang) lectures on computing?
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Not familiar with either, will check out Joe
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I'd recommend Alan Kay quite a bit more strongly but I'd recommend checking out both. Incidentally Joe Armstrong did interview Alan Kay at some Erlang conference
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Opinions on the Fermi paradox?
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Not familiar, will check it out
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Oh man. Basically: Where are the aliens??
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0 sats \ 1 reply \ @ek 30 Oct
We are the aliens
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That explains how I've always felt :)
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Thoughts about VPRI's (a now defunct Alan Kay led research team) FRANK system as part of their STEPS project and the design choices that were made there? https://tinlizzie.org/VPRIPapers/tr2012001_steps.pdf Any ideas there that might be used in Start9 OS? Same question about https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/263700.263754
I think much of the stuff over at vpri.org might be right up your alley, Matt
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Not familiar, will look into it
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0 sats \ 1 reply \ @k00b 30 Oct
Fountainhead or Atlas Shrugged?
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Fountainhead
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0 sats \ 3 replies \ @ek 30 Oct
With router you mean for the internet?
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Yes, to replace your current home router. It's going to be awesome
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0 sats \ 1 reply \ @ek 30 Oct
omg can’t wait
So basically an internet router that can run lightning and apps?
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No, the server will continue to fulfill that function. A router serves 3 functions:
  1. Access to the Internet
  2. Shield from the Internet
  3. Traffic controller of the local network
Powerful router are too complex for people to use. Easy-to-use routers are not powerful enough. We will make a powerful router that is easy to use...and bonus points it will integrate seamlessly with a Start9 server :)
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Thoughts about Alan Kay's lectures and writings about computing?
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I am not familiar with them, will look into it
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migration away from Telegram and onto a private, self-hosted Matrix server
That sounds like a virtue signaling or walled garden, shooting themselves in own foot. What is wrong with giving support over Telegram? Nothing.
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Scammers are totally out of control, abusing customers relentlessly. It is not safe at all. A "walled garden" (lol) is the only way to prevent scams. Think of it like having friend over to your secure home instead of a public park in a warzone.
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No, telegram have an unique ID for each user, but yeah you have to activate it in advanced features. Then you can block them by ID.
Will not take too much until scammers will join Matrix too.
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We block scammers all the time. They just come back with a different ID lol.
We will not have a scammer issue on the private server, because we are charging $$$ to join the server. You get removed, the only way to rejoin is to pay again, which scammers won't do. Problem sovled. It's the only way to solve it
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Yes. I understand there's some controversy with some things mr Saylor has said recently but I do remember him speaking quite eloquently about this issue and one solution in the form of what may be called an "orange check" that internet money like bitcoin can provide. I don't see any other practical way to stop spam myself. And it's just so friggin' simple, easy to understand and seems like it can't be that hard to implement. I don't understand why more websites and email providers haven't begun offering this feature years ago.
I guess that bigger network effects are needed to make it a viable solution and it may not be worth the effort for these websites given that so few people own btc, and an even smaller fraction lightning. Then again it wouldn't have to be bitcoin perse. As long as there is some cost. Could be X tokens. I'd have hoped that X would have been one of those trailblazers by now helping bootstrap initial network effects and introducing the idea, seeding the zeitgeist. Of course they've got lots on their plate as well so can't blame 'em that much.
In early days when you turn on "orange check mode" nearly everything will be blocked since so few people have set up the payment rails but the way to get it to catch on I'd think is to offer the ability to turn on "orange filtering" or just "money filtering" client side and have the user be able to select treshholds and amounts and also have sensible default settings.
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I agree with make them pay... That's how SN works too, pay to post.
btw, why don't you make a Start9 territory on SN?
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We absolutely should, mostly just busy as hell
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Matrix does not require a phone number, does not require you to use a third party, closed source server, and does not necessitate the installation of a compiled application on a users device
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So why not plain nostr chat then? Funny that NostrDevteam didn't mention that :)
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We love Nostr
But we will continue to use Matrix until a serious competitor is built
Matrix is mature, battle tested, performant, and reliable
You may join our instance here: https://chat.nostrdev.com
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0 sats \ 1 reply \ @Wumbo 30 Oct
How does Start9 decide what should be included in the Start9 Registry vs the Community Registry?
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To go on the Start9 registry, we have to like it, understand it, have time to audit it, and have time to support it. So often it's just a bandwidth constraint. More here: https://blog.start9.com/community-tech-program/
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