Finding out about Nostr and Lightning
Of late, I've been messing around with Nostr and such to find out what it's all about. One place I've been intrigued by is Stacker.news. It's not Nostr, but it is "login with Lightning."
At least from my perspective, logging in this way is very similar in appearance to logging with via Hive Authentication Services (HAS or HiveAuth)...you get a QR code, you scan it with an app (BlueWallet in this case, Keychain with HiveAuth), and you're in.
Contrarian view
Someone there was nonplussed about this article in Bitcoin Magazine. Apparently, Bitcoin Magazine set up https://rare.b.tc and they're selling "rare sats." Some of these rare sats are ordinal inscriptions (i.e., NFTs on Bitcoin). Others are just normal satoshis that are deemed special, for instance, sats that came from Hal Finney's wallet.
A user on stacker.news felt this was an outright scam. See the initial post and comments at https://stacker.news/items/216980. The comments were entirely in agreement and that this was an outrage. I responded saying this didn't really bother me. The more I think of it, the more it bothers me less and less. What's more, I like it.
Provenance
I believe the person who was upset about this feels the magazine is falsely describing sats as different. Well, it's true that these sats can be proven (provenance) to be unique. Those "Hal sats" can be traced back thanks to blockchain doing what it does. Then, it's up to each person to decide for him or herself if that makes the sat truly different or not. To some, this would be no difference at all. For others, it would be.
We hear a lot about fungibility with Bitcoin and cryptocurrency. Fungible = every token is the same as any other. One dollar is the same as any other dollar. With Bitcoin, this is mostly true, but not entirely. Ordinals ripped fungibility into NFTs. But, even without ordinal inscriptions, all sats are not the same. For instance...
...imagine a crime ring, a really, really bad one was out there doing their thing. They do all the bad stuff: murder, extortion, human trafficking, sex trafficking, drug trafficking, child abuse in all forms, etc. Suppose they accepted bitcoin in their big crime payment, then were caught and the bitcoin wallet recovered by authorities. Then, the authorities eventually put the BTC up for auction. Would you want one of those sats? Many people would be unbothered...it's a sat. But, some people would not want a sat with a transaction history forever linking their personal wallet to the crime ring wallet. Blood money.
There's a reason some people prefer to mine bitcoin, even though it's financially not wise and they lose money in electricity...they want clean coins with no track history at all.
Subjective value
Is a Hal sat worth more than any other sat? Say a Hal sat was up for sale for 10,000 satoshis. Would you make that trade? The Satoshi Bitcoin Converter tells me that's currently $2.91 USD worth of sats. Personally, I would not make that trade. However, I'm sure there are many people who would love to make that purchase to have a small bit of bitcoin history. What if a sat from the Genesis block, Satoshi's first block ever, was up for sale, would you spend 10K sats to buy one of those? I would. The novelty of owning a piece of Bitcoin/crypto/economics history would be worth it to me.
Free trade and freedom
The main premise I tried to make in my stacker.news comment was that such an exchange allowed for the free market to determine if this is okay or not. If this is such a bad thing, the market will determine that. Or, if someone really wants that Hal sat, then it's okay to go ahead and get it. What's more, following true free market principles, both parties are happy in that 1 Hal sat for 10K regular sat exchange. The buyer is happy with the new Hal sat. The seller is happy to have 10,000 sats. Both win.
And again, if this is such a bad idea, the free market will weed it out. That's the glory of free people acting freely in free markets.
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That's exactly how a free market is supposed to operate: when there is a match between buyer and seller, both and seller get what they want. Whenever we hear talk of how "free markets failed," one of 3 things happened:
Regulation can have a place in a truly free market, but the regulation needs to be in place to make sure the rights of both parties are respected and that neither party violates the rights of the other. Any other kind of regulation is an abridgement of the free market. Financial markets as we know them aren't free markets, and they are trying to suck cryptocurrency into their combined sphere of influence.
So many people have been talking about Nostr and I think I'm becoming interested day by day
I want to know how it works
It's taking me a bit of learning. Knowing Hive and web3 definitely helps, but nostr has different terminology and works differently. Figuring out relays is tricky to me.
I like it because it gives me a bit of that feeling from the early bitcoin days.
My advice would be to get an Alby account and start there, start messing around. That's what I'm doing. Alby is not a nostr purist's wallet, but it's very easy and is widespread at the moment. Those two things are important to me at this stage. https://getalby.com
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