makeasnek

After looking for a way to sell event tickets via Bitcoin lighting network, I have given up on finding a solution built for tickets. Is there another solution I can re-purpose? #shopstr seems interesting, I can list a bunch of items aka tickets and people can see them by clicking on my profile, but it requires a cashu wallet not a regular lightning wallet.

#flockstr seems great but their ticket functionality doesn't work yet.

I know lnbits has a ticketing extension but I'd rather not have to run my own node, BTCPay server, etc.

Anything else out there?

Mastodon is a great platform. I have an account there, and I have been using it as a twitter replacement for several months. I have been using nostr for around two months. I have also read fairly deeply into how Mastodon and Nostr work. I think nostr is better. Here's why.

Background:

Mastodon and Nostr offer basically the same thing: a federated/decentralized replacement to twitter. They share the same basic features: tweeting, following people, a public square w/ trending notes and hashtags moderated by instance rules, DMs.

Mastodon/Lemmy/Kbin all federate through an underlying protocol called ActivityPub. You create an account at an instance which you use to interact with these sites. Your instance can push/pull data to other instances via the AP protocol.

Nostr is an underlying protocol, like ActivityPub. The main service is hosts currently, called Nostr, is a twitter clone, but there's other stuff like a video streaming platform. They all federate with each other just like Mastodon/Lemmy/Kbin. There is no reddit clone on nostr yet, but I imagine it's only a matter of time.

Instead of "instances", nostr has "relays". The app or site you connect to nostr through will usually connect to multiple relays (just like your mastodon instance will connect to multiple other instances). Relays, like instances, have their own moderation policies and can choose what kind of content they allow.

Here's why I think nostr simply works better:

• In mastodon your identity is tied to your instance, in nostr it's not. If your instance decides to close up? You have to make a new account somewhere else. You lose all your followers, the list of who you follow, your tweets, your DMs, etc. This sucks. This happened to me early in my mastodon experience. It was annoying, but it would be way more annoying if I had spent five years building up that account.
• In mastodon, your instance can stop you from seeing content from other instances and ban users from other instances. It can stop you from following them or being followed by them. While this moderation might be nice sometimes, I'd rather it be opt-in than mandatory. Nostr relays don't have this power. Nostr doesn't allow this because you are usually connected to multiple relays. While a single relay can do this (as each relay sets its own policies), as long as one relay you are connected to lets the data flow, you are good to go.
• In mastodon, admins can read your DMs. If you DM somebody on another instance, that's two instances that can read your DMs, and so can anybody who breaks into their server. In nostr, all DMs are encrypted by default and can only be read by the intended recipient.
• If mastodon and fediverse's goals are to create a P2P or federated network of instances, having users tied to instances is not good. It incentivizes users to pick bigger, more stable instances which will lead to centralization over time.

A question of funding

One question that fediverse needs to solve is: how are we going to fund hosting costs for instances and more broadly, development?

There are many valid options such as: ads on instances, selling "badges" or awards like reddit, subscriptions for extra features, etc. What is not a sustainable plan, imo, is just hoping users donate enough to keep things afloat. Open source and free software projects have a long history of being underfunded leading to them closing up shop or not reaching their full potential. Nostr at least has a potential answer for this, while AP/fedi don't really seem to yet.

Nostr has an optional built-in tipping functionality where you can leave tips for users whose content you like. You can tip a fraction of a penny or $100. And users can tip you. This has a few effects. For one, it incentivizes people to use nostr. Non-profit orgs, for example, can use it to fundraise.

Secondly, it provides a sustainable funding mechanisms for relays and development. When you make a tip, it goes through your "tip pool" and you can select people or entities to give a % of every tip to. So, for example, you can leave a 10c tip on a tweet and 1c automatically goes to the relay operator.

Where Mastodon/AP is better:

• Mastodon has more people I want to follow. There is a greater user base and diversity.
• Mastodon has a more consistent interface. Pretty much every mastodon site looks the same. Nostr has a dizzying array of apps and web portals. That's great for user choice, not great for user onboarding.
• While nostr relays in theory can filter content and cultivate public squares with specific sets of values, I've found in practice this hasn't been done as much, most relays seem the same. I think in time as the user base grows this will happen organically, there's just little reason to separate them out now.
• Password recovery/account loss. With nostr, your identity is a private key generated by your client. This means your identity isn't tied to an instance (yay!). But, if you lose the private key, you lose your identity and have to make a new one. Likewise, if somebody steals your key, they can post as you. And there is no real password recovery functionality since nobody else has your password. There are good technical solutions for this like social account recovery and key revocation certificates but they aren't currently implemented. I imagine they will be with time.
• Mastodon/Lemmy/Kbin/etc can all talk to each other through ActivityPub. While Nostr's underlying protocol supports this kind of federation, the twitter clone is the main platform with users on it and it doesn't have a reddit clone etc.
• The AP username format of username@website.com is much better than nostrs long public keys. There are some nostr protocol proposals to make this better, some of which are out there and working, but it's not really standardized yet.

Adding an edit about moderation since there is a lot of confusion about this:

Moderation abilities in AP and Nostr from an admin perspective are identical.

• As a relay operator in nostr, you choose what kind of content your relay accepts. You can block users, filter content based on keywords, de-federate from other instances with weak moderation policies, etc. Same as being an instance admin on AP.
• As a user, you can choose relays which provide you with a good "public square" experience free of bigots, NSFW, or other content you don't want to see. It's your choice, same as AP. Most users are connected to multiple relays. You can connect to only one in if you want.

The key difference in moderation is that in AP if your instance blocks a user or relay, it is blocked for all their users globally. This means you as a user can't keep following or DMing somebody whose username or relay has been blocked unless you make a new account on a different instance and check it separately. On nostr, as a user, this is not a problem. If you disagree with that moderation decision you just add a different relay to your list, as long one relay in your list of relays connects to that user, the data will flow and you will get to see it. It will remain blocked on the relay which blocked them and for users connected to it (if they are only connected to that relay, or if all their other relays also block that user/defederate from that instance).

It's the best of both worlds: relay operators can set their own moderation policies and vibes and choose which other relays they federate with, users have the freedom to use multiple relays to access the content they want and the freedom to choose which relays they use based on what kind of content they allow.

Whether or not you actually think this is a good thing to plan for now or not, you owe it to yourself to have an understanding of what Bitcoin can offer you in a collapse scenario. You should probably also know about Monero. It can even work with widespread internet outages, we'll get to that in a moment. My goal is to give you the information you need to decide if this is something worth looking into further. I will gladly answer any questions you may have.

Why?

• Global instability and partial breakdown of intl markets or national or supranational governance structures will greatly impact the spending power of your national currency, even if you are blessed with a fairly stable one right now
• Your government, in an attempt to stop the bleeding, will eventually resort to just printing more currency because that's one of the last measures that every failed state since the invention of currency has pursued, including both sides of the US during the civil war (though the north was a little better at backing that printing with additional investments/securities but that's a story for another time). It's also a measure they use in less dire circumstances, like bank bailouts and "quantitative easing".
• Your government may also go around seizing assets randomly, in an attempt to keep their system afloat, like the US did when it went around seizing everybody's gold to maintain the gold standard

During this time period, it would be wise for you to:

• Keep a hold of as many assets as you can
• Have something to exchange for goods or services. Even if international supply chains have broke down, you will still want to trade with people locally and maybe occasionally far away

For those of you who are unfamiliar with Bitcoin and Monero, let's start with some basics about Bitcoin:

• Bitcoin is a digital currency that is minted according to a protocol. The protocol sets the rules for how and when coins can be minted. This protocol is secured via cryptography.
• Bitcoin has faithfully followed this protocol for 15 years. Every day, 24/7, 365 days a year without getting hacked or experiencing a single hour of downtime.
• With Bitcoin lightning, international transactions take less than a second, for fees 100-1000% lower than credit cards, paypal, etc often under a single cent. Even on main chain, fees are much lower than wire costs and whatever your probably less than trustworthy post-collapse money broker is charging you.
• Anybody can access and use Bitcoin who has a phone and internet access. The setup process takes less than 5 minutes. There's no ID required, no bank holidays, and no middlemen.
• Bitcoin, unlike some national governments now, and certainly your national government in a time of crisis, has a clear, unchanging economic policy. There are a certain number of Bitcoin's minted, and after that no more can be minted. That's the policy.
• Because Bitcoin is decentralized, so secure, and based on basic principles of physics and math instead of trusting some particular party like a central bank, nobody can make Bitcoin print money it's not supposed to or do anything it's not supposed to. The government can't turn on the money printer and dilute the value of your Bitcoin by making more of them. The system isn't kept together and working through altruism, it's kept together and working due to principles of mathematics and physics that simply being rich or powerful doesn't absolve you of following unlike much of our legal system.
• In order to spend your Bitcoins you have to have access to a "private key" which is really just a very long number. If you don't have the private key, you can't spend the Bitcoins. Nobody can guess your private key, because guessing them even using all of the globe's current computing power would take approximately until the heat death of the universe.
• Because the "private key" is just a small piece of information, it is easy to hide. You can write it on a piece of paper, memorize it, or put it on a flash drive. You can also split the key among multiple parties so that even if one of you gets kidnapped, they can't spend funds without the approval of the other people in your group. Cash and gold can't do that.

Bitcoin vs precious metals:

• Bitcoin is much, much easier to spend than gold or silver.
• Gold requires you to figure out how to slice off a small amount of it to spend it, which is awkward
• Gold requires you to move it from buyer to seller physically or trust some third party to attest that the gold has transferred via using gold as a paper security
• Gold takes up physical space and hiding it is harder. Even burying it in your yard can be undone by a cheap metal detector. Good luck getting it through a border crossing.
• Large gold transactions require enlisting a third party to verify the gold is actually gold, or the equipment and knowledge to do it yourself.
• Yes, gold has industrial uses, but we have way more gold than we need for those industrial uses. And there will be a lot less industrial uses when.. global industry collapses. Its use as a currency was great in the 1300s, but now we have much better systems that it can't really compete with.

Ok ok, so what about if there are widespread internet outages?

• Your bank is useful because it's connected to other banks. During widespread internet, power, and other infrastructure issues, it becomes a lot less functional for moving money from A to B.
• As long as you have one connection to the internet, you can access and spend your Bitcoin. If you have no connection, your Bitcoin stays safe on the blockchain waiting for you to come back. And if your recipient has no internet access at the moment? Same thing.
• Even without internet, you can sign transactions and use lightning channels, which you can use as a basis for some localized trading with some trust trade-offs. There are, in fact, some Bitcoin wallets that are optimized for low-connectivity situations.
• While Comcast may not have survived, internet will be one of the first infrastructures people setup and share. It takes surprisingly little power to run and exists as a mesh network. There will be lots of equipment left over to run basic internet services for the globe for a while. I am glossing over some details here, but safe to say collapse != no internet forever. Things will be rocky for a bit, but we will likely have working wifi before we have running water or stable government again, for many reasons. Plus satellites exist.
• While there are many caveats and interesting scenarios to explore here (like what if the internet splits into two seperate internets?), in pretty much all of them Bitcoin still maintains a decent degree of usability and security.

Ok, so that's Bitcoin, but what about Monero? Monero is another cryptocurrency, similar to Bitcoin, but with a focus on privacy. This is important.

• Every transaction on the Bitcoin ledger is public. Everybody can see who sends coins from A to B
• The identity behind a Bitcoin address is pseudonymous. This means that if you make a new wallet, nobody knows who is behind "wallet B".
• But there are ways to find out who owns "wallet B". For example, if somebody asks you to send them some coins, now you have a wallet address and a name to match up. They might have also bought coins on an exchange, so now the government and exchange know who that address belongs to, etc.
• The public nature of the Bitcoin ledger also means that anybody can see the balance of any address. This could single you out as a target for robbery.
• Monero solves these problems by using a changed version of the Bitcoin protocol. Nobody can know your balance and nobody can see the flow of money from A to B, so you can maintain your anonymity.
• The monero network has been around since 2014 and is considered a fairly reliable coin. It has less hashpower behind it (less security), but is still plenty secure for most any transaction you can imagine.

Now, here are some common reasons why people say Bitcoin would be useless to them. For any criticism you can think of, ask "why isn't this true of fiat" and you'll find it probably equally applies.

• "Bitcoin has no inherent value" - K, then give me some please? Neither does fiat currency. In fact, by design, fiat's value decreases over time. The primary value of any currency is the stability of its fiscal policy and the network effect ie how many places can you buy and spend it. Bitcoin has the biggest network effect of any cryptocurrency. Year after year, on average, adoption grows no matter how you measure it (liquidity, number of nodes, etc). Bitcoins value is that it has an incredibly clear, stable fiscal policy and usability as a transactional currency. That's it.
• "In a collapse scenario, nobody wants Bitcoin, they'll want bread or other resources" - Sure, barter will always have its place, especially early on, but what is more valuable than a single item is a currency you can trade for many items. You may want stuff I have but have no things I want. Currency solves that problem. In other collapse scenarios even with incredibly unreliable currency and hyperinflation we still see people using currency for buying items. Currency's utility doesn't disappear just because a currency sucks.
• "Bitcoin uses too much energy" - Bitcoin uses less than 1% of global energy, much of it from renewables. Energy usage is crucial to securing the blockchain. Think about just how much energy is used by all the western union locations in the world, all the other wire transfer facilities which exist to do exactly what Bitcoin does but with more efficiency and delays. Bitcoin miners tend to chase the cheapest electricity, which often is from renewables, "stranded energy", and over-provisioned grids. Bitcoin has even been used to increase production of renewables due to its ability to even out energy demand curves. See this article for more details. Many currencies are based on incredibly inequitably distributed resources like precious metals or stable governments. Bitcoin is based on energy, which while not perfectly equitably distributed, is the most equitably distributed resource in the world. It literally falls from the sky onto every square meter of earth.

An important warning: there are two ways you can "own" Bitcoin: self-custody and everything else.

• Self-custody means you have the private key to your Bitcoin.
• A "custodial" wallet means somebody else has the private key to your Bitcoin. You've deposited it in their private little bank and they promise to give it back. Bitcoin exchanges work this same way. If they collapse, you lose your funds. Custodial wallets are fine to use and come with some benefits, just don't store anything in them you'd be sad to lose. Move funds you actually care about into your self-custody wallet.
• A self-custody wallet requires you to be dilligent about backups. If your computer or phone dies and you lose your private key/seed phrase, you can't get the Bitcoin back. Period. No matter how much you fuss and how much money you spend. Seriously. The same technology that protects you from other people spending your Bitcoin also means you can't spend it if you lose your key.
• Bitcoin lightning is great for everyday spending. If you have larger sums of money, move that BTC "on-chain" and out of lightning.
• When researching wallets, make sure you know what kind of custody the wallet offers. Always choose open-source wallets which are well reviewed online for maximum security. If you are storing large amounts of funds, look into things like multi-sig wallets, cold storage, etc.

A community for people using the BOINC platform to donate their CPU/GPU power towards scientific research. BOINC is used for medical research, finding asteroids, and even by the Large Hadron Collider. Join us in our quest to answer all the questions! !boinc@sopuli.xyz

Nostr and Mastodon have both positioned themselves as "twitter alternatives" and both offer some degree of federation. I have done quite a bit of reading and testing with both and am writing this in case you are curious about which one may work best for you.

I ended up deciding to use both, but I have a slight preference for nostr on the tech side of things. But in terms of user base, there are more people I want to follow on mastodon.

Let's start with what is the same with both systems:

• They are both federated and decentralized, reducing our dependency on centralized services like twitter
• Both are completely open-source
• They are both currently setup to share short messages like tweets, but are built on protocols which can support other kinds of messages and content.
• In both systems, you can "follow" people to have them show up in your feed, and people can "follow" you. You can also browse tweets from other users on the same server or from across the network in a "public square" type setting. Both also support hashtags. Both support "liking" a post, "re-tweeting", "replying", etc.
• They are both similar to e-mail in that any user can send a message to any other user regardless of which "instance" or "server" they are on (there are some exceptions here for moderation/defederation in Mastodon's case)
• They both feature some tools for moderation with more tools coming down the pipe soon
• You can run your own "instance" or "relay" on both for greater degrees of control and resiliency, though in Nostr's case there is very little benefit to doing so.

Terminology

• Mastodon has "instances" or "servers", nostr has "relays", these are essentially the same thing.

How to use

• With Mastodon, you generally sign up on an instance's website and then access it via their website or via an app. You can choose from many different apps and change whenever you like.
• With Nostr, you don't need to sign up at any website, you simply choose an app and it creates your account. You can change apps anytime you like. You can also sign up and access nostr through a website (like snort, which is what I use), but your account is not actually at that website, the website is essentially just your portal to access the nostr network.
• Note that while Mastodon is basically exclusively focused on "tweet"-like messages, Nostr does support a bunch of other types of content sharing with some apps optimized for that particular function. But the vast majority of nostr use/content still seems to be in the tweet-like category.

User base:

• Mastodon has a much larger and more diverse user base.
• One thing people say they don't like about nostr is that there are a lot more crypto bros on it. You can curate your feed as you like just as with mastodon. In fact, when I signed up at snort (a nostr website), during the default sign-up it blocks anything that's crypto, politics, or nsfw related.
• In both systems, instances or relays are often centered around a particular topic. Mastodon seems to embrace this concept more than nostr.

Identity

• In mastodon, your identity (ie your login name, your list of who follows you, the list of people you follow, and your tweet history) is tied to your account on a given instance. This means that if that instance shuts down or decides to kill your account for some reason, you have to start all over on another instance.
• In nostr, your identity is tied to your private key (made by the app you use, you don't actually need to know the key), not a single server or instance. When you "tweet" your message is automatically relayed to several relays. You can move your private key between apps if you want to change the app you use. Nostr is therefore more censorship resistant and resilient in the face of network outages or instances deciding to close.

Moderation and Federation

• In both Nostr and Mastodon, instances can set their own moderation policies to control what flows through their server.
• Likewise, Nostr and Mastodon instances can choose not to talk to other Nostr and Mastodon instances, though this kind of "defederation" is more frowned upon in Nostr circles and less relevant as a choice since an instance can't control who you follow.
• In both systems, you can block users or servers you find annoying.
• Unlike Mastodon, in Nostr you can always follow somebody so long as at least one relay is serving their content. Your relay doesn't control who you can follow. While in Mastodon your relay generally doesn't control who you can follow, they have this ability and sometimes use it for anti-spam, anti-abuse, or philosophical reasons (ie defederating from threads).

Privacy/Security

• Mastodon has some confusion among users that DM's weren't actually as private as they were used to based on using twitter previously. This is really more just incorrect user expectation, not a flaw or problem with mastodon.
• Mastodon instances can see your DMs between you and other users.
• Nostr has the ability to send encrypted DMs, so the relay cannot read your messages and they truly are private. Though I believe the metadata (who is sending messages to who and when) is not private.

Micropayments

• Nostr has built-in support for micropayments or "tips" via Bitcoin lightning. This means if you like a tweet, you have the option to give a small monetary tip to the author. You can tip what is essentially a hundredth of a cent or $100, it's up to you. Likewise, other people can tip you if they like your tweets. You don't have to use this function at all if you don't want, it's not turned on by default.
• Mastodon has no support for micropayments

Other

• Mastodon has some ability to integrate with other services like lemmy/kbin since they use the same underlying protocol. How and when to do this integration seems to be some matter of debate at the moment.

Conclusion

I like nostr's design better mostly because it gives me some more autonomy in a few key places:

• In nostr, I am not dependent on my instance. I imagine mastodon will fix this issue in the future and make it easier to recover from situations where your instance decides to close up shop, but as of right now it's an unsolved problem. I had this happen early in my mastodon experience and it was pretty annoying, I would have been even more annoyed if I had spent years building up tweets, followers, people I follow, etc. Mastodon offers more portability than traditional social media sites, but nostr goes even further than Mastodon does in this regard.
• I like that my instance can't choose who I follow or talk to.
• The encrypted dm and tipping functionality is interesting but I don't think I'll get much use out of it. I tried tipping just to try it out, and it works smoothly, but it just doesn't appeal to me much. And if I really want secure communications I'd probably use a different system for it.

Mastodon has more people I want to follow, that for me is the main reason to be on mastodon.

from: https://universeathome.pl/universe/forum_thread.php?id=738 I met Krzysztof in the summer of 2014. It was then that Grzegorz Wiktorowicz found me and invited me to collaborate on a new scientific project. The reason they found me on the Internet was a problem with accessing the necessary computing power needed for the scientific research of these two scientists. Soon after, the test server for the Universe@Home project was created - some of you may still remember it.

As soon as it turned out that the idea of using BOINC was a bullseye, Krzysztof offered me a more permanent collaboration, which I undertook with joy. Few of us have the opportunity to work with scientists of this caliber.

We worked together for almost 10 years. About a month ago, we were discussing development possibilities, and Krzysztof was telling me about the publications being created based on our joint work (yes, there were supposed to be more than one!).

Unfortunately, today we will no longer be able to implement these plans...

As Krzysztof was a founder of the project, I don’t know yet what will happen next with our project. It's too early for any decisions, but whatever they may be - you will find out immediately. Krzysztof never forgot to mention the help our community provided him, and I am sure that we too will remember his trust in the power of the community...