Nostr, Curated Thoughtfully

Published by: Laeserin
Author: Stella

Hello and welcome to my community blog. I manually curate the selection of events, from my own hand or those of writers I follow.

Looking for comments…

Searching Nostr relays. This may take a moment the first time this article is opened.

Highlights

View highlight: Careful, Icarus
Silent payments aren't a panacea either, mind you. They are meant to be non-interactive, as Calle pointed out. And on top of that they will create on-chain transactions just the same, bringing fee pressure and bloating the UTXO
Careful, Icarus
View highlight: Careful, Icarus
Silent payments aren't a panacea either, mind you. They are meant to be non-interactive, as Calle pointed out. And on top of that they will create on-chain transactions just the same, bringing fee pressure and bloating the UTXO
Careful, Icarus
View highlight: Careful, Icarus
Silent payments aren't a panacea either, mind you. They are meant to be non-interactive, as Calle pointed out. And on top of that they will create on-chain transactions just the same, bringing fee pressure and bloating the UTXO set just the same.
Careful, Icarus
View highlight: Careful, Icarus
This type of choice is removed entirely if clients make a deterministically derived address the default.
Careful, Icarus
View highlight: Careful, Icarus
So when I said that "Lightning is a sane default for zaps" that's what I meant. Lightning does not allow you to spy on the financial activity of the sender (or the receiver) in perpetuity
Careful, Icarus
View highlight: Careful, Icarus
So when I said that "Lightning is a sane default for zaps" that's what I meant. Lightning does not allow you to spy on the financial activity of the sender (or the receiver) in perpetuity.
Careful, Icarus
View highlight: Careful, Icarus
So when I said that "Lightning is a sane default for zaps" that's what I meant. Lightning does not allow you to spy on the financial activity of the sender (or the receiver) in perpetuity.
Careful, Icarus
View highlight: Careful, Icarus
She goes on to say, correctly, that right now, thanks to the Lightning Network, "[zaps] don't dox you and everyone else you interact with for the rest of eternity." And as we've already established above, "when I cash out my zaps, nobody knows where that money went to."
Careful, Icarus
View highlight: Careful, Icarus
which encourages bad practices and has the potential to actively harm users in the long run, for the sake of short-term "convenience" and "we can do it so why the fuck not" I guess.
Careful, Icarus
View highlight: Careful, Icarus
But there's a fine line between just doing things and just doing damage to things. I hate to see unsuspecting users get rekt,
Careful, Icarus
View highlight: Careful, Icarus
I promised myself that I would never get into a twitter argument ever again, and resorted to shitposting instead. Bliss.
Careful, Icarus
View highlight: Careful, Icarus
One last thing: zaps and numerology go hand-in-hand. 21 sats here, 69,420 sats there, palindrome zaps, etc. We can't do any of that if we hit the chain directly because broadcasting the exact amount would make it trivial for an attacker to identify the actual transaction. Which means any sane proposal would
Careful, Icarus
View highlight: Careful, Icarus
I feel like a broken record when I keep saying that [money and identity aren't
the same thing][money-identity]. "The whole point of money is to not know your
customer," to quote the [Italian comedian][italian-comedian] once more.
Careful, Icarus
View highlight: Careful, Icarus
But there's a fine line between just doing things and just doing damage to things. I hate to see unsuspecting users get rekt, and if something insane like
Careful, Icarus
View highlight: Careful, Icarus
There are scenarios that make this problematic. Let's pick a ridiculous one, just for fun. Imagine a mafia boss coming to your house, giving you money that was made via illicit means. He vanishes instantly after, but not before leaving a trail that leads directly to you. A trail that's very easy to pick up by the police as well as other mafia people. To make things worse, you had no option to
Careful, Icarus
View highlight: Careful, Icarus
You decide to move the money, which is to say: move the UTXOs that are now associated with your nostr identity. Maybe you want to move them to your cold storage, or maybe you want to buy something online, or spend it at a [merchant] directly, or maybe you want to send the money to a friend who isn't on nostr yet. Whatever you decide to do, absolutely everyone in the world
Careful, Icarus
View highlight: Careful, Icarus
In short: using on-chain addresses for zaps is a terrible idea precisely
because it reveals more than necessary. And to add insult to injury, it
automatically makes this oversharing permanent.
Careful, Icarus
View highlight: Financial Repression and the March Toward Serfdom
The future of European financial sovereignty depends on individuals who refuse, quietly and relentlessly, to comply with their own impoverishment.
Financial Repression and the March Toward Serfdom
View highlight: Financial Repression and the March Toward Serfdom
his is the distributional reality that the “tax the rich” framing deliberately obscures. Wealth taxes do not fall on the wealthy in proportion to the narrative. They fall on the aspiring wealthy which are always the people who are trying to build multigenerational financial security through patient, disciplined capital accumulation. The middle class. The people least able to absorb forced liquidation and most dependent on compound returns over long time horizons. These are the people who most likely cannot afford the escape routes.
Financial Repression and the March Toward Serfdom
View highlight: Financial Repression and the March Toward Serfdom
The unrealized gains tax is a blunt instrument designed, whether intentionally or through economic illiteracy, to dramatically raise the time preference of every Dutch investor. Why hold assets for the long run when you face annual tax bills on their paper appreciation? Why compound your savings when the government extracts a 36% toll on the compounding itself? The rational response is to reduce equity exposure, shorten investment horizons, and shift into non-taxed or less-taxed vehicles. As a result the following consequences are likely to follow:
Financial Repression and the March Toward Serfdom
View highlight: Financial Repression and the March Toward Serfdom
The Box 3 reform, scheduled for implementation in 2028, proposes a 36% levy on unrealized gains across stocks, bonds, and cryptocurrency holdings. Not on profits realized or income earned, but on paper gains; the fluctuating, market-priced, potentially-evaporating-tomorrow notional appreciation of assets you still own. This is confiscation by stealth that is dressed up as tax policy. Similar unrealised gains tax proposals are circulating in Belgium, Denmark, and at the EU level as part of broader capital income harmonisation discussions, but the Netherlands is the leading edge, not an isolated case
Financial Repression and the March Toward Serfdom
View highlight: Financial Repression and the March Toward Serfdom
Property rights are the logical prerequisite of all social cooperation. You own your body, the products of your labour, and assets acquired through voluntary exchange. The state’s legitimate role, to whatever limited degree one grants it legitimacy at all, does not extend to claiming title over appreciation in the value of assets you continue to hold and have not sold.
Financial Repression and the March Toward Serfdom
View highlight: Financial Repression and the March Toward Serfdom
When investors must liquidate holdings to meet tax obligations on unrealized gains, they do not sell in an orderly fashion. They sell into markets. This creates price pressure, which reduces asset values, which, in a grim irony, potentially reduces or eliminates the very gain they were taxed on. A cacophony of the “unintended consequences” of central planning will manifest in full force, thanks to the planners’ inability to anticipate the second and third-order effects of their interventions. The Dutch government cannot model how many investors will sell, when, and into what market conditions.
Financial Repression and the March Toward Serfdom
View highlight: MBS26: Why Muslims Must Embrace Nostr
what kind of human being the tech expects, and what kind of human being the tech produces.~ @npub1uzf...57h3
MBS26: Why Muslims Must Embrace Nostr
View highlight: MBS26: Why Muslims Must Embrace Nostr
nostr:naddr1qvzqqqr4gupzpuejs5sha9m2m890q4rygkkczp7mnrm9je7deekvu30xpksqace2qq2k766hdpn57ur8ga495an4v3dxjkzfxag455ujspq
MBS26: Why Muslims Must Embrace Nostr
View highlight: MBS26: Why Muslims Must Embrace Nostr
Nostr is not an Islamic protocol. Bitcoin is not an Islamic monetary system. GrapheneOS is not an Islamic operating system. They are the structural forms through which decentralized digital life is currently the most coherently organized. The task is not to build from nothing — only Allah does that. Digital Hijra is about migrating to inhabit and sustain these tools with sufficient depth, spiritual seriousness, aesthetic practice, and intellectual integrity that what emerges become more that just niche Islamic cypherpunk culture.
MBS26: Why Muslims Must Embrace Nostr
View highlight: MBS26: Why Muslims Must Embrace Nostr
The rihla model — scholarly travel in pursuit of knowledge, the building of trust networks through direct encounter across geography. This is the model for how the knowledge dimension of the network develops its integrity. The classical Islamic scholarly tradition built its authority not through institutional credential but through chains of attestation, through the isnad — who heard what from whom, traceable back through living relationships. In our distributed network that is trying to develop genuine scholarly and intellectual life, that model of attestation-through-relationship rather than credential-through-institution is not only historically resonant, it is architecturally suited to what Nostr actually is.
MBS26: Why Muslims Must Embrace Nostr
View highlight: The Abundance Cage
This, then, is the genuine counter-vision: not the passive receipt of government checks, which extinguishes the motivation to adapt and surrenders economic agency to the state; not the resentful rejection of technology, which is as futile as opposing the power saw; but the active deployment of powerful tools (AI, robotics, the entire apparatus of automated production) by individuals who own sound money, whose savings are protected across time, whose capital accumulates at the pace of their own discipline and not at the discretion of any central authority. In such a world, the arrival of a more powerful machine is not a threat to be compensated for. It is an inheritance to be claimed; another instrument added to the workshop of a free people who own their labour, own their money, and bow to no sovereign for the disposition of either.
The Abundance Cage
View highlight: MBS26: Why Muslims Must Embrace Nostr
IV. The Beautiful Resistance Linux, Nostr, Bitcoin — these are products of the same civilization that produced Google, Facebook and Apple, running on the same material infrastructure, built by people whose cognitive formation happened within the same technological epoch. The open source developer and the surveillance-state capitalist are operating within the same fundamental disclosure of the world. The question is not whether your tools are sovereign. It is whether your relationship to tools as such has been transformed. And changing which tools you use does not, by itself, answer that question because there is a metaphysical orientation that shapes the entire field of modern technological practice.
MBS26: Why Muslims Must Embrace Nostr
View highlight: The Abundance Cage
The AI infrastructure that makes UHI administratively feasible also makes it the most powerful behavioral surveillance and control system ever built. Citizens will not be required to do anything overtly but they will simply find that certain behaviors, associations, speech acts, and consumption choices are quietly incompatible with continued receipt of their government cheque. The state does not need malicious intent to arrive at total economic control through UHI. It needs only the ordinary operational logic of a bureaucratic institution with unlimited financial leverage over the population it administers.
The Abundance Cage
View highlight: The Abundance Cage
AI is incapable of resolving the problem of a state that habitually outspends its income. This lack of fiscal discipline, rather than a shortfall in productivity, is what ultimately fuels inflation. Inflation is not primarily a function of supply chains or price indices but it is the inevitable consequence of increasing the money supply faster than the production of real goods and services. Call it what you will: "printing," "deficit spending," "quantitative easing," or "Universal High Income."
The Abundance Cage
View highlight: The Abundance Cage
A government that can give you everything can take everything away. A citizenry that depends on the state for its subsistence is not free; it is domesticated.
The Abundance Cage
View highlight: MBS26: Why Muslims Must Embrace Nostr
The deepest problem with purely secular accounts of human potentiality is not that they are wrong about the power of formation. They're largely right about that. The problem is that they have no account of what formation is operating on. They map the substrate layers but not the transcendent. And anyone who has done serious inner work — in any spiritual tradition — knows that the psychological and the spiritual are not the same thing.

What accumulates through years inside the attention economy is sediment. Real, thick, genuinely difficult to move through. But sediment deposited on something. The residue is not the soul. Tarbiya then is not a reconstruction project. It is excavation. It is clearing. Moving through the sediment toward something that was always already there, that the system worked on but could not reach, and so buried it in mud.
MBS26: Why Muslims Must Embrace Nostr
View highlight: MBS26: Why Muslims Must Embrace Nostr
The Hallaqian insight — that you cannot capture or reform a metaphysically loaded system without being formed by it in return — does not lead to paralysis. It leads precisely to our founding move. If the state cannot be captured, if the platforms cannot be reformed, if the system cannot be redirected from within — then you do not try. You build outside. You found something new on different metaphysical ground, with a different account of what the human subject is and what community is for. The Hallaqian problem is not an argument against Digital Hijra. Properly understood, it is the argument for it.
MBS26: Why Muslims Must Embrace Nostr
View highlight: MBS26: Why Muslims Must Embrace Nostr
The Hallaqian problem is not an argument against Digital Hijra. Properly understood, it is the argument for it.
MBS26: Why Muslims Must Embrace Nostr
View highlight: MBS26: Why Muslims Must Embrace Nostr
His core thesis is that the modern nation-state is not a neutral tool that Islamic political projects can simply capture and redirect. It is a metaphysically loaded organism with assumptions that produce a specific kind of subject, the citizen, whose formation is structurally incompatible with the Muslim moral subject our tradition is trying to cultivate. The Hallaqian problem[^5] is thus a problem of pyrrhic victory: you capture the machinery of the state and find that the machinery has been quietly capturing you.
MBS26: Why Muslims Must Embrace Nostr
View highlight: The Abundance Cage
ntial threat to the entire fiat ponzi scheme.
The Abundance Cage
View highlight: The Abundance Cage
existential threat to the entire fiat ponzi scheme.
The Abundance Cage
View highlight: The Abundance Cage
Once the state is established as the universal income distributor, the question of how much to distribute becomes permanently political. Every election becomes a bidding war over UHI levels, every fiscal crisis becomes a justification for expanding the conditions attached to payment and every social problem becomes a candidate for behavioral modification through the threat of payment suspension.
The Abundance Cage
View highlight: The Abundance Cage
Once the state is established as the universal income distributor, the question of how much to distribute becomes permanently political. Every election becomes a bidding war over UHI levels, every fiscal crisis becomes a justification for expanding the conditions attached to payment and every social problem becomes a candidate for behavioral modification through the threat of payment suspension.
The Abundance Cage
View highlight: The Abundance Cage
To have 8 billion people dependent on the benevolence of the tech bros who will have all the capital and the power, while the citizen owns nothing but his own idleness, is a destiny that no free man should find tolerable.
The Abundance Cage
View highlight: Bitcoin Is Time
As soon as money goes digital, we have to agree on a definition of time, and herein lies the whole problem.
Bitcoin Is Time
View highlight: Bitcoin Is Time
keeping track of things in the informational realm always implies keeping track of time
Bitcoin Is Time
View highlight: Bitcoin Is Time
In the digital realm, coinstamping requires timestamping.
Bitcoin Is Time