Tech is the exception that proves the rule, rather, advancing so fast that the concomitant price deflation outpaced inflation seen in other sectors.
There's an interesting chart that shows how inflation has been distributed very unequally in the economy over the last 20 years. Things like healthcare and housing where the supply is legally/artificially constrained (thus preventing natural price deflation) have seen the biggest increases.
As technological advancement drives increased productivity, purchasing power that would have otherwise accrued to the not-asset-owning class in the form of price deflation is siphoned off by central planners who would like a way to levy taxes without having to go through the democratic process.
The justification/counter-argument from academia is that if deflation were allowed to occur it would harm the economy by disincentivizing the circulation of money (since all you have to do to is wait and your currency becomes more valuable).
The counter-counter argument is that it is nonsensical to expect that a falling cost of living would harm the economy because price deflation is, on the contrary, an effect of economic growth that has already occurred.
I always thought that the argument against the gold standard/BTC/whatever (relatively) stationary or deflationary currency is that the money supply needs to be elastic to account for the change in the size of the economy. That is, as the economy grows, there needs to be more currency to support it.
No arguments against the idea that inflation is effectively a tax.
My understanding is that everyone agrees that expanding the money supply under conditions of economic growth is necessary to avoid deflation.
The contention centers on whether price deflation is a good or bad thing.
If you're a "grow the pie" kind of person, you probably think that it's a good thing because falling prices without falling demand is simply a sign of the pie having grown.
If you're a "redistribute the pie" kind of person, you understand that deflation is an opportunity to control where newly created wealth is funneled to without the people who create the wealth noticing.
So I've been building of one of the nostr web clients ( https://satellite.earth ) full time since December last year - I agree partially with all these points and will try to add something from my perspective of being perhaps a bit too close to this.
1) With regard to message replication/ordering, the relays are supposed to reject messages that are received with a timestamp that deviates from the server clock beyond some max delta, but it's not clear they always do this. Nostr in its current state (multiple relays hosting everything and letting clients sort it out) is optimizing for redundancy over efficiency — as the ecosystem matures I think this will get sorted out. I have one idea in particular that I think could really help, but it's beyond the scope of this comment.
2) In the very early days you had to copy/paste your key into some clients, but this is not the case anymore. There are several web extensions now that hold your key securely and expose a limited interface for clients to sign messages.
3) You're right - there are too many NIPS (that's "nostr implementation possibility" for those unaware). But fortunately the only required NIP is NIP-01 which is basically just a standard for how to sign and exchange json between clients and relays. I don't think any client implements all the NIPs. In fact, there has been a lot of talk on nostr about 'microapps' (apps that specialize in a narrow use case) and that's fine — maybe because nostr was birthed in the context of being a Twitter alternative we've been thinking that all clients need to support the whole protocol, but I don't really think it will turn out that way. Since all apps are interoperable with a shared user identity, it's possible for clients to be complementary to each other in a way that hasn't previously been incentivized.
4) Regrading blob storage — that's what NIP-94 was created for. You can in principle create a "file" message containing whatever metadata you want. This can be a torrent magnet link or IPFS cid or whatever.
For what it's worth, I've personally never had as much coding anything than I have working on nostr. There's a core group of people that are very excited about this, and it's really motivating to get immediate feedback every time I push an update. No doubt the whole thing is very messy compared to a corporate-sponsored project like (for example) Bluesky. My bias is toward ecological systems tending to win in the long term. We'll find out.
I checked out a community that on the tin is about learning coding and found Trumpers, bigots and antivaxxers. It reminded me of pro free speech fork of Reddit. It wasn't a bad idea AT ALL on the face of it but in practice its front page was never without a racial slur and no decent people stayed long.
If everyone cares about privacy then privacy focused places ought to be full of on average smart people having intelligent conversations. If few people feel the need to bother you end of serving largely the paranoid and the odious and this can easily be a self re-enforcing trend as bad drives out the good.
I feel like the space could use some innovation if its produce communities worth attending to without strong centralized moderation. Instead of bubbling up the top 100 things the community as a whole thinks are worth reading or the top 100 things that someone thinks I might be willing to engage with including 60 things selected because they are liable to make me angry or succeed in wasting my time why not have a personalized analysis done on MY side or on a computer I rent to pull in 10,000 things and figure out which 100 I actually want to engage with based on my own aims not advertisers.
I would probably pay for that especially if it could be plugged into a lot of common platforms to filter out the crap.
Social media is crawling with the bigoted anti-reality Trumper crowd. There are plenty here as well.
Maybe running a local spam filter on one of these decentralized platforms is the way to go. I wouldn't mind running LLMs and removing all the content from Trump crime family fans. Would be nice to detect and reject LLM-generated adtech bullshit while we are at it.
> Linden was emphatic about how science requires a mechanism of action
I don't think this is correct. Science is based on empiricism. Of course we'd like to understand the mechanism of action, but it's not strictly required for scientific description of some aspect of reality. For example, Kepler's laws were derived from the observed paths of the planets — it was only later that these same laws could be explained with recourse to the theory of gravity.
Even if that is what he meant, I still don't think it's correct.
To speak of a "mechanism of action" is necessarily to speak about a model of Nature that you, an observer, have created.
Natural phenomena exist empirically and logically prior to any such model, thus is is metaphysically redundant to say that Nature as such requires a mechanism of action.
I've used Nostr a handful of times and am impressed with how responsive the network appears to be. But the problem I have with it is that the default feed (or whatever its called) is chock full of crypto nonsense. Terrible first impression.
I made a test post and was immediately pinged by two crypto bots. Yeah no thanks.
That's a fair point, and most of the people on nostr are aware of the need to diversify. In fact, as of last week you can create Reddit-like sub-communities on nostr with rules like "no crypto content" which should help a lot.
