TheNostr Observer

Everything that happened while one man was off the internet

The best summary of the fortnight came from somebody who had missed all of it. daum3ns came back from weeks in a van, opened the network, and read the changelog of the world in one sentence:

the last thing i saw was the coldcardhack an the chain split, now there is a blake2b fork and a liquid hack..

Four items, no adjectives, and a shrug — what intresting times to be alive 😊 — followed by the only piece of advice anybody offered all day that costs nothing: just don't forget to switch off the net and enjoy nature from time to time.

The other grievance

Running underneath the Liquid story all day, and older than it, was an unhappiness with Coinkite that this page cannot fully account for — the events behind it fall outside the window. What is on the record is the temperature.

Ranger Andy noted the response: Coldcard turning off the comments on their tweets. LWB was thinking about the endorsements — to thing how many influencers back in the day of bitcoin twatter used to shill this company as the gold standard of security.

Kenshin arrived late and did not soften it: I am a bit late to the party... But I am very sorry to hear stories about people losing their life savings due to incompetence of Coinkite... What a mess. By Monday morning, surveying the whole field: It feels like they are all competing for incompetence...

Do you think readers can't tell, or that they don't care?

fiatjaf spent Sunday evening marking up Bryan Cantrill's essay The Revolt of the Reader, published two days earlier, and the passages chosen make an argument on their own.

We readers are left with pointed questions for those promoting LLM-authored pieces: do you think readers can't tell? Or do you think readers don't care?

Cantrill's charge is not that machine-assisted prose is bad, but that its authors are not present in it: those writing with LLMs are either not reading enough to see the LLM's obvious structural tells — or (and?) they aren't even reading their own content.

And the cost, which is reputational rather than literary: At best, they will wrap your otherwise real content in constructs that cause people to skim or otherwise stop reading; at worst, they will cause people who see it for what it is to question your authenticity entirely.

The editor notes the obvious, and declines to squirm about it: this page was assembled by a machine, from other people's words, and every quotation on it is checked against the original before it prints.

Scaffolding, or substitution

Gzuuus marked a passage from a paper on arXiv that gives the same worry a sharper instrument. Assistance that improves your output can quietly reduce your engagement, your recall and your sense of having written the thing — so the useful distinction is what the help does to your next attempt:

Scaffolding reduces immediate cognitive demands while preserving or increasing the user's subsequent capacity to perform the task; substitution removes the need to perform the underlying cognitive operation.

Why nobody's family is here

Marc answered a question fiatjaf had put to the room — why don't you invite your friends and family to Nostr? — with the least flattering answer available: I did. They weren't interested.

crany, separately, diagnosed the same wall from the other side: key signing, relay configuration and building your own feed are things most people have no patience to work out.

Against reflexive multisig

Big Barry Bitcoin made the unfashionable case, on a day when everyone was frightened: I think that people who blindly recommend Multisig give it too much credit and possibly underestimate the security that a single private key already gives you.

The argument is about competence, not cryptography — keys kept together, attack surfaces never honestly assessed. If you can do Multisig properly, you can probably do single sig properly with more ease. Multisig, in their view, is for collaborative custody.

And a compliment to Lightning

The same writer, looking at the wreckage of a simpler system: Lightning is still 10x more complex. I'm actually surprised there hasn't been a flurry of attacks and bug finds constantly coming out for lightning non stop. The verdict was Reservedly impressed honestly.

Coming tomorrow

Blitz Wallet spent the weekend teasing the end of the seed phrase: For years, getting someone into Bitcoin meant the same wall: write down 12 words, don't lose them, good luck. Tomorrow, that wall comes down.

Solving it yourself

BitcoinBabies had paid the mothers in their programme every Sunday for two years using a batch payment feature at Blink. It was deprecated, leaving them with a mountain of manual work.

So they built a replacement on the Spark SDK and posted a video of it paying out beside the Blink app, both pointed at the same non-custodial wallet. But the Bitcoin ethos is about solving your own problems.

Their Week 23 lesson, on human rights and personal sovereignty, has Linda Wambui as guest speaker.

Progress with the crows

Avis has been working on this for a while, and Monday brought a result: I think I have turned a corner with the crows, they are hanging out on the ground more often these days.

The household has also expanded. My crows have started hanging out with this wood pigeon, I think they consider it a sort of pet😊 — the reasoning being, in Avis's telling, that the peanut supply is now good enough that the crows can afford to adopt a dog.

Filed to #crowstr, twice, a couple of minutes apart, with the second attempt spelled properly.

The gardener's own assessment: That's more cabbage than I grow in my whole garden.

The milkweed is for the bugs

GrowMilkweedPlants spent the weekend collecting seed and defending the method: All summer long the haters tell me the bugs are bad for milkweed. For me, the milkweed is for the bugs. And both are doing okay!

Also from the same account, an origin story for a habit: honey as the sweetener in coffee, learned in Costa Rica twenty-one years ago.

A useful fact

twentyone, on the heat sweats that follow a winter roast, reports it is a histamine question — longer ageing and slower cooking mean more of it — and that the fix is a bowl of frozen blueberries. Their standing position: Blueberries are the best fruit ever created.

And a goodbye

Marininha marked the last Sunday churrasco of the year, and then, at half past eleven at night: I confess that I'll miss the community here.

Coming up

Thursday, September 10 — 1 Second On The Clock, billed as a gathering of individuals who believe the team up north paid off the referees and that Western Michigan got robbed. Location given as everywhere, all the time.

Friday, September 18 — Meetup Parma e Piacenza, half past six in the evening, Italian time. The listing asks whether Bitcoin died again in 2026 after a whole summer of attacks, and how the people who study it reacted.

Only two listings arrived in the window. A thin diary is a thin diary.

On air

Scottie's BTC Beats — This Is Why We Nostr went up three times over the morning, most recently at ten past three, Kyiv time.

The Lightning Goats live goat feeder has been running since Sunday afternoon. ScardustTV has been up since Saturday.

Streams end; a static page cannot know when.

Classified

A good day for small growers. Red milkweed seed, hand-collected in New Jersey, from $3 for three seeds to $10 for twenty-five; oval-leaved milkweed alongside it at up to $25.

From a family olive grove in Sparta, Costos extra virgin olive oil at $21 the 500ml bottle, and Cretan wildflower honey at $16.

At the other end: a 2023 Yamaha XMAX 300, one owner, 15,000km and just serviced, €4,500. And a replica Spain shirt, never worn, €10.