No. 2EF3E4Monday, October 5, 202624h to 17:19

The Nostr Observer

Printed from one corner of the network

Ranked as EZ680 events through your lens222 voices

BTC Map · September’s balance sheet

234 more merchants. Fewer freshly checked.

The map keeps growing. Keeping its pins trustworthy is the slower job: the average merchant listing is now 457 days past its last check.

BTC Map finished September with 27,148 merchants, a net gain of 234. Its monthly report puts the larger total, including exchanges and ATMs, at 29,622 places. The number verified within the past year moved the other way, falling by 286 to 15,957.

The distinction matters to anyone who turns up expecting to pay. A pin records a place; a recent check gives the next visitor more reason to rely on it. The project’s verdict is direct: keeping the map accurate has not kept up with it.

There was substantial work on the tools. The rebuilt web submission form keeps the map in view, fixes the pin while details are entered and adds a review step before submission. Android 1.2.0 arrived on September 30 with bundled data, local caching and downloadable map areas for offline use.

The report also records different kinds of local effort. Thailand’s 169 changes were almost all updates to existing places. In the United States, more than half of 431 changes were additions. Both expand the map’s usefulness; only one necessarily makes it look bigger.

September closeAs reported
Merchants27,148
Places, including exchanges and ATMs29,622
Places verified within a year15,957
Average days since merchant check457

Month-end figures from BTC Map’s September report, not live totals. The project asks contributors to re-verify nearby places as well as add new ones.

Nostr Community Zine

The network, folded into a pocket

Two small printed Nostr Community Zine booklets resting on a table.
No Good Kid’s print announcement arrives with two physical copies on the table. The file is intended for meetups, conferences and conversations with friends.Image shared by No Good Kid

A conversation about Nostr can now begin with something handed over. No Good Kid has shared a print-ready Community Zine file and the specifications a print shop needs: A3, 420 × 297 mm, 300 DPI, CMYK, with three-millimetre bleed and crop marks.

The economical suggestion is to have the shop print and trim the sheets, then do the folding yourself. A folding demonstration is linked in the comments. The announcement invites questions from anyone preparing copies.

There is an appropriately modest distribution plan here: take a few to the next gathering, or give one to the friend who has been asking what this network is for. Paper has no account-creation screen.

The source link on the picture credit leads to the announcement and its print-ready PDF.

The repair desk

Amber 6.6.7

Give the relay another chance

Amber fixes a failure that could leave relays disconnected until the app was force-closed. Relays marked dead after poor connectivity now get another attempt after a fifteen-minute cooldown, and failed attempts are no longer counted twice.

VPN changes and restored internet access also reset stale connections and the reconnect delay. The release adds recognition of web requests from browsers other than Chrome and fixes a permission-saving crash after an app was deleted or reset.

PHP

A sick weekend, a new binding

Unhosted Marcellus spent a weekend at home building a replacement native binding for secp256k1 in PHP, instead of attending a conference.

The account is short: using the library from PHP was possible a decade ago, but the old binding had become unmaintained beyond repair. The replacement is published as secp256k1-php.

Outis 0.3.0

An eye on the clipboard

Daniele released Outis 0.3.0 with optimisations and a new monitor mode that prompts when it detects an email address in the clipboard.

The announcement links downloads for macOS, Linux and Windows, alongside a screenshot of the new behaviour.

Who gets to read?

At the relay

Open protocol, chosen audience

Daniele asks why people put their own write relays behind authentication for readers, beyond reducing load and collecting data. In another note, fiatjaf offers the case for content reserved for friends or paying readers.

Fiatjaf’s broader distinction is about who decides: Nostr was never about being fully open for everybody, only that there is no single central authority deciding on behalf of users.

The disagreement separates two questions that are easily collapsed: whether a network has a central gatekeeper, and whether every publication on it must admit every reader.

Among familiar faces

When the inner circle arrives

Dreiberge describes the same question at a more personal scale. Nostr had been a place where few followers also knew them offline, making it easier to share small pleasures without worrying about everyday encounters or misunderstandings.

Now more people from their inner circle are joining. The reaction is welcome rather than rejection: And I’m genuinely happy about that. It’s lovely. But I also need a little time to get used to it 🤍

An audience can change without a setting changing. The pleasure of finding familiar people and the freedom of speaking among strangers do not always arrive together.

In brief

Utah’s VPN rules halted

The Electronic Frontier Foundation reports a preliminary injunction against VPN provisions in Utah’s age-verification law. It is an interim block on enforcement, not a final ruling disposing of the entire law.

Suspended at the CI run

/dev/fd0 reports discovering a GitHub account suspension while trying to run a repository’s continuous-integration checks. The note says no advance notice or email arrived; it gives no reason for the suspension.

The score is now 1,116

Yesterday’s paper carried Arjen’s Doodle Duo score of 544. A separate result in today’s window puts it at 1,116: two phones, one player steering left and another right, without an internet connection.

Gathered · Recorded · On the calendar

From the picture desk

The hedgerow’s colours

A wicker basket holding small apples, red berries and leafy branches.
Jimble’s Jumble records a hedgerow harvest of crab apple, sloe, rowan, rosehip and hawthorn. A basket photograph accompanies the list.Image shared by Jimble’s Jumble

The exchange

An album you can hold

Joe Martin’s Alone In Valentine is listed in two physical formats: vinyl at £30 and CD at £20. Both listings are active and based in the United Kingdom.

For a signed copy, the artist asks buyers to send a direct message after ordering. Prices are those in the listings; delivery details remain with the seller.

Music’s smaller payments

863 sats per wallet

Amplified Tunes reports September’s distribution: 8,629 sats collected outside its podcast and magazine, with sixty per cent designated for six selected artists or profiles. The announced payment is 863 sats to each wallet.

The distribution’s figures are reproduced as posted.

Dates ahead

A pub, a farewell, a coffee

Oct 6 · 20:00
Belfast Bitcoin Meetup, The John Hewitt, 51 Donegall Street. Newcomers welcome.

Oct 8 · 18:30
Round Rock Bitcoiners #52, Allen R. Baca Center, Round Rock. The group’s final meeting there plans a three-of-five multisig treasury before moving to rotating venues.

Oct 10 · 09:00–11:00
Bitcoin & Coffee #101, Sogno Toscano Caffè, 1512 Montana Avenue, Santa Monica.

Times are local to each venue. Title links lead to the organiser listings.

The Instrument

400 notes, none shared

The ranked notes desk and the anonymous control each returned four hundred notes from the same window. Their overlap was zero. Across all fourteen desks, the reading contains 680 events from 222 voices.

Twenty-four hours ending Monday, October 5 at 17:19, Europe/Vilnius. These are the reading’s counts, not totals for the whole network.

And finally

Monday’s culture shock

Dreiberge describes the return from a weekend immersed in their own world to the working week: remembering they are a teacher, settling back in by Tuesday, and relying on coffee in between. Some reconnections do not need a software patch.