Microblog Memes

I don't have any issue with Nostr, it honestly doesn't interest me very much at all. But since it came up, let me tell you a little anecdote:

A few months ago I opened the Wikipedia article on Nostr, which states in the last sentence of the overview that:

Nostr was created as a result of perceived moderation issues on Twitter, as well as both technical and cultural disagreements with other protocols such as ActivityPub and Secure Scuttlebutt.

for which it cites the original blog entry where the protocol was introduced. Since I was interested in what these disagreements might be, I read through the post. And while I did find out what the criticisms of AP and SSB were, I also had a different train of thought going on too:

After reading the short summary, I thought to myself "Well that sounds like a nice hobby project, but isn't that just BBS with crypto (and over the internet instead of telephone lines)?" That changed, however, when I read somewhere else that relays can also query other relays for their posts, after which I though "Well that sounds like a nice hobby project, but isn't that just NNTP with crypto (and over the internet instead of usenet)?"

Again, none of this is an issue for me and I don't really have any problems with the protocol itself but what did rub me the wrong way was that towards the end of the blog post, in the Q&A, it says the following:

This is very simple. Why hasn't anyone done it before?

I don't know, but I imagine […]

and idk, not actively looking for prior art seems a bit lazy to me ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

The rate at which new bitcoins enter the economy is controlled. When the processing power of the mining network increases, the difficulty of the mining problem is artificially increased to keep the rate of minting the same. They throw out perfectly good solutions to the problem of creating the next link in the blockchain, to control inflation of bitcoin value.

You'll also notice the difficulty level for this block. The Bitcoin network aims to produce one block every 10 minutes or so. The system is designed to evaluate and adjust the mining difficulty every 2,016 blocks or roughly every two weeks (based on the number of participants). This doesn't always result in a block time of 10 minutes, but it's close.

https://www.investopedia.com/tech/how-does-bitcoin-mining-work/#toc-why-mine-bitcoin

The mining difficulty number represents 2,016 divided by the average time it took to mine one block in the last period, multiplied by the old difficulty level, or:
= Old difficulty x ( 2,016 ÷ average time to mine in the last period )
The lowest difficulty level is 1.0. The higher the number, the more difficult the solution is to find. The difficulty level on Dec. 5, 2024 (measured on December 1) was 102.89 trillion. You might see this published as 102.89T.

They are spending 100 trillion times as many processor cycles on bitcoin mining as is actually required to maintain the network. Every bitcoin transaction could be done at 100 trillionth the current energy cost. The only problem is, it would devalue bitcoins and crash the market like a Venezuelan dollar. So Bitcoin is designed to intentionally flush the energy output of a small country down the toilet to keep itself valuable.