This is a value for value post: see the explanation in the footer.
Watching a toddler grow up
From this post on Nostr
Zaps are an interesting dynamic.
In theory it should lead to a higher quality of content by incentivizing thoughtful discourse.
Or maybe it incentivizes group think? Masses of people trying to figure out what to say in order to get zapped by appealing to emotional >stimuli. Anger, tugging heart strings, erotic content, fear porn, and things exploding, always get eye balls.
It’s an exercise in marketing I suppose. Do things people like, get finically rewarded.
So maybe it doesn’t lead to a higher quality of content but a competition to provide content that people like. Does this result in decentralized “Only Fans” and doom scrolling? So far it doesn’t seem that way but I only interact with Bitcoiners.
But one thing is for sure. The ability to get rewarded for your content prioritizes the use of Nostr over other social media. Trad social media can not compete with this. The centralized model is to attractive to not be captured by interested parties. The more money involved the more attractive it is to rent seekers and authoritarians.
When people talk about Bitcoin being the internet of money. This is it.
It's fun watching toddlers grow up (if you don't have to deal with runny noses and wiping arses). I imagine this is more like the grandparent version.
Nostr is the new protocol for decentralised social media. It's become the darling of the BTC and BTC Maxis. It's not really connected to Bitcoin in any core way except that most of the people working on it have some cross over to BTC and especially BTC Lightning development.
As you can see this post has been "zapped" or upvoted with Lightning payments in sats to the tune of 583 sats or 0.138 HBD. Major result!
Relays
Nostr is showing people one thing I very much like: multiple front ends to the same data. This is made a little more complicated by the absolute explosion in "relays". Relays are the decentralised way in which you connect to Nostr. Ideally (as on Hive) this part of the system should be hidden from end users, but they haven't got a way to do that yet on Nostr. As a result, you need to figure out which Relays you want to connect to. Good luck with that.
Some of these are paid relays which are probably better at filtering spam, but I haven't had the patience to figure out what's worth paying for.
Tipping as a distribution system
I wanted to talk about what's going here in relation to what we do here on Hive.
Zaps on Lightning are being called tips. As Adam Curry has stated, if you value your work and want compensation, ask people for what value they get from it, not a tip. A tip is what you pay ON TOP of how much the meal or the service cost. Ask for tips and you're asking for 10% of what you value your content at!
The flip is that Nostr is operating without the crutch of Hive's upvotes and reward pool. If you truly understand Hive, you know that the reward pool is very significantly a Trojan Horse leading to a wider and more equitable distribution of Hive's governance token. There is nothing like this in Nostr but I'm of the opinion that somewhere along the line we should be diminishing our reward pool in Hive for content. I would be much happier to see this replaced by community specific rewards in the longer term.
How much is a tweet worth?
But that comes to something else: tweets are rarely worth much to me. But every now and then a tweet leads to something important and yes, I discover something of value.
What's going on with zapping on Nostr, where there is no built in economic model to keep the infrastructure running as we have here on Hive, is exuberant direct value transfer. It certainly has an unsustainable feel to it with one exception: rewarding the builders.
There is an ad hoc model which is sending tips to key individuals who are creating software and running infrastructure. This was kicked off in grand style by Jack Dorsey (Twitter's former CEO and founder) with a big grant. What I can't see yet is whether this is sustainably large enough to actually run the scale of infrastructure they'll need to keep Nostr growing.
But in general, the actual amounts going back and forth on Nostr are peanuts compared to post rewards here on Hive. They're also fighting against the Bitcoin Maxi tendency to hodl at all costs!
And when it comes to BTC Maxis... I'll leave you with this pleasant final comment:
Value for Value
For the last few months while building 
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