Stuart Bowman

Building Satellite

https://satellite.earth 🏴

Public Key

npub1lunaq893u4hmtpvqxpk8hfmtkqmm7ggutdtnc4hyuux2skr4ttcqr827lj

NIP-05 Address

_@satellite.earth

Profile Code

nprofile1qqs07f7srjc72ma4skqrqmrm5a4mqdalyyw9k4eu2mjwwr9gtp644uqpr3mhxue69uhkummnw3ezucnfw33k76twv4ezuum0vd5kzmqppamhxue69uhkummnw3ezumt0d5yj45e3

Publishing to

nostr.bitcoiner.social

nostr.mom

Author Public Key

npub1lunaq893u4hmtpvqxpk8hfmtkqmm7ggutdtnc4hyuux2skr4ttcqr827lj

Show more details

Last Notes

2024-08-15 20:31:26

👀
#note1jj7…th2r

2024-08-07 22:50:46

Really excited about @npub1lt6…p8hj !
I’ve been saying for a while now that someone should make couchsurfing on nostr…Couchsurfing around 2010 was like the greatest thing ever, and it was such a tragedy when the admins sold out and rugged everyone who had built up connections. Building it on nostr is a great use case showing how we can preserve social capital.
#note1jp4…c6sk

2024-08-06 22:42:16

Just fixed an extremely subtle bug on Satellite CDN caused by cache settings. The blossom /list endpoint would sometimes return metadata for files that were deleted. Thanks to @npub1klr…7gxc for helping me discover this!

2024-06-30 20:27:42

Industrial tech capable of driving the basic cost of living to near zero has existed for over a century.
Social tech to prevent politicians from funneling all the gains toward warfare has existed only since 2008.
Forget about UBI.
This is the humanitarian case for hard money.
https://cdn.satellite.earth/b00e3dfa85e45119a1a13f79467110e58b30b3ee01cb3c4543e108d7acf9bb8c.png

2024-05-11 16:50:47

- reply

Iran.
Sucks as an American not being able to for bullshit political reasons

2024-05-11 16:47:52

- reply

Yes - keep winning battles awaiting the @npub10r8…t2p8 strategic victory

2024-05-11 16:27:16

- reply

Can second this

2024-05-11 06:51:56

I can see the northern lights from California right now
https://m.primal.net/IFaT.jpg

2024-05-05 23:59:28

“Stock futures inch higher Sunday after weaker-than-expected jobs report left investors looking up”
Actual headline.

2024-05-03 19:33:12

- reply

Oh I didn't know that, interesting

2024-05-03 19:27:55

- reply

The real answer to the question of why the government does not simply print all the money it needs is that by putting the money into circulation and then subsequently reclaiming it through taxation they maintain a floor in demand for the currency

2024-05-03 03:46:54

- reply

I remember walking there. Magical place

2024-05-03 03:01:58

- reply

In the theoretical extreme where humans could go and mine asteroids after exhausting the terrestrial supply, yes

2024-05-03 02:52:09

- reply

Yeah if it happened literally overnight the rate of btc being produced would increase temporarily until the difficulty adjustment kicked in. This is just a thought experiment though.

2024-05-03 02:37:54

- reply

But then you can also expect to make 1000x times less profit, because you have 1000x times more competition

2024-05-03 01:52:52

- reply

But bitcoin wouldn't actually become easier to produce because of the difficulty adjustment, right? Because if the cost of energy falls by a factor of one thousand, this means that (excluding the initial capex of mining rigs for simplicity) people can now afford to run a thousand times as many miners for the same electricity cost. The super weird thing is that for anything other commodity besides btc, this would tank the price. But for btc, the network simply adjusts the difficultly to make each hash harder to find in exact proportion to how much energy you throw at it.

2024-05-03 01:46:29

Seems like privacy is upstream of fungibility

2024-05-03 01:45:12

The existence of a commodity money whose supply is totally insensitive to the cost of production is *super weird*

2024-05-03 01:21:07

Such a strong point near the end of the video about the civilizational fork in the road between digital credit money vs digital commodity money
#note14tg…y0am

2024-05-02 04:48:30

That would be so cool if there was an AI inside your laptop that you could grant keyboard/mouse control to and that you could communicate with verbally, and it would understand what you were asking it to do in context of what was currently on the screen. Basically like you're always screen sharing with your AI helper. Since it would have access to everything this would probably only be workable if you were running locally or self hosting. In any case I wouldn't be surprised if UX converges on something like this in the near(ish) future

2024-04-30 14:18:39

- reply

What do you mean?

2024-04-24 19:38:29

- reply

My old mental model was that gold was used throughout history because there was no alternative and that fiat was necessary to match credit availability to the higher rate of growth in the 20th century enabled by technological advancement. The main thing that cured me of this illusion was becoming educated about how historically the misallocation of credit has been far more destructive than lack of credit. The other thing was something that @npub1h8n…rpev said about how deflation is a signal that growth has already occurred. That sent me down a rabbit hole of just thinking from first principles, and seeing the connection between technology and price deflation. This seems obvious once you realize it, but I can distinctly remember this not being obvious to me back in like 2019. It's interesting that bitcoin is a technology that is upstream of an intellectual movement.

2024-04-24 06:58:12

- reply

The deflation being bad argument may have started as a post facto way to justify policy but many educated people now believe this earnestly.
As for the threat of government fiat monopolies, do you mean that most people just look at it from a pragmatic standpoint and think, they ain’t gonna let that happen?
If that’s the case I think it’s in a different class in the sense that critics have to at retreat to arguing with respect to outcome instead of correctness.

2024-04-24 02:53:21

- reply

It got a lot more expensive since last year. From what I understand buying the rail pass vs just buying individual tickets is about the same now.

2024-04-22 17:39:31

The dematerialization of *social capital*.
Censorship resistance provides a medium of exchange, web of trust a store of value.
I'm increasing convinced that's what's really going on here.

2024-04-17 01:37:23

- reply

Me and @npub1ye5…knpr are building it

2024-04-17 01:36:07

- reply

Good to hear it uses NDK, I came here to ask that!

2024-04-14 16:53:32

- reply

@npub1ye5…knpr

2024-04-13 05:13:11

- reply

Yes and that the moment of the new moon is objectively simultaneous for every person on earth

2024-04-13 03:58:50

- reply

Wait so are you running monitors in all those cities?

2024-04-12 22:49:25

Honored to be in such company
#note1z3u…2cg6

2024-04-08 21:08:41

- reply

Yeah the past and the future are an abstraction. Which isn’t to say they aren’t real. Abstractions are real.
Still it’s an odd feeling to realize that there never has been, and never will, anything other than the present moment. That there really is no “whenelse” to be. Not even like as a metaphor, but like *actually*
I can perceive this only fleetingly. Sometimes I wonder what it would feel like to be able maintain this awareness- maybe some people can.

2024-04-08 17:47:22

- reply

The siren song of ecash schemes 🤣

2024-04-08 17:40:44

- reply

I sense a rabbit hole. This one goes deep.

2024-04-06 21:21:56

- reply

nostr: npub12262qa4uhw7u8gdwlgmntqtv7aye8vdcmvszkqwgs0zchel6mz7s6cgrkj
> relay based communities add connection overhead
Increase connection overhead? Hmm maybe if you're aggregating community posts. But if you only want to see the posts from a specific community, and you only have to connect to one community-specific relay, that would actually *decrease* connection overhead. It's a different use case than global nostr.
> not everyone can run one
We're fixing this :)

2024-04-06 20:30:04

- reply

If it censors people, you can fork it

2024-04-06 19:57:21

- reply

> Feel moderation should happen at the relay level rather than at the message level
You are 100% correct. Building communities on top of the protocol is too complicated. Communities should be based on relays, like how nostr was supposed to work all along.
Me and @npub1ye5…knpr are building this right now.

2024-04-06 19:48:23

- reply

Yes, communities will rise again!

2024-04-05 19:33:16

- reply

Yeah I need to make it auto refresh to show that the credit was updated. Thanks

2024-04-05 18:54:04

- reply

So totally working now? What was the issue? If it's a bug I want to know about it!

2024-04-01 21:16:09

- reply

Haha yes 🤣

2024-03-30 00:39:16

The world is made of words #note1ktn…f0l2

2024-03-19 23:31:00

Relays but for media #note10uf…5slg

2024-03-19 20:16:10

If you read one thing today, read this! #note1l2h…jaqs

2024-01-06 17:36:28

Landed in Madeira
https://cdn.satellite.earth/e353dd682ec84ec2ab87d822a33fecb60a25ae3ff4f721755bf1d3bde921fade.jpg

2023-11-30 23:51:41

Anyone looking to share accommodation? #note1wk5…3xq7

2023-11-20 21:32:28

- reply

Because a market is a computer that takes time to discover what the viable niches are, and when you change some macro-variable (such as the purchasing power represented by a unit of currency), the model of what those niches has to get recomputed.
The analogy to biological evolution would be changing the value of a joule.
(I think)

2023-11-01 23:14:03

So I don't miss any clients for my "subcommunites of nostr" talk - what are the clients that have at least some support for NIP-72, other than Satellite? So far I have:
- nostrudel by @npub1ye5…knpr
- nostr.kiwi by @npub1alp…6dsn
- zapddit by @npub1ltx…z40t
- Amethyst by @npub1gcx…nj5z
Who else?

2023-10-31 09:50:06

I think I've been to 7-Eleven four times today

2023-10-15 18:22:32

- reply

R2 specifically. I chose R2 on account of the pricing model that charges only for storage and not data egress (bandwidth). That's actually a fairly big deal because with other options (e.g. S3) you're always at risk of getting a huge surprise bill if some hosted data gets really popular, and this forces all the services built on it to host third-party data to be post-pay with no guarantees to the customer about how much they will be charged.
By replicating R2's pricing structure, Satellite CDN is able to be flat-rate pre-pay, and therefore a good fit for lightning.
If you're concerned about censorship, that's what NIP-94 is for. For every file uploaded, Satellite essentially creates a torrent for it, and returns these params to the client. So if Cloudflare ever pulls the plug there will, in principle, be recourse to self hosting. Also, the url path of every file on the CDN is just the SHA256 hash, so to deal with the problem of dead links in the long term, clients could just parse out the hash from dead links and serve the same data from a different host.

2023-10-09 00:06:40

- reply

Wow that must have been pre-nostr, nice to see you here! Thank you 🙏

2023-10-05 03:26:24

- reply

Lmk when you got something, would love to check it out

2023-10-05 02:41:00

- reply

Really good idea

2023-10-01 19:01:31

The question of how to design a trending feed in a way that is simultaneously
1) Interesting
2) Hard to game
3) Actually decentralized
leads down some deep rabbit holes

2023-09-14 02:51:32

- reply

Working on search!

2023-09-06 05:32:55

- reply

Hey I’m the Satellite dev - this is the first time I’ve ever seen someone else running Satellite! So cool

2023-08-09 02:12:37

- reply

You shouldn’t have to approve it multiple times, looks like a bug. I’ll look into it, thanks

2023-08-07 04:27:30

Hey everyone I just pushed a big update for Satellite!
Redesigned front page layout, added mobile nav and other new design stuff, plus some pretty significant performance optimizations.
I'll do a full write up tomorrow.

2023-07-26 06:00:08

https://arxiv.org/abs/2307.12008
Could be a big deal

2023-07-13 22:40:27

- reply

Disambiguating Community Forks
I noticed that people have been linking to nostr communities without including the admin's pubkey in the URL, e.g.
just https://satellite.earth/n/dwadziesciajeden
instead of the full URL https://satellite.earth/n/dwadziesciajeden/npub1xpuz4qerklyck9evtg40wgrthq5rce2mumwuuygnxcg6q02lz9ms275ams
It might seem like a minor issue but I think handling this ambiguity is actually pretty important for UX — subreddit's were useful because you could refer to them by name like "r slash [whatever]" and it was obvious what you had to type into your web browser to get there. On nostr it's trickier because there can be multiple versions of a community, each namespaced to the pubkey of its admin.
To deal with this, I just pushed an update showing a page at the bare URL that lists all the forks of community.
If you're signed in and Satellite detects that you're subscribed to one of the forks, you'll be redirected there automatically.
In a future update I might make it so that non-signed-in users get directed to the most popular fork.

2023-07-06 17:20:12

- reply

Right now there isn't any consensus on standard dimensions.
Maybe we should just go with the 5:1 ratio to make it easier for reddit refugees to clone their communities here.

2023-07-06 06:43:59

- reply

So I just checked a bunch of relays and couldn't find the metadata for the community — do you know which relays it was published to from nostr.kiwi? If not I would recommend trying to republish the community. As long as it has the same name the new version will just update the old one.

2023-06-23 21:18:53

- reply

Announcing "subreddits" on Nostr
https://satellite.earth/n/satellite/npub1lunaq893u4hmtpvqxpk8hfmtkqmm7ggutdtnc4hyuux2skr4ttcqr827lj
Hey everyone — my initial implementation of the NIP-172 draft proposal for Reddit-style moderated communities is now live on Satellite!
Want to see an example?
Check out n/satellite - a nostr community I've just created for Satellite-specific questions, feature requests, etc.
Do you have an idea for a community for which you'd be willing to take on the role of founder/moderator?
You just need to decide on a name and fill out the info for banner image, description, and rules. I'm working on creating a directory of communities, but for now, please drop a link to your new community as a reply to this post.
If we can position nostr as a credible alternative to reddit it could be huge.
Here's some screenshots:
https://cdn.satellite.earth/e48bac55423420d97f2e00ca58ee949ec7096eef589887c79672ae2fb9c173a6.jpg
https://cdn.satellite.earth/81af09e1a7b9dfd67d4199282b7aca5d6cb1bc4e0031962ef8f594a3f91010e9.jpg
https://cdn.satellite.earth/10164d76a4b977c753128fcded01ebc814639e786bfae59ac90c8efb0fa74291.jpg

2023-06-13 19:09:02

What if we made something like an app store for PWAs on nostr?

2023-06-13 15:49:41

So what comes after Feudalism?

2023-06-01 00:36:24

- reply

I’ve only tested mobile NIP-07 with nostore - I’ll see if I can replicate with Orion/Alby

2023-06-01 00:27:59

- reply

NIP-07 should work on mobile!

2023-05-31 23:04:22

- reply

There is no storage cap! There is only "time remaining". You pay for storage in terms of "GB Months". So, for example, if you buy 1 GB Month and you upload 1 GB, your time will run out after a month. If you upload half a gig, your time will last for 2 months. If you upload 100MB (1/10 GB) then you time will last for 10 months. You can top up your storage at any time (or delete stuff to make it last longer!)

2023-05-31 22:50:47

- reply

That's odd — according to my database your payment succeeded.
Media is stored on Cloudflare R2.

2023-05-31 22:38:33

After the past few weeks of building it's time to push this prototype out and get some feedback from users —
Announcing Satellite CDN: Scalable media hosting for the nostr ecosystem!
https://satellite.earth/cdn
- Upload video and other large files, up to 5 GB each
- Simple flat-rate pricing, buy storage with sats
- Fast, free and unlimited data transfer
- Integrated NIP-94 censorship resistance
- Developer-friendly API
https://cdn.satellite.earth/2ab2fe9cccb9267060106a274682fa24bdf9499dc2b3c94eed734c38a5d6e8e9.png
https://cdn.satellite.earth/b0a5715db4c105746bb539ab3ef88aaaab800edcd8c3084eed7aae4cd86b8fa2.png
https://cdn.satellite.earth/d08b384d48294e77f79df495e3c83ed9a0b09e0b191e8073fbfbd0978d054ec1.png
I feel like a "native" nostr solution for hosting and streaming large videos could really help with adoption and I'm curious about how Satellite can support specific use cases.
API docs coming soon.

2023-04-30 02:46:49

Satellite is now fully open source
https://github.com/lovvtide/satellite-web

2023-04-27 23:04:22

Talking about Satellite on nostr nests tonight
https://nostrnests.com/thebitcoinlobby

2023-04-23 15:45:00

- reply

Haha so there *is* a post button already, it’s on your profile page

2023-04-23 00:42:00

Deployed Satellite update:
- Implemented encrypted direct messages
- Added support for handling NIP-27 mentions
- Significant performance optimizations for front page feed and elsewhere
- Fixed super annoying problem with sometimes losing your scroll position when navigating back to the main feed on mobile
Next week's update will include user search, improvements to the UI for inserting mentions, additional features for managing your following list, and a global post button.
If you haven't tried https://satellite.earth please check it out and tell me what else you'd like to see.

2023-04-20 00:44:51

- reply

TESTING

2023-04-15 02:58:23

- reply

I think it’s the sense that we have a common purpose

2023-04-15 00:18:40

- reply

Working on it. My proposal for the torrent stuff was merged into NIP-94 a couple days ago. We've (for the most part) achieved consensus about how files will work on nostr. Now I can focus on implementation.

2023-04-14 22:53:27

- reply

The best performance optimization I've come up with for Satellite is to "lazy render" items in long lists. The app listens for the position of each element and only starts to render it when it gets close to coming onscreen. The helps by reducing the number of images that have to get loaded at once, but I suppose the root cause is a lot unoptimized images getting uploaded in the first place. If we wanted to go nuclear on this problem we could set up a server that acts as a proxy to generate and cache thumbnails.

2023-04-13 19:08:08

- reply

Yes, next week. Cleaning up the codebase now.

2023-04-11 03:25:48

- reply

Thanks I love to hear that. Satellite is still a bit immature I feel, but much more coming in the next update. Appreciate the zap 🙏

2023-04-07 02:21:47

- reply

Brilliant post

2023-04-03 20:35:10

- reply

Looks like #[4] verified me, I just tried to verify you again and it seems to have worked this time 👍

2023-04-01 15:51:09

- reply

I’ll volunteer

2023-03-31 03:49:23

Building stuff for nostr is the most fun I've ever had coding anything

2023-03-27 20:36:22

- reply

> it reads like media relaying since it doesn't address longevity of storage. Or does it?
It does! In fact longevity/resilience was one of the primary considerations for this design. Any host can store media files which are identified by hash and served from a cdn over http, or if clients cannot find any host that has the media they can try to pull it from other peers (hence the choice of infohash). It only takes one person seeding the content for it to remain available.
> For the choice of infohash (sha1) - why not sha256?
The majority of installed bittorrent clients only support sha1, and for the fallback p2p option to work there must to be seeders. It's true that the torrent infohash is a bit clunky since it has to follow the BitTorrent v1 spec, but the gains in backward compatibility are worth it I think. And this limitation is mitigated/obviated by that fact that our proposal allows for multiple hashes. If you wanted to add support for IPFS, or any other hash, you could absolutely do that by just adding another "i" tag to and labeling it in a way that clients recognize, and we are actually planning to enumerate a few popular alternatives in the NIP. In any case, what makes the torrent infohash special (and why is was our default choice) is the ability to not only be an integrity check but that it also provides a means to actually "get" the data in a p2p way without reinventing the infrastructure that exists for doing so.
> We can expect to live in a world of deep fakes soon, so I would also consider pgp signatures instead of pure integrity hashing
Well that's the whole point of having the user sign the metadata (including integrity hashes) of the file. The metadata goes to the relays and the blob goes to the host(s). If hosts don't have the file you can load it as a torrent in your browser via WebTorrent (which is already integrated into some clients)
PGP integration would be really cool (again, backwards compatibility ftw) but I wonder if it makes sense to do that in a more general way, perhaps as part of the key delegation concept that is already addressed by other NIPs. Lot's to think about. Thanks for your feedback.

2023-03-24 00:00:06

Here's the link to the content-addressed-media proposal. This is a rough draft - help me and @degenrocket shoot some holes in it! Next step is drafting a NIP.
https://github.com/lovvtide/nostr-torrent

2023-03-17 01:28:39

Hey everyone, I just deployed the alpha version of Satellite, the new nostr client I've been building. Check it out and let me know what you think!
https://satellite.earth/

2023-03-17 00:37:55

- reply

I just deployed Satellite, the new nostr client I've been building since December!
https://satellite.earth