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I want to just try and imagine the potential golden age of decentralized, democratized tech. Drone warfare makes offensive wars way more painful. Ukraine can hold Russia at bay. Iran can hold the US and Israel at bay. Small countries have demonstrated that they can't just be bullied around the way they could be before. With any luck, this will lead to war becoming even more unpopular than it is now. The ability to effectively defend your own country has become democratized and available to all. Nostr represents a new paradigm. It's a protocol--and protocols are some of the most powerful pieces of tech in existence. TCP, UDP, and HTTP are all protocols and they dictate how the ENTIRE internet works. The first protocol to *work* is the one that wins. Nostr is an open, flexible, and simple protocol where there are no gatekeepers or "servers" that own your data. While it works great for the Twitter-like interfaces that Mastodon and BlueSky have, Nostr goes way beyond that. It doesn't force you into any particular format at all. For example, it can be used to run alternatives to Discord, Reddit, GoFundMe, Vine (DiVine), and chat apps like Whatsapp or Telegram. All someone needs to do is write a client for it; the backend (Nostr relays) already exists to run it. All of this is done without any identification, with no permission from anyone, with no barrier to entry. So down your bag of shrooms. Let's say we now have a post-centralization internet. Most of the internet is no longer owned by a single large company. No one talks about what they saw on "Reddit" or "Twitter" or "YouTube" anymore, and no one says they saw something on "Nostr" either because there's no single service that any of this data lives on anymore. It's stored on whatever relays and servers you want, including your own, and retrieved for whatever app or use case you need. When we talk about our public online lives, we think in terms of a digital public commons that anyone can join in on. When we talk about our private online lives, we come from an understanding that encryption where NO one can view what you don't want them to see is finally the default. Online privacy becomes a normal expectation again. In prog