Good day/morning/evening denizens of nostr!

This is the current situation. - You buy something with Bitcoin: In most countries you have to pay vat and in addition capital gains between the difference of buying and selling Bitcoin if you have made a profit. This is an approximate 20% + 20% (of the profit) (It depends on each country). - You sell Bitcoin: You pay between 20% and 30% of the profit (Depending on country). You have a lot of Bitcoin: In some countries you will pay wealth tax. You have a lot of unrealized gains: In many countries they are trying to apply this, soon we will have the first country to do so. If you have bought bitcoin with KYC you are screwed, the exchanges will end up passing all the data to the states and their respective tax offices. If you have non-kyc bitcoin you can only use it to buy a soda, if you use it to buy a car or a house they will accuse you of money laundering, drug trafficking or whatever they want. And you think bitcoiners have won? You can go to a country that has more lax tax regulations but tax havens are becoming increasingly difficult. You have to try to make Bitcoin legal tender, and to do this you have to use your Bitcoin, and you have to accept Bitcoin as payment, only by creating a large black market where you do not have to pay taxes you can bend the state, otherwise your Bitcoin will only enrich the state. During all these years the HODL strategy has been totally wrong, while we have carried out HODL the states have encircled us. We came here for freedom.

Yeah! Many are external to Nostr too, visits to the web nostr clients and some are from the PFPs that are used by different web based software that read Nostr profiles. Nostr is growing 🔥 Thank you! 🫂🙏🏻

8 MILLION UNIQUE VISITORS 👀

My 2024 review and high-level report. Let's start with some stats for the nostr.build: - 720 Million media requests served - 650 TiB of bandwidth consumed - 8 Million unique visitors - 85% average cache hit rate - Improved median CPU time per request from 200 down to 2 milliseconds per request - 20 requests per second are served on average - 99.994% uptime for the hosted media - 98% uptime for the website and uploading servers - 2.5K daily free uploads on average Some improvements for the free uploads: - Increased free upload size from 10MiB to 50MiB - Increased image resolution from 1980px to 3840px - Increased per server RAM from 1GiB to 4GiB - Added full mirror of all uploaded media to the additional vendor (backup) - Implemented moderation headers (can be used to hide NSFW content if desired) Now some of the stats of my dev work for the nostr.build: - 1,333 git commits - 42 repositories with my contributions - 10k+ lines of code written, or changed Some features and completed projects: - Rewritten nostr.build account page (AI, stats, nostr share, drag-n-drop, variaty of sizes, poster for video, etc.) - Added AI Studio, onboarded multiple models from SD and Flux. - Added media statistics - Rewritten media serving front-end (dropping CPU utilization by 100x) and improving TTFB as well as cache hit rate (from 50%+ to 85%+ on average) - Implemented variaty of the spam, and other illegal media upload prevention mechanisms (automated AI media scanner, PhotoDNA scanner, etc.) - Implemented AI Moderation API that is shareable with other nostr media hosts (e.g., nostrcheck.me) - Implemented upload of pdf, zip, etc., with full virus scanning. - Various improvements to the PHP code, bug fixes and optimizations. - Implemented e.nostr.build to allow easy embedding and sharing of the video/audio files for the account holders - Referal links and account credits - Onboarded more nostr clients for uploads (e.g., YakiHonne) Some of the prototyping I've done for nostr.build: - Semantic search of the media (ML based), multilingual - Basic search for media using AI Vision - Video transcoding using serverless and server-based setups - Video transcoding to DASH/HLS (CMAF) - Multi-party audio/video chat Some of the in-flight projects that I'll have to complete in 2025: - Seamless implementation of the Blossom protocol (70% done) - Rewrite of the post-upload scanning to utilize workflows (50% done) - New video upload and transcoding experience, HLS, DASH, VBR video/audio (10% done) - New NoSQL based data-plane backend with the new API (50% done) - Full rewrite of the Accounts page (5% done, blocked by new API and data-plane) - Additional models for the AI Studio (90% done) - <Secret projects with new experiences and features> (25% done) I am sure I am forgetting a bunch, and this is only done from my memory.