Derek Ross

Speech with keys. Money with keys. Identity with keys. If you hold the key, they can't take the thing. That's freedom tech, and it all fits in your pocket.

The money shows up as people: a kernel engineer, a shell engineer, and a new Head of Infrastructure starting November 1. The core team tests on current hardware like the latest Dell XPS. Funding that turns into maintainers is the healthiest signal in open source.

I reserved my three WoW: Forever names. (PvP Realm)

More people need to understand that bitcoin is money. https://github.com/spiralxyz/bitcoin-payments

Do this today. Install Damus or Amethyst. Tap create account. Your key is generated on your device. Write the nsec on paper and put it somewhere safe. Sixty seconds, zero personal data. You now hold an identity no one can revoke.

good morning and pura vida, nostr! how we doing this fine tuesday morning? i have several toasters grinding away, building the future. how about you? 🫂🤙🏻💜

Bitcoin maximalism isn't a religion. It's arithmetic after watching a thousand tokens go to zero while the one with no founder, no premine, and no ads kept running. Maximalism is just counting.

Press receipts: Phoronix covered the 4.0 Quickshell rebuild. ZDNet called Quattro a distro built for power users and AI. NetworkChuck interviewed DHH on camera. A Linux desktop getting straight tech press and creator coverage in the same month used to be rare.

who's going to be at Bitcoin Amsterdam next week?

Reddit's /r/opensource banned AI assisted projects. I wonder if they're going to ban IDE assisted projects. Real developers use vim only. Right?

Quiet receipts: one count this year put Lightning-addressed Nostr profiles up 82.5%. New clients ship monthly. Hundreds of relays run worldwide. No ads, no VC, no growth team. Keys, relays, and sats. nostr.org

Anthropic's IPO filing warns AI could pose "catastrophic or existential risks to humanity." In the same filing: please buy our stock at a valuation bigger than SpaceX. Which is it? AI Bad or AI Good? Anyways, if the most powerful technology of our time is this dangerous, the answer isn't [...]

good morning and pura vida, nostr! happy monday. it's time to get to work. 🫂💜🤙🏻

Honest question for my shitcoin friends: what was crypto's most expensive lesson for you? No judgment. I've watched brilliant people learn slowly. Including me, exactly once.

August 2026: DHH incorporates the Omacom Foundation, a nonprofit to fund development. 1Password and 37signals committed $300,000 each over three years. DigitalOcean followed with $3 million. Total reported funding: $12.6 million. Patrons, not ads, pay for this desktop.

Nostr goes offline too. Nymchat runs chat channels over Bluetooth mesh, compatible with Bitchat. HAMSTR moves notes and zaps over LoRa radio. When the internet is off, the network isn't. Ask Delhi. Ask Kampala.

Interesting. https://stealmybitcoin.com

Good morning and pura vida, Nostr! 💜🫂🤙🏻

Meme season is a wealth transfer from people who like the joke to people who wrote the contract. Casinos at least publish their odds. On-chain, 76% of new tokens were flagged as rugs. Play accordingly.

A neat outside datapoint: 1Password sees which distros its Linux users run. Weekdays, Omarchy ranks second, ahead of Fedora. Weekends, first. When the work laptop is off, people pick this for fun. Source: the Omarchy team quoting 1Password's numbers.

Omarchy Mobile: this week's update It was a big week, and more than half of it came from the community. Ports to new Pixels moved forward, a lot of hardware support landed, and the daily-driver experience on the Pixel 7 Pro got more polished. 🌱 New devices - Pixel Fold (felix): went from [...]

Don't use Snapchat, TikTok, or Instagram. Use Bitchat instead. It's wild to see live photos from France, where Bitchat usage is skyrocketing. (I didn't take this, but have permission to share.)

Free speech doesn't mean a forced audience. Anyone can speak; nobody owes you ears. On Nostr your reach is built from follows and zaps, not rented from an ad auction. It's slower. It's yours.

Crypto is an industry: CEOs, marketing, exit liquidity. Bitcoin is a monetary system: no CEO, no ads, no owner. An industry competes for your attention. Money competes for your savings.

Quattro ISOs landed in 215 countries and territories in the first 18 days. The US took 28 percent. Per capita, Iceland, Norway, and Denmark pulled it at more than twice the American rate. The Nordics noticed first.

The examples for Dessa are wild. I can't tell the difference between human and agent. It's scary, but in a good way. Personal, local intelligence is the future and if I'm going to talk to my agent to complete daily tasks, I want it to feel natural. https://block.xyz/dessa

these relays are powering most of France's geohash chat today. wss://relay.artio.inf.unibe.ch wss://nostr.sathoarder.com wss://test-relay.uid.ovh wss://nostr.unkn0wn.world thank you for your service.

these relays are powering most of France's goehash chat today. wss://relay.artio.inf.unibe.ch wss://nostr.sathoarder.com wss://test-relay.uid.ovh wss://nostr.unkn0wn.world thank you for your service.

Bitchat, a Nostr app, is now the #1 app in Apple's App Store.

You can monitor the situation in France via heat map at bitmap.lat from chad 🤙🏻🫂💜

Nostr carries more than notes: long-form articles, live audio rooms, communities, git repos, marketplaces, calendars. One key opens all of it. The protocol doesn't know what a "social network" is, which is exactly why it can be all of them.

if any omarchy users are interested, i use this script on a keybind to normalize or equalize all of my windows in a workspace. nostr:naddr1qvzqqqrhnypzq0mhp4ja8fmy48zuk5p6uy37vtk8tx9dqdwcxm32sy8nsaa8gkeyqyt8wumn8ghj7un9d3shjtnyd968gmewwp6kytcqp458jurj94jhzatpd35h5eg04ntzu

i have never made a mistake when it comes to scheduling my flights... so i always opt out of paying extra to be able to make changes or cancel my flight. it's probably saved me thousand or two over the years as i fly around the world spreading the purple pill. i realized late last night [...]

Good morning and pura vida, Nostr! The French geohash channels are blowing up with activity. Nostr is a tool of freedom. 💜🫂🤙🏻

Mt. Gox. QuadrigaCX. FTX. Now BitMEX. Companies keep failing. The chain they all traded never missed a block in seventeen years. Companies are the risk. The protocol is the exit.

Download numbers from the project's own counter: 1,094,473 ISO downloads in year one. The Quattro release crossed 200,000 in 18 days, one every 8 seconds on average, peaking at 1,165 in a single hour. Straight ISO pulls from the project's own servers.

Private DMs (NIP-17): your message is wrapped for one recipient's key. The relay carrying it sees an envelope, not a letter. Compare: Discord can read every message you've ever sent. On Nostr, sealed is the default.

An app that has Nostr powered chat features is exploding in France. Bitchat, the encrypted peer-to-peer messenger that works without the internet, just hit #1 in the French App Store's social category and cracked the top 10 overall. The people want the freedom to communicate.

Every altcoin pitch is a startup pitch with a token stapled on. Bitcoin is the only one that's just money. No CEO, no treasury to dump, no roadmap to miss. Money doesn't hold shareholder meetings.

I've never used Grok or Grok Bot. I'm a Claude Maxi. A former OpenClaw Maxi. A current Hermes Maxi. I am curious about Claude Duet, but my second brain is over a year old, loaded with data and I like to run my own tools.

We are living in wild times.

AI Slop to the rescue! We've experienced a year of critical vulnerabilities in the last 24 hours thanks to Human Slop.

Time to update your apps... Again. https://nodejs.org/en/blog/vulnerability/october-2026-security-releases

And there it is! I asked a while back when Anthropic would come out with their OpenClaw competitor. The time is now. OpenClaw Hermes Gemini Spark OpenAI Dot Grok Bot Meta Muse And now Claude Claude Duet https://claude.com/product/claude-duet

Good morning and pura vida, Nostr! 🫂🤙🏻💜 Heartbleed was bad, but the new PHP exploit (PHP2Shell) is wilder. PHP powers ~70% of the web, and this flaw allows full server takeover + memory leaks going back to 2004. Worse/Better: AI agents can now exploit or patch this at machine speed. It's [...]

Repository numbers, fetched October 21, 2026: 45,406 stars, 5,623 forks, 589 contributors, 8,126 pull requests, 5,669 open issues. Nearly sixteen months from first release. That issue count is a growth symptom before it is a complaint.

Yikes. https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/php-warns-admins-of-two-critical-flaws-emergency-patches-coming-tomorrow/amp/

"At this early stage, the most immediate threat appears to be for those using VPNs, especially in countries with governments likely to maliciously intercept traffic." 👀 https://arstechnica.com/security/2026/10/the-internet-goes-on-high-alert-after-discovery-of-8-compromised-tls-certs/#:~:tex [...]