The housing market is in an interesting phase. We've seen significant price inflation in real estate over the past decade, driven by low interest rates, easy credit, and a surge in demand. There's a question that many are starting to ask: Are these prices sustainable? Historically, housing prices have moved with fundamentals—income growth, population expansion, and construction costs. However, in recent years, prices have outpaced these fundamentals, driven largely by speculative buying, low mortgage rates, and the search for yield in a low-interest-rate environment. This divergence has caused homes to become more of an investment vehicle than a utility—a place to live. While homeownership has traditionally been a way to build wealth, the current environment has pushed prices far beyond the reach of many, turning homes into speculative assets rather than just a place to live. Enter Bitcoin. As a deflationary asset with a capped supply, Bitcoin introduces a new standard for value storage and transaction. If we transition to a Bitcoin standard, we could see a fundamental shift in how assets, including real estate, are valued. What's your take on Bitcoin's role in all this? #RealEstate #bitcoin image
𓅦 NOSTR tech update This week we successfully implemented our Nostr-based messaging system based on NIP-17, instead of the still commonly used NIP-4. NIP-4, the traditional direct messaging system in Nostr, has a significant privacy weakness: while it encrypts the message content, it exposes important metadata about who is talking to whom and when these conversations occur, "DM Reporter" (@dm-reporter) which seems to have been deleted from all relays made people aware of this. At first our idea was to generate a unique keypair for communication with every client so it was harder to trace to see who is using our platform, luckily we found out that there was already a NIP with a better solution, namely NIP-17 which describes "gift wrapped" direct messaging. The gift wrapped approach combines three NIPs to create a more private messaging system: 𓅦 NIP-44 provides strong encryption for the actual message content using modern cryptographic methods like ChaCha20 and HMAC-SHA256. 𓅦 NIP-59 introduces a clever three-layer wrapping system: • The actual message becomes a "rumor" that isn't signed • The rumor gets encrypted and sealed (kind 13) • The seal gets encrypted, gift wrapped (kind 1059) and then posted by a randomized nostr key. 𓅦 NIP-17 ties it all together by defining how these wrapped messages should be handled, including: • Using kind 14 for the actual chat message • Randomizing timestamps to prevent time-based analysis • Allowing users to specify which relays should receive their DMs This approach provides several advantages: • Hides who is talking to whom • Makes it impossible to see when messages are exchanged • Allows for message deniability Relays are also advised to only serve wrapped messages (kind 1059) to their intended recipients, providing an additional layer of privacy protection. Check out the code, fully open source: #grownostr #nip4 #nip14 #nip17 #nip44 #nip59 image