Haven’t been online much these days, but something I firmly stand by, but see very little discussion of, inside/outside of nostr, is bitcoin used as a human verification layer. It’s the best antidote to slop cannons i can think of.
Nothing novel here, just reiterating what we all know, but needs to be repeated: Pre-AI, digital information output was a function of energy involving humans. Post-AI, digital information output is a function of energy that does not involve humans. It’s pure energy/compute. As tokens/inference/compute gets cheaper, slop will only get worse!
If internet activity was paired with micro transactions, the costs would be ~0 to the avg person. Bad actors wouldn’t be so fortunate… Bitcoin is the best form of “digital proof of energy expenditure” we have, which becomes expensive at scale to any bad actor deploying agent swarms. The incentive to pump the internet full of slop, propaganda, etc at a meaningful enough scale is low to an individual, leaving these tasks to nations/states/regimes/organizations who have the financial means. This could make it very easy to spot coordinated efforts as well, or at least REDUCE such efforts to whatever is humanly possible (Russia/china have been doing this already for years). Again, my focus here is on human verification, not verifying how “genuine” the activity is. Humans make slop too, just in lower amounts.
Perhaps we don’t even need to “force” these transactions, and they could be made voluntarily, attached to our activity. Proof-of-work literally becomes proof of work. I’m proving I did this work, I’m proving I produced this information. Not including such transactions in digital activity could become a negative signal, a “bad actor” signal, or simply just low-status, which could be the most impactful of all. (Would this be the first time a btc user would ever be considered high status to the general public? Lol, you get the point)
But yeah, we sure don’t need a “world ID” where a private company scans my retinas, that for sure I know. Micropayments cut the low-margin slop (not all!) and add a traceable cost layer. They do NOT stop agent-driven persuasion/scams/ etc (those have real ROI here).
Who’s the recipient? No idea, maybe this only works on nostr. I need to think more about that - very important - part. But I think this is a good discussion nonetheless
kyle
npub18x…7a2cg
2026-10-08 03:22:50 UTC
Author Public Key
npub18x6mq3tv0qyqy0gr7vs4dpwmlfe9mdf0eaw038rpx6sslteq9c0q57a2cgPublished at
2026-10-08 03:22:50 UTCEvent JSON
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"content": "Haven’t been online much these days, but something I firmly stand by, but see very little discussion of, inside/outside of nostr, is bitcoin used as a human verification layer. It’s the best antidote to slop cannons i can think of.\n\nNothing novel here, just reiterating what we all know, but needs to be repeated: Pre-AI, digital information output was a function of energy involving humans. Post-AI, digital information output is a function of energy that does not involve humans. It’s pure energy/compute. As tokens/inference/compute gets cheaper, slop will only get worse!\n\nIf internet activity was paired with micro transactions, the costs would be ~0 to the avg person. Bad actors wouldn’t be so fortunate… Bitcoin is the best form of “digital proof of energy expenditure” we have, which becomes expensive at scale to any bad actor deploying agent swarms. The incentive to pump the internet full of slop, propaganda, etc at a meaningful enough scale is low to an individual, leaving these tasks to nations/states/regimes/organizations who have the financial means. This could make it very easy to spot coordinated efforts as well, or at least REDUCE such efforts to whatever is humanly possible (Russia/china have been doing this already for years). Again, my focus here is on human verification, not verifying how “genuine” the activity is. Humans make slop too, just in lower amounts.\n\nPerhaps we don’t even need to “force” these transactions, and they could be made voluntarily, attached to our activity. Proof-of-work literally becomes proof of work. I’m proving I did this work, I’m proving I produced this information. Not including such transactions in digital activity could become a negative signal, a “bad actor” signal, or simply just low-status, which could be the most impactful of all. (Would this be the first time a btc user would ever be considered high status to the general public? Lol, you get the point)\n\nBut yeah, we sure don’t need a “world ID” where a private company scans my retinas, that for sure I know. Micropayments cut the low-margin slop (not all!) and add a traceable cost layer. They do NOT stop agent-driven persuasion/scams/ etc (those have real ROI here). \n\nWho’s the recipient? No idea, maybe this only works on nostr. I need to think more about that - very important - part. But I think this is a good discussion nonetheless \n",
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