2023 Jan 05

• Taking a very brief intermission to work on what will likely be my life’s legacy: a bot to repost greg tweets to nostr.

• Exploring nostr development through this project has given me some perspective on just how young this project is. There are a couple of rust packages, all have less than 30 stars on github. On nostr I see so many people talking about developer-related stuff, but I realized there are actually pretty few people actively working on it, even with the rise in popularity lately. It’s not that popular yet.

  • Mainly using/copying nostr-types and nostr_rust.

• Relearned that secp256k1 is the elliptic curve used in Bitcoin, and schnorr signatures in Bitcoin are a Schnorr scheme using this curve (as opposed to the prime/generators scheme taught in class). I should actually look into how elliptic curve cryptography works at some point. Learning the number theory for what we learned in class was super cool so ECC must be pretty interesting too. Hopefully I have enough math background to grasp it.

• Choosing to use Rust for my bot because why not. Learned to make HTTP requests in Rust using Hyper, and can successfully make calls to the Twitter API.

• Realizing I should just start working on rust-lightning instead of doing things on ldk-sample. ldk-sample really doesn’t need more work on it, and contributing to rust-lightning will help me immerse myself in the codebase better anyway. One PR was enough to practice, now I should just get started.