Jack Dorsey gave $10 million to an anonymous founder with a deep devotion to a fascist ‘guru’
Dorsey gave $10 million to a foundation supporting Nostr and 14 bitcoins, worth roughly $245,000, directly to Nostr’s founder, who until now was known pseudonymously as Fiatjaf.
Nostr “has no board, no company behind it, no funding,” Dorsey said in an interview with the Silicon Valley outlet Pirate Wires last month. “It’s a truly open protocol. The development environment is moving fast. And I gave a bunch of money to them.” Nostr has a relatively small user base of cryptocurrency and privacy enthusiasts, including Edward Snowden.
“We don’t know who the leader is, it’s like this anonymous Brazilian,” Dorsey said.
That anonymous Brazilian is Giovanni Torres Parra, a developer who has also built at least two webpages devoted to disseminating the work of the far-right conspiracy theorist Olavo de Carvalho. Before he died in 2022 after contracting COVID-19, de Carvalho — known as Olavo — praised Brazil’s military dictatorship, claimed that Pepsi-Cola was flavored with stem cells of aborted fetuses, preached that tolerance for homosexuality was “incompatible” with democracy, and had an office in Virginia decorated with portraits of Confederate generals.
So not that long ago I posted something about Beardo quitting Bluesky because he was more interested in Nostr, and I noted my puzzlement at him funding this thing without even knowing who “Fiatjaf” was. I mean, that’s quite a lot of money to give to someone you don’t even know the identity of… evidently that identity is now known somehow (bet he’s thrilled about that), and for some reason I find myself suspecting that Dorsey was perfectly aware of who he was all along. The end of the article further says:
On a podcast last year, Parra, as Fiatjaf, mused about the likelihood that “Nazis or racists or whatever” could see Nostr as a home for hate speech because the nature of the protocol means it has no centralized content moderation.
“I want to tell these people to go somewhere else, but I think we need these people, too,” he said.
Giovanni, meu irmão em Cristo, NO ONE needs Nazis. No good comes from Nazis. And no good is going to come of Nostr if you think Nazis might be useful to it in any way.
