Sunday Brunch 11: Buttercup Roberts

Sunday Brunch #11 is a relaxed, music-first decompression chamber with Buttercup Roberts at the table: coffee poured, no sermon, no script, and the Value-for-Value house rule intact, where 90% of sats streamed during songs goes directly to the artist. Buttercup brings a playlist built through deep dives on WaveLake and Nostr, using the episode to reflect on how direct zaps can create a real feeling of connection between listener and musician in a world usually clogged with intermediaries.

The conversation ranges across Buttercup’s wider creative world. She shares her film background, her love of storytelling’s emotional power, and her growing disenchantment with the modern film industry’s shift from immersive movies toward disposable “content.” That opens naturally into talk about The Bridge, her parallel Nostr project using comics, characters, and visual storytelling to make privacy, censorship, data rights, and digital freedom more legible to everyday people.

A big middle section focuses on discovery, onboarding, and the UX challenge in open music ecosystems. Avi and Buttercup compare WaveLake and Fountain, discuss how hard it still is for normal people to browse music intuitively, and zoom out to the broader Nostr problem: how do you onboard artists and non-Bitcoiners into a network that is still culturally dominated by Bitcoin-native conversation? Their answer is less about hiding the ethos and more about building compelling creative entry points around art, identity, and sovereignty.

That leads into Bitcoin for the Arts, where Buttercup discusses the initiative’s mission to fund artists across disciplines, not necessarily for explicitly “Bitcoin” art, but for work that carries the ethos into culture through story, symbolism, and emotional resonance. The episode closes in a playful, ambitious place: imagining grants, murals, scavenger hunts, and global artistic treasure maps as ways to make the parallel culture feel alive, participatory, and worth showing up for.

Links

• The Bridge on Nostr
• Today's Playlist