13 ms·

Why I’m betting on Nostr

214 points by jseliger 3y ago

dewey 3y ago
I was playing around with it a few months ago and set up a relay for fun (https://blog.notmyhostna.me/posts/taking-a-look-at-nostr/ https://blog.notmyhostna.me/posts/taking-a-look-at-nostr/). I found it to be a very nice starting point if you want to follow how a protocol is being developed as it's all very transparent, simple and easy to follow here: https://github.com/nostr-protocol/nips https://github.com/nostr-protocol/nips
spraveenitpro 3y ago
[dead]
dekervin 3y ago
For all the talk about nostr, I recently discovered it's actually a tenth of the size of mastodon[0]. The hype-to-actual-activity is through the rough with this one. [0] https://datum.alwaysdata.net/?explorer_view=quest&quest_id=quest_20230731_204011_797106 https://datum.alwaysdata.net/?explorer_view=quest&quest_id=q...
- azangru 3y ago
  That's actually quite impressive, considering that Mastodon is both talked about much wider, and is easier to use.
  - JAlexoid 3y ago
    Getting an account setup is unfortunately a challenge. Which leads to the same issue as Bitcoin, Git and other open services - costs of managing are so high, that there's going to be monopolization in the hands of the one that can attract the most resources... and even when the financial costs aren't high(hosting Git or a mailserver on your home router/server/NAS is not expensive), the time costs start to take a toll. There's going to be a mental barrier to these things - paying $9 per month for a managed Mastodon instance is mentally way too much. I pay for Google One, to not think about storage and mail management... and get many perks with it.
- imachine1980_ 3y ago
  i never hear of nostr before and i use mastodon for while, and twitter debacle was critical, 200000 active users is lots of people from this type of non comercial céntric products. edit: i check few nostr people and the public is quite different between the two platforms, that doesn't invalidate what i say but explain my lack of engagement in the platform
  - bubersson 3y ago
    Yeah, Nostr is quite new compared to Mastodon. The clients became usable just this year. I posted my first note on Nostr in Dec 2021 and that was literally just days after the first web client allowed posting. Mastodon has been there at least since 2016.
unboxingelf 3y ago
as a dev and nostr user, here’s my elevator pitch: everything is an event. events are signed using pki so it’s easy to know who sent the event and it’s authentic. they’re human readable json objects. events flow over websockets so it’s “real time”. you can build literally anything on this platform - listen for a type of event, do something, emit another. it can all interoperable. we started with basic twitter clones but are rapidly moving into uncharted territory - people are building music distribution apps, ai agents, and so on. and the entire ecosystem has native, programmatic payments built on bitcoin’s lightning network.
- intotheabyss 3y ago
  Why would you use Bitcoin lightning when you can use Ethereum L2s?
  - unboxingelf 3y ago
    Ethereum’s recent move to Proof of Stake undermines the their ability to be decentralized and permission-less. If a validator adds a blacklisted transaction, they will be slashed [0]. Ethereum had an unfair issuance. That means the founders kept a pool of coins for themselves and have unfair control of the network, furthered by PoS. Ethereum is effectively a private tech company led by a CEO. They have a public roadmap. Ultimately I think these fundamental properties of Ethereum make it inadequate as a permission-less money protocol. It works great for games and apps, but its foundations are susceptible to coercion and control - and you can’t build a permission-less protocol on that foundation. [0] https://cointelegraph.com/news/51-of-ethereum-blocks-are-now-compliant-with-ofac-standards-raising-censorship-concerns https://cointelegraph.com/news/51-of-ethereum-blocks-are-now...
    - Canada 3y ago
      > If a validator adds a blacklisted transaction, they will be slashed [0]. This is incorrect, and your reference doesn't back the statement up. Validators don't have to include any transaction they don't want to, just like Bitcoin mining pools don't have to either.
nacs 3y ago
The number of users is almost irrelevant in the context of Nostr because many clients generate a new ID. These aren't email-verified/phone-verified users -- this is literally just a new key/ID being generated. Some web apps auto-create a new ID and join the network every time you use them. Also, the signal to noise ratio is really bad with a lot of spam and almost all discussions related in some way to crypto. Nostr has potential as a technology but the current demographic is basically a social network full of crypto fans.
- dekervin 3y ago
  And even then most of the discussion are very shallow compared to crypto twitter. I can't understand why. I would've thought since it's early adopters, discussion inside a tightly knit group would be more meaningful... alas
  - vorpalhex 3y ago
    Crypto scammers are the new discount viagra. Nostr and services like it have a place but they are not going to replace services that have meaningful anti-spam.
    - JAlexoid 3y ago
      Meaningful ant-spam is resource heavy operation. Maybe if AI models are portable/accessible enough to run on a small system - we'd reduce the amount of manual work required... Talk to anyone who tried running their own private mailserver. SMTP is a decentralized open and very simple protocol - yet that doesn't address the issues that keep people away from hosting their own mailservers.
      - mik1998 3y ago
        Anti-spam is one of those things that get very overblown when a lot of it can be quite easily solved. Simple bayesian spam filtering annihilates most spam. > Talk to anyone who tried running their own private mailserver I run a mailserver and spam is actually not a big issue for me at all. Blocking hosts with no rDNS, residential IPs and no dkim already blocks all the spammers who simply scan all the IP addresses and rspamd kills the rest. Granted, I don't post my email publicly on linkedin or other but I get no spam in my inbox.
itslennysfault 3y ago
Why is an article from December 2022 on the front page of HN? Nostr has moved quite a bit since this article was written. The most obvious being that it says to try Damus from test flight (it went GA like half a year ago).
- dgellow 3y ago
  Someone shared it, people liked it.
evbogue 3y ago
I tried Nostr for awhile, and I appreciate that they're picking up where Scuttlebot left off. There are a few things that bug me about it that I wish they'd fix, or that some future protocol will solve. First, I want a replication strategy. Nostr messages get lost in time, and many of the clients end up just blasting an entire message history at your client. Because there's no clue in the protocol how messages are related other than a timestamp this also means you can fake timestamps and write fake messages in the future or back in time. This doesn't have to be an append-only log, but you need some idea of message order to avoid wasting bandwidth to get someone's timeline and detect when a message has been posted out of order. Second, I don't like that many Nostr clients are using the same signing key for messages as they do for lightning transactions. We don't know how many of these web Nostr clients are secretly sending your private keys back to their servers, and everyone will run from Nostr as soon as some untrustworthy dev starts emptying lightning wallets. Third, someone needs to delete some of these NIPS. The arms race to make Nostr as complex and difficult as possible to implement is not going to do much for the ecosystem in the long run. In the beginning Nostr was simple to implement from scratch, they should get back to that! Fourth, it needs a dedicated blob store protocol. Yah, I know IPFS isn't great but someone should come up with something that is simple and works. Anyway best of luck to the people who are working on the project. If anything we learned more about how these protocols can work, even if Nostr isn't going to be the winner in this space in the long term.
- drexlspivey 3y ago
  > First, I want a replication strategy. Nostr messages get lost in time, and many of the clients end up just blasting an entire message history at your client. Because there's no clue in the protocol how messages are related other than a timestamp this also means you can fake timestamps and write fake messages in the future or back in time. This doesn't have to be an append-only log, but you need some idea of message order to avoid wasting bandwidth to get someone's timeline and detect when a message has been posted out of order. nostr is stateless it’s just a streaming protocol for messages, there is no ordering (the same way there is no packet ordering in UDP). Looks like what you need is something built on top of it. Right now nostr relays are just that, real time message relays, they are not even supposed to store the messages.
Brighthurst 3y ago
I'd like to point out that the apparent "crypto dominance" is mostly due to that group's propensity to be early-adopters of new technology. The apparent crypto spam is actually a good opportunity to squash the bot issue early. Even people "in crypto" hate bots spamming the newest shitcoin. So while that may put some people off, there is non-crypto related communication, and the "crypto dominance" will decrease over time.
- xigoi 3y ago
  Still, cryptocurrency is inherently baked into the network due to the “zaps” mechanism.
  - 3np 3y ago
    NIP-57 is optional. It's implemented by clients using that functionality but not required per se. The same goes for NIP-52 [Calendar Events] and NIP-99 [Classified Listings]. Neither of those are "inherently baked into the network".
clarkmoody 3y ago
All the degenerate token-fueled web3 hype of 2021 sold a bunch of dreams about decentralization and owning your social graph to unsuspecting retail and then delivered nothing but rugpulls and bankruptcy letters. Meanwhile, nostr built a system people actually use on top of open protocols. No tokens, no blockchains. Only notes and other stuff transmitted over relays.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- unshavedyak 3y ago
  The relationship to Bitcoin makes me nervous, though. I don't understand it, but even the mention of it makes me want to write off the whole protocol because i'm just that averse to crypto, and tried of seeing repeated crypto grifts.
  - clarkmoody 3y ago
    Bitcoin and nostr are completely separate protocols, but they just so happen to have a level of interoperability. You can use either system without ever touching (or caring) about the other.
- rchaud 3y ago
  To be fair to the Web3 hustlers, they never cared one iota that every 'decentralized app' was either a coin exchange, NFT marketplace or some hideous Pay to Earn abomination passing itself off as a 'game'. They pointed at every one of these snake oil machines and said "here's proof that it's being adopted".
jron 3y ago
Damus has come a long way since this article was written. Android also has a great client, Amethyst: https://github.com/vitorpamplona/amethyst https://github.com/vitorpamplona/amethyst Gossip is a cool rust desktop client: https://github.com/mikedilger/gossip https://github.com/mikedilger/gossip Strfry is used by most of the large relays: https://github.com/hoytech/strfry https://github.com/hoytech/strfry Doug Hoyte is a wizard.
jrm4 3y ago
I tried it for a bit, and for both content and tech, tying it to Bitcoin seems like -- perhaps not a deal-killer, but mostly pointless and trying to hard. The theory is cool, it makes sense, you have your identity tied to your Bitcoin public key. But it just seems unnecessary to focus on this particular bit of the technology, when the human relationships via something like Mastodon and federation seem to be just fine.
- zikduruqe 3y ago
  It did some BTC begging and got a bunch of Sats sent to me via the Lightning network. All in all I made "money" from participating. Then the porn took over.
  - izzydata 3y ago
    Why should money be involved when interacting with friends on the internet? I don't think I get it at all.
- 3np 3y ago
  > you have your identity tied to your Bitcoin public key. Uhm, where did you see that?
  - jrm4 3y ago
    That is how it is presented; I'm aware that you can probably use it without owning any Bitcoin, but again -- even the Twitter guy is touting that being the point of it.
    - unboxingelf 3y ago
      Bitcoin tips are just another action on notes (tweets), along side likes and reposts. Don’t like bitcoin? Cool, don’t click the button. That’s literally all there is to it.
zzo38computer 3y ago
I had looked at nostr before, and I had some criticisms of it: 1. The serialization and canonization of JSON. Fortunately the conversion to arrays without floating point numbers avoids the problem with digitally signing the canonized JSON, but this is still messy. There are other problems with using JSON too, including inefficient binary data, restriction of which character sets you can use, lack of proper 64-bit integers, and others. I preferred a efficient binary format instead. 2. Servers cannot send messages to each other. I would allow it as an optional capability, in addition to clients sending messages to multiple servers. 3. It should not need WebSockets; plain TCP (with optional TLS; it should not be mandatory) would do. Other optional protocols can also be possible to do, e.g. HTTP POST requests, or even HTTP GET (or Gemini) to merely receive a single message by its ID. (WebSockets in binary mode could also still work.) 4. Character encoding. Unicode is too messy as well as other problems. My proposal is you can specify what code page to use, including an extended TRON code (including ISO-IR-169, Cangjie, and others). A few control codes might be used, e.g. line break, furigana, and text direction; for simplicity you might not need much more than that I suppose. 5. Lost messages. Blockchaining (i.e. each message contains the hash of the previous message) might help a bit, but still sometimes you will have lost one, or an entire account is lost without anyone else referencing them. Making this mandatory comes with many problems, but being optional also has different problems, so it is unclear. 6. Some other stuff, too (I do not remember all of them at this time). I had tried to design a better one, but I did not know what to call it so I just reversed "nostr" to make "rtson", but that doesn't seems like very good either. (Although, maybe is not needed; NNTP is good enough anyways.)
- jimmydoreornot 3y ago
  1. I concur. But it's no big deal. 2. Nothing prevents this, but it would be specified as a sister protocol. I haven't seen it specified, but I know that relays are doing it. 3. Websockets allows pub-sub. Clients stay connected to relays and instantly get the next message when it arrives. Polling means either lots of polling or having delays. 4. I can't even comment on this one. 5. Optional chaining is possible and has been proposed. I also started a nostr-like protocol back in November 2022 based on my gripes with it. Then I came to my senses... nobody is going to use my variant. Perfection is the enemy of the good.
imhoguy 3y ago
Interesting technical solution. However looking at the stats it seems it lost the momentum: https://stats.nostr.band/ https://stats.nostr.band/ What happened?
tortoise_in 3y ago
Why not try xmpp?
cropcirclbureau 3y ago
Nostr's very cool tech and I'm excited to see where it ends up. But I'm not sure it'll make for good social networks/apps that I'll care about. ActivityPub and Matrix get flak on the account portability issue and it's a valid one but it (and their design in general) provide a pressure on their communities to be very "cozy-web"[0] despite the few leviathan instances. Nostr's more than flexible (almost under-specified) that you can build your cozy spaces on top of it but I'm convinced its design allows it to be a real decentralized contender for the big social and I fear that's where its custodians are headed. It won't be long before we see Nostr service providers that replace all the core functionalities of Twitter like a good algorithm and moderation[1]. Personally, I don't want Twitter with pki. I don't want Twitter at all. I really hope Nostr keeps it cozy but hey, at least you'll get to personally choose your algorithm. [0]: https://maggieappleton.com/cozy-web https://maggieappleton.com/cozy-web [1]: https://primal.net https://primal.net has a great start
- Arathorn 3y ago
  fwiw we’re plugging away at acct portability in Matrix via MSC4014, which is even implemented in the Dendrite server impl now…
dang 3y ago
Related. Others? New content moderation system for Nostr - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37343373 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37343373 - Aug 2023 (2 comments) Social Media is broken. Can we fix it [with nostr]? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36698217 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36698217 - July 2023 (1 comment) How to verify your domain on Nostr and Bluesky (for micro.blog users) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36646598 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36646598 - July 2023 (40 comments) Show HN: Zapddit – a Reddit-style open-source client for nostr - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36326468 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36326468 - June 2023 (1 comment) Show HN: Agora – Follow your favorite topics across Nostr, Bluesky, and Mastodon - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36210443 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36210443 - June 2023 (3 comments) Nostr – Decentralized social network - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35773168 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35773168 - May 2023 (164 comments) Nostr (“Notes and Other Stuff Transmitted by Relays”) – An Introduction - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35690659 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35690659 - April 2023 (141 comments) Decentralized Twitter Alternatives Bluesky and Nostr Experience Growing Pains - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35673764 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35673764 - April 2023 (5 comments) Jack Dorsey has set a 10 btc bounty for Nostr based alternative to GitHub - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35020964 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35020964 - March 2023 (127 comments) Mostr: A Fediverse Nostr Bridge - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34999118 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34999118 - March 2023 (3 comments) A decentralized social network with a chance of working - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34937223 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34937223 - Feb 2023 (9 comments) Nostr, Love at First Sight - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34901659 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34901659 - Feb 2023 (1 comment) Blogstack.io: blogging on nostr with lightning tips - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34850871 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34850871 - Feb 2023 (1 comment) Set up a Nostr Relay server in under 5 minutes - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34697020 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34697020 - Feb 2023 (1 comment) Nostr.how – A Complete Guide to Nostr - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34656925 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34656925 - Feb 2023 (135 comments) What do y’all think about Nostr? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34535910 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34535910 - Jan 2023 (2 comments) Nostr: Notes and Other Stuff Transmitted by Relays - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34526562 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34526562 - Jan 2023 (154 comments) Snowden on the Lightning Network on Nostr - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34507443 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34507443 - Jan 2023 (91 comments) Edward Snowden Joins Nostr - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34503748 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34503748 - Jan 2023 (21 comments) Move over Mastodon, here comes Nostr (and to set up your NIP-05 id) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34442708 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34442708 - Jan 2023 (1 comment) A Map of Nostr Relays - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34408692 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34408692 - Jan 2023 (2 comments) Awesome Nostr - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34406773 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34406773 - Jan 2023 (2 comments) Nostr Is the Decentralized Protocol That Might Replace Twitter - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34174724 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34174724 - Dec 2022 (5 comments) Coracle – a web client for the Nostr protocol - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34144111 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34144111 - Dec 2022 (2 comments) How to Start Using Nostr? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34090375 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34090375 - Dec 2022 (1 comment) Check Out the Nostr Protocol - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34068676 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34068676 - Dec 2022 (2 comments) Jack Dorsey donates to develop decentralized social network protocol [pdf] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34002218 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34002218 - Dec 2022 (9 comments) Nostr is a stupid simple P2P protocol that works, built by builders - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33746360 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33746360 - Nov 2022 (128 comments) Nostr Protocol - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31717981 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31717981 - June 2022 (9 comments) Jester: Chess over Nostr - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31580536 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31580536 - June 2022 (1 comment) Fiatjaf/nostr – a censorship-resistant alternative to Twitter - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29749061 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29749061 - Dec 2021 (138 comments) Nostr – The final solution to Twitter censorship as an open protocol, not P2P - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25104364 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25104364 - Nov 2020 (6 comments)
kyle-rb 3y ago
I liked the punchline at the end. > Edit: Please note that I changed my Nostr public key identity. My last private key was compromised, likely from using it to log into a web client last month.
- futuretaint 3y ago
  nostr being an offshoot of crypto/bitcoin tech influences the protocol in important ways, like everything crypto/bitcoin you need to read documentation to understand the terminology being used and you need to 'invest' in the culture, which is bitcoin evangelist culture w/ all the baggage.
  - segfaltnh 3y ago
    Which essentially limits adoption to less than 1% of humans, a problem centralized social networks don't have to contend with.
    - libertygirl 3y ago
      This is a feature and not a flaw. More does not equal better.
      - kyle-rb 3y ago
        Sure, but then it's not really something to be "betting big" on like the author says he is.
wuming2 3y ago
USENET with fancy interface?
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
vehementi 3y ago
When someone leads with a silly misleading percentage (they increased 30000%!!!!!) it automatically discredits their site
- vaylian 3y ago
  XKCD 1102
- spopejoy 3y ago
  It's a crypto VC pump piece, overstated numbers come with the territory.
causality0 3y ago
People are increasingly aware of the value of free speech and dangers of letting any centralized platform decide what is and is not acceptable to say I wish, but I think this is completely wrong. Support for freedom of speech is at an all-time low and continues to drop. Frankly if it didn't already exist I don't think you could even get the postal service off the ground these days, with its completely uncensored communication.
- wmf 3y ago
  He's clearly talking about... certain people.
charles_f 3y ago
I like the concept of Nostr. The technology is not too bad (there's that small issue that you can't change your key so if it ever gets exposed you're done). In practice though, the only two topics covered on Nostr are a) nostr, b) bitcoin and how stupid non bitcoin believers are. Good demo that technology is only a portion of success.
maxawebster 3y ago
Hey everyone, author of the original essay here. Glad to see so much interest in Nostr! I originally published this article in Jan '23. Since then, we've seen a lot of development around both the protocol and applications (much of which has been well documented here by jb55 and others). Twitter-like clients such as Damus and Amethyst have gotten much better and new clients like primal (primal.net) have emerged with their own takes on features like caching and algorithms. Nostr Wallet Connect made it substantially easier to connect a Lightning wallet with a Nostr client for one tap zapping, radically simplifying the payment experience for end users. I'm personally most excited to see several early examples of applications that move beyond social media and show Nostr for what it is - a generalized data protocol. Almost any app would benefit from a persistent identity and portable data shared with other apps. Here are a few live examples: - Long tail of edge AI services - pablof7z and several others are piloting a new construct called "data vending machines (DVMs)" which allow users to publish job requests to the nostr network and other users (or bots) to compete to fulfill those requests. We're already seeing early markets for fine tuned open source models completing services like voice-to-text transcription or image generation. Even cooler, each of these DVMs is chainable, so the output of one DVM can be the input of another. See https://vendata.io https://vendata.io for example. This recent hackathon had a few cool dvm projects as well: https://bolt.fun/tournaments/ai4all/overview https://bolt.fun/tournaments/ai4all/overview - Music - Stemstr (stemstr.app) is a Nostr native app for creating and remixing music. Wavlake (wavlake.com) is a music streaming service with Lightning zaps, which recently integrated Nostr login. - Text annotation - https://highlighter.com https://highlighter.com allows users to collaboratively highlight text (think rapgenius on Nostr). You can even collaboratively highlight this very thread if you like! - Marketplaces - bids and asks are messages which can be published over Nostr, allowing multiple marketplace front ends to share a common order book or liquidity. We've already seen a few pocs for building Nostr based marketplaces such as: github.com/lnbits/nostrmarket github.com/supertestnet/superstore - Nostr browser - an early version of Spring, a nostr browser, recently launched to experiment with hosting various microapps in one interface: github.com/nostrband/nostr-universe/ This list is just the tip of the iceberg, but hopefully it gives a good overview of Nostr's potential. I've invested in a number of these projects already and remain committed to funding many more hackers exploring Nostr in the coming months!
lemper 3y ago
two things. first, the more you try to convince me about the best thing after sliced bread, the more I doubt it's even a bread. second, anything related to crypto currency should be held in doubt (in the highest order) until proven otherwise. even if I ignore two things above, I don't want to use any new comm. protocols. to me, what we have now is good enough™.
lenkite 3y ago
> I believe that open and permissionless systems inevitably win over closed competitors because open systems can marshal the collective resources of many more contributors than any individual business can employ. Yeah, this is why mobile computing is owned by Apple and Google.
brabel 3y ago
> I believe this idea could integrate with Block’s vision for Web 5, which to the best of my understanding, also anchors Decentralized Identifiers (DIDs) into the Bitcoin blockchain. There's a lot of effort going on in the EU to enable international, decentralized identity that can be recognized by every country. The first thing they decided was that DIDs on the blockchain are a terrible idea. GDPR demands that personal information must be protected, but having your DID in a blockchain forever, for all to see every transaction your DID ever performs, goes completely against that. It's one of those ideas that doesn't pass even 5 minutes of light consideration when you actually understand the implications. However, DIDs are not tied in any way to blockchains, so they're still a good idea, just the ideal implementation needs to be found yet.
- red_admiral 3y ago
  Excellent point. There may be use cases where a DID tied to a verifiable history is a feature (particularly for organisations as opposed to individuals), but for most people having it linked to a blockchain is definitely not the way forward. Also, blockchains and associated protocols can become defunct, or dwindle in usage until a 51% takeover of the remainder is feasible, or many other things. I imagine that in the end, a DID will be a private/public keypair wrapped in some hardware that the average person can use.
- 3np 3y ago
  No. That's just strawmanning a terrible implementation. Here's another less terrible one: Public certificates of ID issuers are what's stored on-chain. Individual users have their (potentially locally generated) DIDs cross-signed by an issuer. The only data being stored on-chain is issuer certificates (and potentially further signatures and metadata around them) and this makes it possible to run the whole scheme in a more decentralized fashion.
red_admiral 3y ago
> Please note that I changed my Nostr public key identity. My last private key was compromised, likely from using it to log into a web client last month. This is still a very new technology ... That seems like an area that needs work before the other 90% of the world can use Nostr securely.
Alifatisk 3y ago
My experience with the Nostr atmosphere has been faaar worse than Mastodon. Data-loss and my timeline being flooded with spam from Crypto fans is prime examples.

214 points by jseliger 3y ago

I was playing around with it a few months ago and set up a relay for fun (https://blog.notmyhostna.me/posts/taking-a-look-at-nostr/ https://blog.notmyhostna.me/posts/taking-a-look-at-nostr/). I found it to be a very nice starting point if you want to follow how a protocol is being developed as it's all very transparent, simple and easy to follow here: https://github.com/nostr-protocol/nips https://github.com/nostr-protocol/nips

spraveenitpro 3y ago

[dead]

dekervin 3y ago

For all the talk about nostr, I recently discovered it's actually a tenth of the size of mastodon[0]. The hype-to-actual-activity is through the rough with this one. [0] https://datum.alwaysdata.net/?explorer_view=quest&quest_id=quest_20230731_204011_797106 https://datum.alwaysdata.net/?explorer_view=quest&quest_id=q...

azangru 3y ago
That's actually quite impressive, considering that Mastodon is both talked about much wider, and is easier to use.
- JAlexoid 3y ago
  Getting an account setup is unfortunately a challenge. Which leads to the same issue as Bitcoin, Git and other open services - costs of managing are so high, that there's going to be monopolization in the hands of the one that can attract the most resources... and even when the financial costs aren't high(hosting Git or a mailserver on your home router/server/NAS is not expensive), the time costs start to take a toll. There's going to be a mental barrier to these things - paying $9 per month for a managed Mastodon instance is mentally way too much. I pay for Google One, to not think about storage and mail management... and get many perks with it.
imachine1980_ 3y ago
i never hear of nostr before and i use mastodon for while, and twitter debacle was critical, 200000 active users is lots of people from this type of non comercial céntric products. edit: i check few nostr people and the public is quite different between the two platforms, that doesn't invalidate what i say but explain my lack of engagement in the platform
- bubersson 3y ago
  Yeah, Nostr is quite new compared to Mastodon. The clients became usable just this year. I posted my first note on Nostr in Dec 2021 and that was literally just days after the first web client allowed posting. Mastodon has been there at least since 2016.

unboxingelf 3y ago

as a dev and nostr user, here’s my elevator pitch: everything is an event. events are signed using pki so it’s easy to know who sent the event and it’s authentic. they’re human readable json objects. events flow over websockets so it’s “real time”. you can build literally anything on this platform - listen for a type of event, do something, emit another. it can all interoperable. we started with basic twitter clones but are rapidly moving into uncharted territory - people are building music distribution apps, ai agents, and so on. and the entire ecosystem has native, programmatic payments built on bitcoin’s lightning network.

intotheabyss 3y ago
Why would you use Bitcoin lightning when you can use Ethereum L2s?
- unboxingelf 3y ago
  Ethereum’s recent move to Proof of Stake undermines the their ability to be decentralized and permission-less. If a validator adds a blacklisted transaction, they will be slashed [0]. Ethereum had an unfair issuance. That means the founders kept a pool of coins for themselves and have unfair control of the network, furthered by PoS. Ethereum is effectively a private tech company led by a CEO. They have a public roadmap. Ultimately I think these fundamental properties of Ethereum make it inadequate as a permission-less money protocol. It works great for games and apps, but its foundations are susceptible to coercion and control - and you can’t build a permission-less protocol on that foundation. [0] https://cointelegraph.com/news/51-of-ethereum-blocks-are-now-compliant-with-ofac-standards-raising-censorship-concerns https://cointelegraph.com/news/51-of-ethereum-blocks-are-now...
  - Canada 3y ago
    > If a validator adds a blacklisted transaction, they will be slashed [0]. This is incorrect, and your reference doesn't back the statement up. Validators don't have to include any transaction they don't want to, just like Bitcoin mining pools don't have to either.

nacs 3y ago

The number of users is almost irrelevant in the context of Nostr because many clients generate a new ID. These aren't email-verified/phone-verified users -- this is literally just a new key/ID being generated. Some web apps auto-create a new ID and join the network every time you use them. Also, the signal to noise ratio is really bad with a lot of spam and almost all discussions related in some way to crypto. Nostr has potential as a technology but the current demographic is basically a social network full of crypto fans.

dekervin 3y ago
And even then most of the discussion are very shallow compared to crypto twitter. I can't understand why. I would've thought since it's early adopters, discussion inside a tightly knit group would be more meaningful... alas
- vorpalhex 3y ago
  Crypto scammers are the new discount viagra. Nostr and services like it have a place but they are not going to replace services that have meaningful anti-spam.
  - JAlexoid 3y ago
    Meaningful ant-spam is resource heavy operation. Maybe if AI models are portable/accessible enough to run on a small system - we'd reduce the amount of manual work required... Talk to anyone who tried running their own private mailserver. SMTP is a decentralized open and very simple protocol - yet that doesn't address the issues that keep people away from hosting their own mailservers.
    - mik1998 3y ago
      Anti-spam is one of those things that get very overblown when a lot of it can be quite easily solved. Simple bayesian spam filtering annihilates most spam. > Talk to anyone who tried running their own private mailserver I run a mailserver and spam is actually not a big issue for me at all. Blocking hosts with no rDNS, residential IPs and no dkim already blocks all the spammers who simply scan all the IP addresses and rspamd kills the rest. Granted, I don't post my email publicly on linkedin or other but I get no spam in my inbox.

itslennysfault 3y ago

Why is an article from December 2022 on the front page of HN? Nostr has moved quite a bit since this article was written. The most obvious being that it says to try Damus from test flight (it went GA like half a year ago).

dgellow 3y ago
Someone shared it, people liked it.

evbogue 3y ago

I tried Nostr for awhile, and I appreciate that they're picking up where Scuttlebot left off. There are a few things that bug me about it that I wish they'd fix, or that some future protocol will solve. First, I want a replication strategy. Nostr messages get lost in time, and many of the clients end up just blasting an entire message history at your client. Because there's no clue in the protocol how messages are related other than a timestamp this also means you can fake timestamps and write fake messages in the future or back in time. This doesn't have to be an append-only log, but you need some idea of message order to avoid wasting bandwidth to get someone's timeline and detect when a message has been posted out of order. Second, I don't like that many Nostr clients are using the same signing key for messages as they do for lightning transactions. We don't know how many of these web Nostr clients are secretly sending your private keys back to their servers, and everyone will run from Nostr as soon as some untrustworthy dev starts emptying lightning wallets. Third, someone needs to delete some of these NIPS. The arms race to make Nostr as complex and difficult as possible to implement is not going to do much for the ecosystem in the long run. In the beginning Nostr was simple to implement from scratch, they should get back to that! Fourth, it needs a dedicated blob store protocol. Yah, I know IPFS isn't great but someone should come up with something that is simple and works. Anyway best of luck to the people who are working on the project. If anything we learned more about how these protocols can work, even if Nostr isn't going to be the winner in this space in the long term.

drexlspivey 3y ago
> First, I want a replication strategy. Nostr messages get lost in time, and many of the clients end up just blasting an entire message history at your client. Because there's no clue in the protocol how messages are related other than a timestamp this also means you can fake timestamps and write fake messages in the future or back in time. This doesn't have to be an append-only log, but you need some idea of message order to avoid wasting bandwidth to get someone's timeline and detect when a message has been posted out of order. nostr is stateless it’s just a streaming protocol for messages, there is no ordering (the same way there is no packet ordering in UDP). Looks like what you need is something built on top of it. Right now nostr relays are just that, real time message relays, they are not even supposed to store the messages.

Brighthurst 3y ago

I'd like to point out that the apparent "crypto dominance" is mostly due to that group's propensity to be early-adopters of new technology. The apparent crypto spam is actually a good opportunity to squash the bot issue early. Even people "in crypto" hate bots spamming the newest shitcoin. So while that may put some people off, there is non-crypto related communication, and the "crypto dominance" will decrease over time.

xigoi 3y ago
Still, cryptocurrency is inherently baked into the network due to the “zaps” mechanism.
- 3np 3y ago
  NIP-57 is optional. It's implemented by clients using that functionality but not required per se. The same goes for NIP-52 [Calendar Events] and NIP-99 [Classified Listings]. Neither of those are "inherently baked into the network".

clarkmoody 3y ago

All the degenerate token-fueled web3 hype of 2021 sold a bunch of dreams about decentralization and owning your social graph to unsuspecting retail and then delivered nothing but rugpulls and bankruptcy letters. Meanwhile, nostr built a system people actually use on top of open protocols. No tokens, no blockchains. Only notes and other stuff transmitted over relays.

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
unshavedyak 3y ago
The relationship to Bitcoin makes me nervous, though. I don't understand it, but even the mention of it makes me want to write off the whole protocol because i'm just that averse to crypto, and tried of seeing repeated crypto grifts.
- clarkmoody 3y ago
  Bitcoin and nostr are completely separate protocols, but they just so happen to have a level of interoperability. You can use either system without ever touching (or caring) about the other.
rchaud 3y ago
To be fair to the Web3 hustlers, they never cared one iota that every 'decentralized app' was either a coin exchange, NFT marketplace or some hideous Pay to Earn abomination passing itself off as a 'game'. They pointed at every one of these snake oil machines and said "here's proof that it's being adopted".

jron 3y ago

Damus has come a long way since this article was written. Android also has a great client, Amethyst: https://github.com/vitorpamplona/amethyst https://github.com/vitorpamplona/amethyst Gossip is a cool rust desktop client: https://github.com/mikedilger/gossip https://github.com/mikedilger/gossip Strfry is used by most of the large relays: https://github.com/hoytech/strfry https://github.com/hoytech/strfry Doug Hoyte is a wizard.

jrm4 3y ago

I tried it for a bit, and for both content and tech, tying it to Bitcoin seems like -- perhaps not a deal-killer, but mostly pointless and trying to hard. The theory is cool, it makes sense, you have your identity tied to your Bitcoin public key. But it just seems unnecessary to focus on this particular bit of the technology, when the human relationships via something like Mastodon and federation seem to be just fine.

zikduruqe 3y ago
It did some BTC begging and got a bunch of Sats sent to me via the Lightning network. All in all I made "money" from participating. Then the porn took over.
- izzydata 3y ago
  Why should money be involved when interacting with friends on the internet? I don't think I get it at all.
3np 3y ago
> you have your identity tied to your Bitcoin public key. Uhm, where did you see that?
- jrm4 3y ago
  That is how it is presented; I'm aware that you can probably use it without owning any Bitcoin, but again -- even the Twitter guy is touting that being the point of it.
  - unboxingelf 3y ago
    Bitcoin tips are just another action on notes (tweets), along side likes and reposts. Don’t like bitcoin? Cool, don’t click the button. That’s literally all there is to it.

zzo38computer 3y ago

I had looked at nostr before, and I had some criticisms of it: 1. The serialization and canonization of JSON. Fortunately the conversion to arrays without floating point numbers avoids the problem with digitally signing the canonized JSON, but this is still messy. There are other problems with using JSON too, including inefficient binary data, restriction of which character sets you can use, lack of proper 64-bit integers, and others. I preferred a efficient binary format instead. 2. Servers cannot send messages to each other. I would allow it as an optional capability, in addition to clients sending messages to multiple servers. 3. It should not need WebSockets; plain TCP (with optional TLS; it should not be mandatory) would do. Other optional protocols can also be possible to do, e.g. HTTP POST requests, or even HTTP GET (or Gemini) to merely receive a single message by its ID. (WebSockets in binary mode could also still work.) 4. Character encoding. Unicode is too messy as well as other problems. My proposal is you can specify what code page to use, including an extended TRON code (including ISO-IR-169, Cangjie, and others). A few control codes might be used, e.g. line break, furigana, and text direction; for simplicity you might not need much more than that I suppose. 5. Lost messages. Blockchaining (i.e. each message contains the hash of the previous message) might help a bit, but still sometimes you will have lost one, or an entire account is lost without anyone else referencing them. Making this mandatory comes with many problems, but being optional also has different problems, so it is unclear. 6. Some other stuff, too (I do not remember all of them at this time). I had tried to design a better one, but I did not know what to call it so I just reversed "nostr" to make "rtson", but that doesn't seems like very good either. (Although, maybe is not needed; NNTP is good enough anyways.)

jimmydoreornot 3y ago
1. I concur. But it's no big deal. 2. Nothing prevents this, but it would be specified as a sister protocol. I haven't seen it specified, but I know that relays are doing it. 3. Websockets allows pub-sub. Clients stay connected to relays and instantly get the next message when it arrives. Polling means either lots of polling or having delays. 4. I can't even comment on this one. 5. Optional chaining is possible and has been proposed. I also started a nostr-like protocol back in November 2022 based on my gripes with it. Then I came to my senses... nobody is going to use my variant. Perfection is the enemy of the good.

imhoguy 3y ago

Interesting technical solution. However looking at the stats it seems it lost the momentum: https://stats.nostr.band/ https://stats.nostr.band/ What happened?

tortoise_in 3y ago

Why not try xmpp?

cropcirclbureau 3y ago

Nostr's very cool tech and I'm excited to see where it ends up. But I'm not sure it'll make for good social networks/apps that I'll care about. ActivityPub and Matrix get flak on the account portability issue and it's a valid one but it (and their design in general) provide a pressure on their communities to be very "cozy-web"[0] despite the few leviathan instances. Nostr's more than flexible (almost under-specified) that you can build your cozy spaces on top of it but I'm convinced its design allows it to be a real decentralized contender for the big social and I fear that's where its custodians are headed. It won't be long before we see Nostr service providers that replace all the core functionalities of Twitter like a good algorithm and moderation[1]. Personally, I don't want Twitter with pki. I don't want Twitter at all. I really hope Nostr keeps it cozy but hey, at least you'll get to personally choose your algorithm. [0]: https://maggieappleton.com/cozy-web https://maggieappleton.com/cozy-web [1]: https://primal.net https://primal.net has a great start

Arathorn 3y ago
fwiw we’re plugging away at acct portability in Matrix via MSC4014, which is even implemented in the Dendrite server impl now…

dang 3y ago

Related. Others? New content moderation system for Nostr - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37343373 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37343373 - Aug 2023 (2 comments) Social Media is broken. Can we fix it [with nostr]? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36698217 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36698217 - July 2023 (1 comment) How to verify your domain on Nostr and Bluesky (for micro.blog users) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36646598 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36646598 - July 2023 (40 comments) Show HN: Zapddit – a Reddit-style open-source client for nostr - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36326468 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36326468 - June 2023 (1 comment) Show HN: Agora – Follow your favorite topics across Nostr, Bluesky, and Mastodon - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36210443 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36210443 - June 2023 (3 comments) Nostr – Decentralized social network - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35773168 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35773168 - May 2023 (164 comments) Nostr (“Notes and Other Stuff Transmitted by Relays”) – An Introduction - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35690659 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35690659 - April 2023 (141 comments) Decentralized Twitter Alternatives Bluesky and Nostr Experience Growing Pains - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35673764 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35673764 - April 2023 (5 comments) Jack Dorsey has set a 10 btc bounty for Nostr based alternative to GitHub - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35020964 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35020964 - March 2023 (127 comments) Mostr: A Fediverse Nostr Bridge - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34999118 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34999118 - March 2023 (3 comments) A decentralized social network with a chance of working - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34937223 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34937223 - Feb 2023 (9 comments) Nostr, Love at First Sight - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34901659 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34901659 - Feb 2023 (1 comment) Blogstack.io: blogging on nostr with lightning tips - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34850871 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34850871 - Feb 2023 (1 comment) Set up a Nostr Relay server in under 5 minutes - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34697020 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34697020 - Feb 2023 (1 comment) Nostr.how – A Complete Guide to Nostr - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34656925 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34656925 - Feb 2023 (135 comments) What do y’all think about Nostr? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34535910 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34535910 - Jan 2023 (2 comments) Nostr: Notes and Other Stuff Transmitted by Relays - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34526562 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34526562 - Jan 2023 (154 comments) Snowden on the Lightning Network on Nostr - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34507443 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34507443 - Jan 2023 (91 comments) Edward Snowden Joins Nostr - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34503748 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34503748 - Jan 2023 (21 comments) Move over Mastodon, here comes Nostr (and to set up your NIP-05 id) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34442708 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34442708 - Jan 2023 (1 comment) A Map of Nostr Relays - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34408692 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34408692 - Jan 2023 (2 comments) Awesome Nostr - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34406773 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34406773 - Jan 2023 (2 comments) Nostr Is the Decentralized Protocol That Might Replace Twitter - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34174724 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34174724 - Dec 2022 (5 comments) Coracle – a web client for the Nostr protocol - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34144111 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34144111 - Dec 2022 (2 comments) How to Start Using Nostr? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34090375 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34090375 - Dec 2022 (1 comment) Check Out the Nostr Protocol - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34068676 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34068676 - Dec 2022 (2 comments) Jack Dorsey donates to develop decentralized social network protocol [pdf] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34002218 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34002218 - Dec 2022 (9 comments) Nostr is a stupid simple P2P protocol that works, built by builders - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33746360 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33746360 - Nov 2022 (128 comments) Nostr Protocol - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31717981 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31717981 - June 2022 (9 comments) Jester: Chess over Nostr - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31580536 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31580536 - June 2022 (1 comment) Fiatjaf/nostr – a censorship-resistant alternative to Twitter - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29749061 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29749061 - Dec 2021 (138 comments) Nostr – The final solution to Twitter censorship as an open protocol, not P2P - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25104364 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25104364 - Nov 2020 (6 comments)

kyle-rb 3y ago

I liked the punchline at the end. > Edit: Please note that I changed my Nostr public key identity. My last private key was compromised, likely from using it to log into a web client last month.

futuretaint 3y ago
nostr being an offshoot of crypto/bitcoin tech influences the protocol in important ways, like everything crypto/bitcoin you need to read documentation to understand the terminology being used and you need to 'invest' in the culture, which is bitcoin evangelist culture w/ all the baggage.
- segfaltnh 3y ago
  Which essentially limits adoption to less than 1% of humans, a problem centralized social networks don't have to contend with.
  - libertygirl 3y ago
    This is a feature and not a flaw. More does not equal better.
    - kyle-rb 3y ago
      Sure, but then it's not really something to be "betting big" on like the author says he is.

wuming2 3y ago

USENET with fancy interface?

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

vehementi 3y ago

When someone leads with a silly misleading percentage (they increased 30000%!!!!!) it automatically discredits their site

vaylian 3y ago
XKCD 1102
spopejoy 3y ago
It's a crypto VC pump piece, overstated numbers come with the territory.

causality0 3y ago

People are increasingly aware of the value of free speech and dangers of letting any centralized platform decide what is and is not acceptable to say I wish, but I think this is completely wrong. Support for freedom of speech is at an all-time low and continues to drop. Frankly if it didn't already exist I don't think you could even get the postal service off the ground these days, with its completely uncensored communication.

wmf 3y ago
He's clearly talking about... certain people.

charles_f 3y ago

I like the concept of Nostr. The technology is not too bad (there's that small issue that you can't change your key so if it ever gets exposed you're done). In practice though, the only two topics covered on Nostr are a) nostr, b) bitcoin and how stupid non bitcoin believers are. Good demo that technology is only a portion of success.

maxawebster 3y ago

Hey everyone, author of the original essay here. Glad to see so much interest in Nostr! I originally published this article in Jan '23. Since then, we've seen a lot of development around both the protocol and applications (much of which has been well documented here by jb55 and others). Twitter-like clients such as Damus and Amethyst have gotten much better and new clients like primal (primal.net) have emerged with their own takes on features like caching and algorithms. Nostr Wallet Connect made it substantially easier to connect a Lightning wallet with a Nostr client for one tap zapping, radically simplifying the payment experience for end users. I'm personally most excited to see several early examples of applications that move beyond social media and show Nostr for what it is - a generalized data protocol. Almost any app would benefit from a persistent identity and portable data shared with other apps. Here are a few live examples: - Long tail of edge AI services - pablof7z and several others are piloting a new construct called "data vending machines (DVMs)" which allow users to publish job requests to the nostr network and other users (or bots) to compete to fulfill those requests. We're already seeing early markets for fine tuned open source models completing services like voice-to-text transcription or image generation. Even cooler, each of these DVMs is chainable, so the output of one DVM can be the input of another. See https://vendata.io https://vendata.io for example. This recent hackathon had a few cool dvm projects as well: https://bolt.fun/tournaments/ai4all/overview https://bolt.fun/tournaments/ai4all/overview - Music - Stemstr (stemstr.app) is a Nostr native app for creating and remixing music. Wavlake (wavlake.com) is a music streaming service with Lightning zaps, which recently integrated Nostr login. - Text annotation - https://highlighter.com https://highlighter.com allows users to collaboratively highlight text (think rapgenius on Nostr). You can even collaboratively highlight this very thread if you like! - Marketplaces - bids and asks are messages which can be published over Nostr, allowing multiple marketplace front ends to share a common order book or liquidity. We've already seen a few pocs for building Nostr based marketplaces such as: github.com/lnbits/nostrmarket github.com/supertestnet/superstore - Nostr browser - an early version of Spring, a nostr browser, recently launched to experiment with hosting various microapps in one interface: github.com/nostrband/nostr-universe/ This list is just the tip of the iceberg, but hopefully it gives a good overview of Nostr's potential. I've invested in a number of these projects already and remain committed to funding many more hackers exploring Nostr in the coming months!

lemper 3y ago

two things. first, the more you try to convince me about the best thing after sliced bread, the more I doubt it's even a bread. second, anything related to crypto currency should be held in doubt (in the highest order) until proven otherwise. even if I ignore two things above, I don't want to use any new comm. protocols. to me, what we have now is good enough™.

lenkite 3y ago

> I believe that open and permissionless systems inevitably win over closed competitors because open systems can marshal the collective resources of many more contributors than any individual business can employ. Yeah, this is why mobile computing is owned by Apple and Google.

brabel 3y ago

> I believe this idea could integrate with Block’s vision for Web 5, which to the best of my understanding, also anchors Decentralized Identifiers (DIDs) into the Bitcoin blockchain. There's a lot of effort going on in the EU to enable international, decentralized identity that can be recognized by every country. The first thing they decided was that DIDs on the blockchain are a terrible idea. GDPR demands that personal information must be protected, but having your DID in a blockchain forever, for all to see every transaction your DID ever performs, goes completely against that. It's one of those ideas that doesn't pass even 5 minutes of light consideration when you actually understand the implications. However, DIDs are not tied in any way to blockchains, so they're still a good idea, just the ideal implementation needs to be found yet.

red_admiral 3y ago
Excellent point. There may be use cases where a DID tied to a verifiable history is a feature (particularly for organisations as opposed to individuals), but for most people having it linked to a blockchain is definitely not the way forward. Also, blockchains and associated protocols can become defunct, or dwindle in usage until a 51% takeover of the remainder is feasible, or many other things. I imagine that in the end, a DID will be a private/public keypair wrapped in some hardware that the average person can use.
3np 3y ago
No. That's just strawmanning a terrible implementation. Here's another less terrible one: Public certificates of ID issuers are what's stored on-chain. Individual users have their (potentially locally generated) DIDs cross-signed by an issuer. The only data being stored on-chain is issuer certificates (and potentially further signatures and metadata around them) and this makes it possible to run the whole scheme in a more decentralized fashion.

red_admiral 3y ago

> Please note that I changed my Nostr public key identity. My last private key was compromised, likely from using it to log into a web client last month. This is still a very new technology ... That seems like an area that needs work before the other 90% of the world can use Nostr securely.

Alifatisk 3y ago

My experience with the Nostr atmosphere has been faaar worse than Mastodon. Data-loss and my timeline being flooded with spam from Crypto fans is prime examples.