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Nostr really feels to me like the blockchain: An incredible novel solution desperately in search of a problem to solve. The engineering behind this is neat, bu

by RIMR 3y ago

Nostr really feels to me like the blockchain: An incredible novel solution desperately in search of a problem to solve. The engineering behind this is neat, but I have no idea why this is useful.

pjfin123 3y ago
Nostr is the only payment network I've ever used that lets you send payments of less than $0.10.
- gkbrk 3y ago
  Nostr is not a payment network. You probably used Lightning instead.
  - RIMR 3y ago
    Bitcoiner "understand what you advocate for" challenge (impossible).
- RIMR 3y ago
  Nostr really feels to me like the blockchain: Nobody that advocates for it understands what it is or how it works.
  - evbogue 3y ago
    Bitcoin uses secp256k1, Nostr uses secp256k1. I was surprised as anyone to learn that when you exchange money using Nostr clients it is not directed at the private key that you use to sign Nostr messages.
    - RIMR 3y ago
      [flagged]
      - seanw444 3y ago
        Your condescending bone-to-pick attitude about people using cryptocurrency is kind of cringe.
    - crotchfire 3y ago
      I'm surprised by this too. Bitcoin was developed just barely before ed25519 was finalized, which is probably why it uses secp256k1. Unless intended mainly for government users (FIPS), almost every new cryptographic system uses ed25519 -- except Nostr. I always assumed Nostr chose secp256k1 so you could send bitcoin to another Nostr user without some extra "payment address request protocol" bolted on the side. Very surprising that this was not the motivation!
- sureglymop 3y ago
  Is it really a payment network though? All the payment stuff happens outside of nostr and with different protocols.
ecf 3y ago
Nostr is everything that fediverse social networks claim to be, but aren’t. I was shocked to find out that the Lemmy instance I signed up on was blocking dozens upon dozens of other instances, which defeats the entire purpose of a federated network.
- AlphaCerium 3y ago
  Then switch to a different one, the point of a federated network is that anyone is able to talk to anyone, not that they have to.
  - _dujt 3y ago
    You must realize that the moment you say “just switch to another” you’ve lost 99% of your potential user base. It took me signing up for Lemmy to realize why Lemmy is still a completely dead network.
    - noman-land 3y ago
      Decentralization/federation is not about "potential user base". It's about diffusion of control. People need to learn to fish because the SaaS model is a precarious foundation to build a culture on. We are having this conversation in a more mainstream way now because more people found out how precarious their online cultural foundations are. Your Facebooks and Reddits and Twitters will get ruined by changes of ownership or on the whim of billionaires. You data will be sold out from under you. You will be squeezed for every penny. The point is to either host your own instance, or use the instance of someone you trust and/or whose moderation policy you align with. It's not to amass a large user base and watch your charts go up.
      - account42 3y ago
        > The point is to either host your own instance, or use the instance of someone you trust and/or whose moderation policy you align with. This should be the goal but will never happen with an activity-pub-based fediverse. It just doesn't scale to everyone or even every small group having their own instances because. Current fediverse software is also too complicated and too resource hungry for even most technically inclined people to self host. You really need a better foundation that is designed for efficient communication between millions of hosts from the start.
poulpy123 3y ago
I tried nostr and I was impressed by how fast it is compared to the alternatives and by how seamless it is to connect to everyone. Unfortunately I'm not interested by the current content and I'm not sure a social media without censorship is viable on large scale
- solarkraft 3y ago
  > I'm not sure a social media without censorship is viable on large scale Right, it absolutely isn't. Some form of censorship is vital. This claim becomes more agreeable when substituting "censorship" with the almost-synonymous word "moderation".
  - rglullis 3y ago
    Nostr's idea of "moderation/censorship" is quite simple: you (or your relay admin) can drop whatever content you don't want to see or promote. It's no different than email servers, and (as a system) it works just fine even if you are surrounded by bad actors.
    - kmeisthax 3y ago
      Wait, this is just ActivityPub with extra steps. Why not just use Mastodon?
      - sharperguy 3y ago
        The main difference with Mastadon is tha with Mastadon you have a single node that you get your federated feed from, and that verifies your identity. Therefore if your node operator doesn't peer with some other node, you wouldn't automatically be able to communicate with users on that node. With nostr, your identity is just a pubkey, and you can publish to / read from several nodes simultaneously. So if some node refuses to puplish certain content, you can just get it from another node without having to create a whole new identity.
  - bshacklett 3y ago
Nzen 3y ago
I found Ryabitsev's 2019 meditation [0] about maybe using git with secure scuttlebutt interesting (though not terribly compelling). Ryabitsev's fantasy scenario involves a developer exchanging git patches for a particular project via phones, to a laptop. Because that person uses secure scuttlebutt, the bug tracking thread is part of the enabling software, rather than out of band. I am of the impression that Ryabitsev's history as mailing list manager and software patch attestation more likely informed this dalliance than typical web3 inroads. [0] https://people.kernel.org/monsieuricon/patches-carved-into-developer-sigchains https://people.kernel.org/monsieuricon/patches-carved-into-d...
- evbogue 3y ago
  The referenced article does not mention git-ssb, which was actually used for some time to develop the Patchbay and Decent clients for Secure Scuttlebutt! https://scuttlebot.io/apis/community/git-ssb.html https://scuttlebot.io/apis/community/git-ssb.html Git-ssb went far beyond just sending and receiving patches. You could actually clone, pull, and push a repo between your friends and your friends friends.
  - alchemist1e9 3y ago
    I remember discovering git-ssb and thinking wow this is it, this is how code can be uncensored and decentralized. Does this Nostr based approach solve the problem as well or should they be looking at git-ssb and extending it? It seems extremely likely governments and courts all across worlds will be increasingly threatened by code in the next decade, so pretty important that a censorship resistant infrastructure is built asap.
klabb3 3y ago
> Nostr really feels to me like the blockchain That’s not strange, given that it’s architecturally similar. However, blockchains are solving global consensus problems. Nostr doesn’t give a shit. To me, that’s good. One piece at a time. Also, what’s so important about consensus? It’s extremely slow and expensive and mostly matters for financial applications. The less financial speculation the better, imo. Time will tell I guess if the architecture holds, and also if there are interesting easy-to-use applications on top of it. But I like the simplicity of it a lot. Feels retro and refreshing at the same time.
- mitchus 3y ago
  In what ways is the architecture similar? As far as I can tell, the only similarity to Bitcoin is that it is a "permissionless" protocol. Any relay can participate in Nostr, just like any node can participate in Bitcoin.
  - klabb3 3y ago
    They’re both decentralized. Actors are identified by public keys. Messages are signed and processed by other nodes. The only high level differences are (1) Nostr does not have a persistence layer (much less one with global consensus) and (2) applications live “outside” the system whereas in the crypto world they’re either hard coded (say bitcoin) or through smart contracts that live “on-chain”, ie as part of the system. Maybe I’m missing something though. It’s just my observation.
    - mitchus 3y ago
      Good points, they are more similar than I had perceived. The fundamental objective in Bitcoin is the decentralized construction of an immutable ledger (through consensus attained by proof-of-work). It basically is a persistence layer. Whereas the fundamental objective in Nostr is to prevent central censoring of messages, so it's more akin to a communication protocol. However, censorship resistance is also a property of Bitcoin.
noman-land 3y ago
The problem all these technologies are trying to address is the centralization of control and authoritarianism. Free association is the cornerstone of a free society and our information technology foundation is not currently equipped to handle a totalitarian adversary. Speech should be unsuffocatable.
throwaway420690 3y ago
[dead]
jgilias 3y ago
Nostr can be thought of as an open, decentralized, censorship resistant messaging layer with a built-in micro payments system. Regarding why this might be useful. Remember when youtube-dl got taken down from GitHub? I think it’s now back after all the outcry. But the point stands, if you develop something that someone powerful might not like, a Nostr based git solution for that might make sense.
- throwaway290 3y ago
  Or, you know, just email the patches.
  - jgilias 3y ago
    That’s a fair point. In the current iteration there’s not much functional difference. The vision though would be to build something that feels a lot like one of the centralized git services, just built on top of Nostr. So, it’d be some kind of a frontend that you may be able to run yourself if it’s open source which you could point to a set of relays to get the ‘git notes’ from. Couple this with the integrated payments functionality, and I think it becomes an interesting proposition. If I recall correctly some time ago Jack Dorsey pledged some amount of BTC to make that a reality.

by RIMR 3y ago

Nostr really feels to me like the blockchain: An incredible novel solution desperately in search of a problem to solve. The engineering behind this is neat, but I have no idea why this is useful.

pjfin123 3y ago

Nostr is the only payment network I've ever used that lets you send payments of less than $0.10.

gkbrk 3y ago
Nostr is not a payment network. You probably used Lightning instead.
- RIMR 3y ago
  Bitcoiner "understand what you advocate for" challenge (impossible).
RIMR 3y ago
Nostr really feels to me like the blockchain: Nobody that advocates for it understands what it is or how it works.
- evbogue 3y ago
  Bitcoin uses secp256k1, Nostr uses secp256k1. I was surprised as anyone to learn that when you exchange money using Nostr clients it is not directed at the private key that you use to sign Nostr messages.
  - RIMR 3y ago
    [flagged]
    - seanw444 3y ago
      Your condescending bone-to-pick attitude about people using cryptocurrency is kind of cringe.
  - crotchfire 3y ago
    I'm surprised by this too. Bitcoin was developed just barely before ed25519 was finalized, which is probably why it uses secp256k1. Unless intended mainly for government users (FIPS), almost every new cryptographic system uses ed25519 -- except Nostr. I always assumed Nostr chose secp256k1 so you could send bitcoin to another Nostr user without some extra "payment address request protocol" bolted on the side. Very surprising that this was not the motivation!
sureglymop 3y ago
Is it really a payment network though? All the payment stuff happens outside of nostr and with different protocols.

ecf 3y ago

Nostr is everything that fediverse social networks claim to be, but aren’t. I was shocked to find out that the Lemmy instance I signed up on was blocking dozens upon dozens of other instances, which defeats the entire purpose of a federated network.

AlphaCerium 3y ago
Then switch to a different one, the point of a federated network is that anyone is able to talk to anyone, not that they have to.
- _dujt 3y ago
  You must realize that the moment you say “just switch to another” you’ve lost 99% of your potential user base. It took me signing up for Lemmy to realize why Lemmy is still a completely dead network.
  - noman-land 3y ago
    Decentralization/federation is not about "potential user base". It's about diffusion of control. People need to learn to fish because the SaaS model is a precarious foundation to build a culture on. We are having this conversation in a more mainstream way now because more people found out how precarious their online cultural foundations are. Your Facebooks and Reddits and Twitters will get ruined by changes of ownership or on the whim of billionaires. You data will be sold out from under you. You will be squeezed for every penny. The point is to either host your own instance, or use the instance of someone you trust and/or whose moderation policy you align with. It's not to amass a large user base and watch your charts go up.
    - account42 3y ago
      > The point is to either host your own instance, or use the instance of someone you trust and/or whose moderation policy you align with. This should be the goal but will never happen with an activity-pub-based fediverse. It just doesn't scale to everyone or even every small group having their own instances because. Current fediverse software is also too complicated and too resource hungry for even most technically inclined people to self host. You really need a better foundation that is designed for efficient communication between millions of hosts from the start.

poulpy123 3y ago

I tried nostr and I was impressed by how fast it is compared to the alternatives and by how seamless it is to connect to everyone. Unfortunately I'm not interested by the current content and I'm not sure a social media without censorship is viable on large scale

solarkraft 3y ago
> I'm not sure a social media without censorship is viable on large scale Right, it absolutely isn't. Some form of censorship is vital. This claim becomes more agreeable when substituting "censorship" with the almost-synonymous word "moderation".
- rglullis 3y ago
  Nostr's idea of "moderation/censorship" is quite simple: you (or your relay admin) can drop whatever content you don't want to see or promote. It's no different than email servers, and (as a system) it works just fine even if you are surrounded by bad actors.
  - kmeisthax 3y ago
    Wait, this is just ActivityPub with extra steps. Why not just use Mastodon?
    - sharperguy 3y ago
      The main difference with Mastadon is tha with Mastadon you have a single node that you get your federated feed from, and that verifies your identity. Therefore if your node operator doesn't peer with some other node, you wouldn't automatically be able to communicate with users on that node. With nostr, your identity is just a pubkey, and you can publish to / read from several nodes simultaneously. So if some node refuses to puplish certain content, you can just get it from another node without having to create a whole new identity.
- bshacklett 3y ago

Nzen 3y ago

I found Ryabitsev's 2019 meditation [0] about maybe using git with secure scuttlebutt interesting (though not terribly compelling). Ryabitsev's fantasy scenario involves a developer exchanging git patches for a particular project via phones, to a laptop. Because that person uses secure scuttlebutt, the bug tracking thread is part of the enabling software, rather than out of band. I am of the impression that Ryabitsev's history as mailing list manager and software patch attestation more likely informed this dalliance than typical web3 inroads. [0] https://people.kernel.org/monsieuricon/patches-carved-into-developer-sigchains https://people.kernel.org/monsieuricon/patches-carved-into-d...

evbogue 3y ago
The referenced article does not mention git-ssb, which was actually used for some time to develop the Patchbay and Decent clients for Secure Scuttlebutt! https://scuttlebot.io/apis/community/git-ssb.html https://scuttlebot.io/apis/community/git-ssb.html Git-ssb went far beyond just sending and receiving patches. You could actually clone, pull, and push a repo between your friends and your friends friends.
- alchemist1e9 3y ago
  I remember discovering git-ssb and thinking wow this is it, this is how code can be uncensored and decentralized. Does this Nostr based approach solve the problem as well or should they be looking at git-ssb and extending it? It seems extremely likely governments and courts all across worlds will be increasingly threatened by code in the next decade, so pretty important that a censorship resistant infrastructure is built asap.

klabb3 3y ago

> Nostr really feels to me like the blockchain That’s not strange, given that it’s architecturally similar. However, blockchains are solving global consensus problems. Nostr doesn’t give a shit. To me, that’s good. One piece at a time. Also, what’s so important about consensus? It’s extremely slow and expensive and mostly matters for financial applications. The less financial speculation the better, imo. Time will tell I guess if the architecture holds, and also if there are interesting easy-to-use applications on top of it. But I like the simplicity of it a lot. Feels retro and refreshing at the same time.

mitchus 3y ago
In what ways is the architecture similar? As far as I can tell, the only similarity to Bitcoin is that it is a "permissionless" protocol. Any relay can participate in Nostr, just like any node can participate in Bitcoin.
- klabb3 3y ago
  They’re both decentralized. Actors are identified by public keys. Messages are signed and processed by other nodes. The only high level differences are (1) Nostr does not have a persistence layer (much less one with global consensus) and (2) applications live “outside” the system whereas in the crypto world they’re either hard coded (say bitcoin) or through smart contracts that live “on-chain”, ie as part of the system. Maybe I’m missing something though. It’s just my observation.
  - mitchus 3y ago
    Good points, they are more similar than I had perceived. The fundamental objective in Bitcoin is the decentralized construction of an immutable ledger (through consensus attained by proof-of-work). It basically is a persistence layer. Whereas the fundamental objective in Nostr is to prevent central censoring of messages, so it's more akin to a communication protocol. However, censorship resistance is also a property of Bitcoin.

noman-land 3y ago

The problem all these technologies are trying to address is the centralization of control and authoritarianism. Free association is the cornerstone of a free society and our information technology foundation is not currently equipped to handle a totalitarian adversary. Speech should be unsuffocatable.

throwaway420690 3y ago

[dead]

jgilias 3y ago

Nostr can be thought of as an open, decentralized, censorship resistant messaging layer with a built-in micro payments system. Regarding why this might be useful. Remember when youtube-dl got taken down from GitHub? I think it’s now back after all the outcry. But the point stands, if you develop something that someone powerful might not like, a Nostr based git solution for that might make sense.

throwaway290 3y ago
Or, you know, just email the patches.
- jgilias 3y ago
  That’s a fair point. In the current iteration there’s not much functional difference. The vision though would be to build something that feels a lot like one of the centralized git services, just built on top of Nostr. So, it’d be some kind of a frontend that you may be able to run yourself if it’s open source which you could point to a set of relays to get the ‘git notes’ from. Couple this with the integrated payments functionality, and I think it becomes an interesting proposition. If I recall correctly some time ago Jack Dorsey pledged some amount of BTC to make that a reality.