Oddbean

Being there from the start, I can say it wasn't fiatjaf; he was involved with Ethereum, Ripple, Stellar, and more recently Bitcoin. You might remember the drivechain debacle—he pushed for a controversial soft fork of Bitcoin, causing some challenges, including for Nostr. While fiatjaf has made notable contributions, some of his ideas may have been polarizing. The key to our success was an exceptionally talented and hardworking team that carried the project for two years, tirelessly working behind the scenes. The real game-changer was Jack, whose intuition and leap of faith elevated the project. Initially, we had under 100 users until Jack came along. Also I think damus played a critical role in that, too. Bitcoin adjacency is Nostr's killer feature, sharing an identity system with Taproot. Bitcoin is a trillion-dollar ecosystem, and Nostr adds serious value to it. Without this synergy, the project might have turned out very differently, possibly even died, like many open-source projects.

Thanks for contributing this history. I didn’t realize fiatjaf was so liberal with his cryptocurrency endeavors :) I agree Jack brought a lot of social consensus to galvanize early visibility (and contributed a lot of funding over time)! I’ve heard the Taproot/identity point mentioned before, but I don’t know much about the relationship. Can you tell more about this? Are npubs/nsec specs inherited from something in Taproot?

Yes, they are exactly the same idenity except nostr starts "npub" and taproot starts "bc". Both use schnorr sigs. So that means that all nostr accounts are all wallets, and all taproot accounts can participate in nostr social and apps. Nostr has a distributed ledger with best in class consensus via taproot. Any nostr user can send money to any other nostr user, they just dont do it, or are not aware. On top of that all of the layer 2 solutions that emerge on bitcoin, rgb, taproot assets, runes, omni, colored coins, liquid, smart contracts, can be used with nostr, and vice versa. Again this is not used at the moment, but it unlocks a huge amount of functionality. Whether or not the current community wants that functionality, I dont know. But there is enormous untapped potential.

Most nostr keys are wildly insecure. I'd hate for someone to use my nostr key as my wallet and send me money, because it would possibly be easily stolen by some third party. To make use of any of that, people should signal somehow that their keys are secure enough for those purposes.

Neat. I understand ordinals is a word that's touchy with people around here. Still, innovation and creating and building! My thought is that stupid jpg mints will play themselves out, or not, whatever the market/people decide. Also, I think it's less about jpg nfts and more about the other stuff that might could be built some day. Any link to the project?

the website is https://deezy.place it’s also a decentralized marketplace that uses nostr to publish listings. but warning we aren’t doing much more development on it these days and prob will shut it down

Concrete example: Your npub: npub1kuy0wwf0tzzqvgfv8zpw0vaupkds3430jhapwrgfjyn7ecnhpe0qj9kdj8 Your testnet address: tb1pkuy0wwf0tzzqvgfv8zpw0vaupkds3430jhapwrgfjyn7ecnhpe0qxdufq2 Notice they are almost identical characters. So I just sent you 1 million testnet sats here: https://mempool.space/testnet4/tx/e0ac22a16f10e975a04736161c31eb6ad62c06a529b73875da009174a3e0e7e0 I just used a directive in my subkey (see below) to send you the sats. So much is possible! https://primal.net/e/note1mhug930fz8nktztrcurxh2k3vl88x7fl0k05rtmjqxy7cs0vjscqplgruf

How do you imagine this might be productized/useful to more people? I was not aware of this relationship and it seems like an important primitive, but it’s not immediately obvious to me what could be built. Do you already have ideas?

Ok finally found it and it doesn't seem as simple as was explained. They are the same standard, but it isn't hashed to the same size, which just looking at it should've triggered to me that it was longer than a normal address just by character count. However it does seem to be the case that you can generate taproot addresses from the nsec and/or use your bitcoin wallet to also generate a Nostr ID with relative ease. But the degree of connection i posted above doesn't seem to check out in practice. Post that was suggesting the beginning could just be swapped, when it seems like it needs to be hashed differently, but the rest of the description of it seems to be correct: nostr:note1jefn0r50q3rzkqgpd8jxph2lpc5c23mthyv2njdn57lg9j4qlkksz7hmqz A post discussing the differences and how to generate addresses or npubs from each other: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5473719.0

Yeah. If that were as clean cut as initially thought. That would be incredible! Even the ability to take an existing wallet and somehow convert that to an npub would be incredible so that organizations and institutions that had a wallet could have a public identity and you could verify the wallet with the identity or vice versa.