Oddbean new post about login | logout Almost everyone working on the #Nostr protocol has direct financial ties to the #OpenSats corporation; many now receiving full salaries in perpetuity. Good for them. Bad for the protocol.
Most of the devs who aren't employed by them have applied to be employed, have previously been employed, or are preparing to apply.
The reason I am saying this is because I'm "none of the above". That gives me more intellectual freedom. Q.E.D.
Think about it. This is fucking obvious and it's staring us all in face. OpenSats openly brags about it and publishes notes equating themselves with Nostr. Why is it not a bigger topic? https://i.nostr.build/dfTUGFLFKZ2XkqNJ.jpg
Are you saying it smells like control of sorts?
We'll eventually stop being as innovative and become just another foundation-controlled project.
Are you sure it will go that way? Also aren't the principle ideas already bulletproof like it is the case with bitcoin? I'm talking about decentralized and censorship structure.
Bitcoin is protected by the nodes running Core. What if everyone running a node worked for the same employer? Would it still be bulletproof?
It's more a question about devs working on Bitcoin Core but at this point nodes are so decentralized that they will refuse to run software that is dangerous to the network. Hard Fork is always an option. I know it's not quite the same with Nostr though.
Nostr doesn't have a Core because it's an open protocol and not a blockchain. Bitcoin is a closed protocol and a blockchain. And there's no such thing as a hard fork on an open protocol because there is no Core to fork off of. It is an organic system held together through the value added by interoperability.
It's turning into an employment pipeline. You come here, vomit up some code and self-market to get attention, apply for a grant, get your grant, done. When the grant runs out, you threaten to stop working, grant is resumed or you abandon the repo and walk away. This is not a system that will attract the sort of people who are willing to take risks, going forward. It wasn't a problem, before, because the grants were going to people who were building before the grants arrived. But now grants are priced in to the decision to start building.
We almost decided _against_ starting our project because of the grants. The ubiquitous nature of the grants leaves the impression that working on Nostr is futile, unless you receive a grant. Users are also reluctant to pay full price for anything because they expect you to be paid by OpenSats, so that you either offer everying "free" or at heavily-subsidized prices.
This centralizes decision making about the protocol, indirectly. If there are two dev teams, and one is independently financed, whilst the other receives grants, the grant app can undercut in price until the other one goes broke and gives up. Since implementations determine the protocol, they either have to finance every app, or they skew the protocol, involuntarily. Both of these situations distort the market and would be difficult to unwind because they cement expectations among the users.
Not so bright of a future emerges from the way it seems to work now. How you see it work out in the future?
Well, they're actually sort of trapped, now, as they're sitting on a gigantic money bag and they are legally obligated to spend it, according to the principles defined by their nonprofit. What they could do, is disintermediate the spending of the money, more, so that users have more direct say in where the funding goes and devs don't have to become de defacto employees, in order to receive foundation monies. #Geyserfund does this with contribution amplification, where individuals are encouraged to contribute and they top-up the most popular projects. We had the idea of arranging a Geyserfund #zapathon, with OpenSats contributing x-amount to the amplification effort, but the idea seems to have gone nowhere. One of the things you can see on the Geyserfund page for Nostr projects is the higher heterogenity of the projects. The users don't only want funding going to devs. They find a lot of value in stuff like marketing, merchandise, documentation, meetups, etc. Nostr is a whole ecosystem, not merely a software project. https://geyser.fund/?tagIds=2
kind of depends on what the funders want, but it can also go too far; for example Mozilla is often criticized for doing too many things outside browser development, while a lot of people just want to fund say, a faster or less memory-hogging browser... but sure, nostr still is in a much earlier phase where it's important to figure out what to even want
Yes, but Mozilla, like Signal or Wikipeedia, etc. is a software development project, not a protocol development project. If you donate to Mozilla, you expect to see software features coming out the other end. Nostriches, who are users, feel like part of the protocol. That's why the merchandise, meetup projects, marketing, is coming primarily from users, not from some foundation. That's the main strength of Nostr, after all: it's not a software project, it's a communications protocol project, so everyone who uses it to communicate, is part of the project.
Nostrocket by @gsovereignty also kind of solves this
I’m making contributions without any financial benefits and I am sure there are many people like me out there. Sticking labels to groups of people based on few examples we find wrong is not the way
There are lots of people who contribute to GitHub, Wikipeedia, Signal, Mozilla, Bitcoin Core, Linux distros, etc. who are not on salary and who expect no direct financial benefit. That is inherent to such projects. Changes nothing about my argument, to point out that we also have people like that.
Sure, and there is nothing wrong in expecting benefits for the time and energy people invest into open source projects.
Self-employed here and no full salary 👀 I need the friction of bootstrapping to maintain creativity and avoid the situation where I can say too much yes.
There are a number of grantees using temporary grants to launch their own businesses. Which is, ideally, what it should be used for. @GitCitadel is paying everything out of pocket and that can be painful, especially if you are not part of a larger team that can share costs. But the problem now arises through the sheer number of grants creating expectations that everyone has one, although not everyone does. It's destroying appreciation for the value of labor, which will make it increasingly difficult for grantees to wean themselves off the money, as potential customers will be upset that their free stuff is no longer free.
I agree with you on that one. On the other hand, this is the free market we desire and there are plenty of opportunities to build profitible businesses out there. Most of them will fail, some of them will succeed and will be copycated.
Well, it's definitely the free-market signaling that a truly open protocol can't work because you can just buy up all of the developers working on it, while it's still in early stages. We might be too early with this attempt because there's still so much cheap investment money floating around the market, destroying price signals everywhere.
Free market is not good i tell you... 🤷
It'll just be another openly-published protocol, rather than an openly-developed one. Most of the users don't even realize that was the goal, so they probably wouldn't notice or care. They'd just eventually feel like innovation was slowing down and not know why, and then they have to wait for the next open protocol attempt and move on to that.
It's just those who are actively developping will regroup around each other some way or another, as long as there's competition, it should pose no issue. We must provide this competition.
A new concept for me, thanks. Openly published protocol vs. Openly developed protocol I assume there’s significant overlap but the current trajectory gives valid cause for concern.
An openly-published protocol is one where the protocol is placed on the Internet, but there's a group that decides what will be in it. An open-developed protocol is very similar, but anyone can simply implement a variant of something already included, and thereby expand or alter the existing state of the protocol. Every implementation that changes some existing protocol definition, is automatically a soft-fork. If at least two matching soft-forks exist, it is automatically a new branch of the protocol, because those two forks/implementations can communicate with each other and this is a communication protocol. Communication between two members of the protocol over a new path or method = expansion of the protocol. That is why you cannot stop someone from creating a Nostr software project that does something novel. That is why this place is crawling with devs. That's what makes Nostr special and inspiring: no centralized control.
I can't think of any previous openly-developed protocols. That makes Nostr unique.
I’m now following @GitCitadel even though this dev stuff gives my brain the ouchies.
Philanthropy is a time tested bootstrapping activity. Nostr will wean itself off as time goes by imho.
There are better and worse ways to do philanthropy.
For the record, I am not, not have I ever been, fundamentally against: 1) philanthropy funding FOSS, 2) any external sources of income for individual projects, 3) OpenSats in general or any members of OpenSats in particular, 4) any developer accepting a grant from OpenSats. My argument is much more nuanced than that because I want to improve the market dynamic, not just piss people off and make a nuisance of myself. People that can't handle that, have already muted me, and they can go cry harder. 🤙🏻
Either you have opensats or another cabal. Thats how it works.
My cabal is better 😁
The way to get rid of a centralized force is by making it obsolete nevent1qvzqqqqqqypzp25s9sryjmw4rc39y8kh025l3v0de24n9x6rnxgwx62pra45jrn3qyt8wumn8ghj7ur4wfcxcetjv4kxz7fwvdhk6tcppemhxue69uhkummn9ekx7mp0qqsx8un20h6wzcj5zuxj37lcpd9zkxyjp3jsjqx24ex34249pfh064qqk9092
Yeah, we're working on that. No worries.
We should collaborate with each other in this race to the (almost) zero marginal cost of clients and try to avoid being lured by grants. It could sound ridiculous, but the resources are there for doing it sustainably. It doesn't mean I can't understand the desperation of some devs that NEED money to deal with their personal problems
Please DM our PO @Michael J . 😊
Interesting view 🙏😎 So you say that every dev on nostr being supported by opensats will just try to get something out, whatever it is , because there’s money to win? Greed wins again, damned ! Also , how the opensats inc can influence the nostr dev ? By choosing certain projects more than others ? 👀 I don’t know if the grants selection is internal, democratic ?
This is why I will not be doing asciidoc articles, though I'm thankful that my voice is being heard by devs
reading about quadratic voting concept adapted by gitcoin, seems interesting: https://www.matthewthom.as/blog/fund-open-source/
here’s a source paper from vitalik buterin: http://arxiv.org/pdf/1809.06421
I'm not even sure where bounties are posted, now. We were originally enthusiastic about working toward one, but we had a bad experience and were like, nevermind then. No idea if the bounty even exists or who else is working on it. Ephemeral bounties. Some of the bounties are really big and you could be working on it, as a team, for months or a year, just to find out that someone had already collected it for a half-assed solution, two weeks before you deliver. Ain't nobody going to invest $50k worth of man hours and infrastructure for nothing. Especially if you know that OpenSats has probably paid someone else to chase the same bounty. LOL
