The other way round: it allows you to access services like a Cashu mint via nostr, without having to connect to the service directly via TCP/IP.
We're going to use this to make Cashu mints available to wallets directly on nostr so operators don't need to doxx their IP or get DNS.
We've looked into numerous alternatives, none of them are as simple as Nostr (e.g. work from within the browser). However, Tor provides much better privacy. This is not a privacy tool.
Why can't cashu mint be accessed w/o dns or IP using NWC/NC-like RPC? Why use generic traffic tunneling for this?
The simplest example is a server that can't expose ports due to firewall or NAT rules. Another case is a mint that doesn't have a static IP address (can use an npub instead).
Am I getting your question right?
NWC wallets don't have static IPs and are behind firewalls too. Clients send ephemeral events as requests to wallet pubkey on some relay, wallet subscribes to requests and replies in a similar way tagging the client pubkey.
Same way wallet could talk to a mint doing RPC using ephemeral events.
NWS is doing similar thing but with a much more complex setup - enter/exit nodes socks5 etc, and the payload is arbitrary binary data, wheres mint RPC would be much simpler and more structured - wallet just connects to a relay and writes/reads some encrypted events.
Yeah we're not inventing a protocol, just changing the transport layer. Http/s still works like it did before, often no changes necessary to the client and server software.
So to use a mint which is behind NWS from my browser I would have to set socks5 entry node as proxy?
You can use a public socks5 entry node since the traffic will be encrypted via https
Or: you can send the requests directly from JS running in your browser through nostr, skipping the entry node.
So is there a NIP or something for sending requests directly through nostr to a mint?
Ok I got it, I guess I could form the http request as nws events in js to simulate the behavior of entry point. Thanks, sounds interesting!
I wonder if I could bypass cors this way to show link previews more reliably...
This is gonna get out of hand 😂
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