Oddbean

Is Nostr dependent on bitcoin? nope. it's a totally independent idea to support free speech. though it does tickle some similar instincts in people If you drop by Nostr even casually, it can often feel like you’re crashing a bitcoiner dinner party. The memes, the FOSS devs, the topics of conversation often seem to overlap with bitcoin culture. Is this just a case of “birds-of-a-feather” or is there more to it? Nostr is an open protocol. It’s independent of the use or existence of any cryptocurrency. It uses cryptography, but nothing super fancy there. It’s actually kinda basic, tbh. So why did so many bitcoiners show up? A simple explanation might be that fiatjaf, the creator of Nostr, was a bitcoiner and brought like-minded people along. But I think there’s more to it than just the initial seed. The critical feature which Nostr gets right is that you can create an account just by doing math on your own. Of course, you can use a little program on your own computer to help do this math (i.e., creating public-private key pairs). This is cryptography at its best — a tool that empowers the individual. You don’t have to go to a 3rd-party-issuer to create an account for you. You don’t have to subscribe to a particular cryptocurrency or political ideology. You could identify as a libertarian, anarchist, democrat, republican, labor party, or you may not accept any political labels at all. On Nostr, you’re welcome to even dislike the concept of bitcoin/cryptocurrencies altogether. As long as you have a curiosity about, or interest in freedom of speech you may find Nostr to be a good place for you to share your thoughts. On Nostr, your ideas and your words are published without being subject to anyone’s permission. The separation of power between clients and data stores is what enforces your rights. It’s baked into the architecture. Not promised and granted to you by a demagogue. That’s the whole idea. https://image.nostr.build/5d23e5dcec75918ff08a8a382bb380c580c65b7511fc3df35e7f404b4f6b716e.jpg

Obligatory contrarian Lightning Maxi take coming in hot... Nostr's roots are as an iteration on how GUN was used in ShockWallet and Lightning Pages, as a means to have a web-friendly overlay network to connect Lightning to WebApps This continues to the primary usecase for Nostr today even as a leaner and more flexible successor to GUN. Users are funneled through the Lightning ecosystem for connecting LN to WebApps: Zap Signaling, NWC, kind 21000, accessing sat monetized services, and and more, is why any users are here to begin with. Heck, even these notes are about Lightning. Without the network effect of Lightning as a native payments layer, Nostr its just another combination of websockets and json. Anything that it's capable of is only in context of it making better Lightning Apps, because key-based identities, webservers, and json aren't otherwise novel.

Not very familiar with SSB but im assuming it doesn't use web relays, that's the key feature inherited from our use of GUN Enabling apps that work in any browser and solve the networking issue is and ultimately what enables distribution where lightning can't reach.. keys and data only matter where they can be delivered to

I appreciate the contrarian take. I don’t have as much background on the full history of nostr — so thanks for contributing that. I wrote what I did because some people look at nostr as tribalist around bitcoiners and I just wanted to say that the beauty to me is that it’s a different layer of technology that’s not closely coupled to a cryptocurrency belief — at least not today. However, I don’t think the incentives of nostr will work long term without internet native money. At some point relays need to get compensated for the resources they contribute. Bitcoin is the only reasonable way to do this, imo. I also don’t think advertising-based business models will work given the protocol structure, so again, we need bitcoin to help mediate the value exchange among people who create/consume on the protocol.

Yep the death of advertising is my thesis in lightning.video, the incentives of users paying for hosting are a micro level are much better.. nostr as the overlay for that transaction metadata is going to reshape the Internet

yup, we’ve all gotta be the customers! Have you explored recommendations in the video context? seems like a needlessly polarizing topic. I suspect it’ll be important to have something like that before video will become a mainstream usecase on nostr.

Kinda, I think the first page you see (discover) when you land there was a waste of time for us... we did it because it's what people expected to see when visiting a video site not because it adds any real value. The overwhelming majority of our traffic is direct links to content or channel pages. I plan on replacing it with a landing page that better explains the value prop of the site. My long range thoughts on the direction of discovery is that ultimately everyone is a curator, who you follow should ultimately dictates what you discover, and that apps will support bring your own algorithms that recommend stuff from your extended social graph. This won't be possible in a performant/scalable way with existing nostr clients that directly talk to the relays unfortunately. I'm hoping we'll get time to work on a indexer with reproducible results that would enable it... Once we do we'll inject it into LVa and finally get that fully Nostrfied

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?

i m on #nostr for the same reasons i jumped into bitcoin. #freedom #equality that “new” magic internet money and this awesome protocol with their enormous potentials will free billions! props to all builders doing god work for humanity🙏 #gratitude #appreciation i ll do my little part and keep on educating about it. #onwards bitcoin & nostr = fReeDoM #satoshi 🙏

since - being an open source project - we lack a marketing team, is anyone thinking about how to grow the user base and engagement metrics? or are we relying on a 'build it and they will come' mindset?

I'm not sure that was ever true. The #Dogons built a civilisation in West African 5000 yrs ago, but no one ever found it because no one could travel that far in those days. The #truth is signposts and #maps are more important than #cities.