Oddbean

Nearly a decade and a half ago, in my early twenties, I was an administrator for a small/medium online forum. This was before social media was super popular. At first I just posted on the forum, and then the admins asked me to be a mod. And then as some admins left, they asked me to be one of the admins. So I did. I did this for like five years, for free. I was working full time, going to grad school part time, running a dividend blog part time, and yet for some reason was also volunteering a lot of time to help run this forum. Because I liked it. After years eventually I left, and someone else stepped in to take my place. All the admins were just volunteering. Anyway, that’s who runs the relays. The psychopaths.

You are endowed with a brilliant mind and foresight. I remember years ago you posted something along the lines of "you are not a Bitcoiner until you run a node and have a miner." I might be paraphrasing, but guess who is doing both now because of your brilliance. I was not entirely new to Bitcoin, but I was failing to understand what really sustains the network - same here. I appreciate your insightful book as well. Thank you.

Probably even true for the cashu mints nostr:nevent1qqsvsnd5hf02fqcyk3lrz2x2km6p23mrwfmcarhhmdnh5v6r3skjpvgpz4mhxue69uhhyetvv9ujuerpd46hxtnfduhsyg82krn4d5etsz7dge8nmpztspqrqvr45yl2hs6enfmzexk84wglfupsgqqqqqqs2grfwz

What?? You didn't do it for influence, follows or subscribers? This old school early days internet stuff sounds horrible 😂😂 I used to mod also in a forum and there is a nice feeling knowing that your part of a self organisjng system that puts the community before the individual. Aligned individuals brought together when the world still felt big and people had time/economic means to be generous!

I do not agree. Dismissing this problem as one that will fix itself is kinda naive to me. Bitcoin nodes basically only do one thing: validate blocks. That's why anybody can run them. That's why the decentralization works. They require low processing power, low space. People don't need an incentive to run them (hell I ran one on a 13 year old PC with a Pentium and some additional HDD slapped on) Nostr relays don't have a set limit to their applications (literally "AND OTHER STUFF"). Basically, they could be doing anything at one point. Especially with the pace at which things are developing. Right now people run relays because they like to and they might even be relatively cheap (I don't know), but at some point it might become so burdensome that they would need a revenue model. And few people will use paid relays. You could end up with a situation like Tor, where 2/3 of the network is in the hands of three letter agencies that don't mind doing all kinds of nasty shit. Anyway, just my opinion. I hope I am proven wrong.

I appreciate your perspective. And Tor is indeed the adjacent network that I think about critically and economically here as a first glance when I put my critical hat on for Nostr. Which is why, in multiple of my recent posts, I purposely brought to attention critical Nostr relay economics from Peter Todd and then quote-posted Odell about how questioning the economics is rational behavior. I do think that Nostr has stronger ethical incentive mechanisms than Tor, as a starting point. Open socials and open data combined, is a stronger selling point than open data alone. I think the ecosystem needs to improve key management and some details, but assuming we hit product market fit and decent UX for big scaling, I think there's a lot of broad support here. Or if we fail, from whatever emerges better from our ashes could do decently. Imo, unlike Tor, the biggest relays will be run by businesses as a loss-leader for their other business activities. In other words, data availability is a cost of doing business. It's more economic, given the broader audience. Power-users of a given social app would indeed pay $10/month or $100/month or in some cases way more as a sizable business. Advertisements aside, they do so in order to reach an audience with minimal frictions of impersonators or data availability. This covers many free users. I admittedly partly kept my post incomplete for a humor punchline, and commented elsewhere on my full thoughts. I don't just think "psychopath hobbyists" will run the relays. They are the relay runners of last resort. To the extent that Nostr grows users in any significant way (still a big "if"), I think businesses in multiple jurisdictions will run the big relays, and then there will be many smaller hobbyist ones to fill the gaps, as far as I can see currently based on how early this tech is. If Nostr has trouble with relay economics and there is no better option on the market, I'd be willing to donate five figures per year in support assuming my own income-generating businesses are running well enough. And there are others that might be willing to 10x or 100x that kind of number. That number only increases as freedom is impaired by more jurisdictions. When I was in my early twenties, not rich, overworked, and put like a thousand hours of voluntary work into that forum in my post that you referenced, I was earning like $40-$50/hr. That was like $40-$50k cumulative labor hours that I provided for free to a forum I liked in my early twenties. Like a psychopath. I earn multiples of that now, and am still a psychopath. Any ecosystem that gets a few whales on its team, and a few people that are willing to work for free part-time or work for scraps part-time, can keep a network running. And as a partner in a venture capital firm that puts seven or eight figures into a company depending on its stage, including various freedom-tech if it's economical, I'd say we're indeed looking at Nostr for any economic angle should it materialize to our criteria, and all of us as partners support it conceptually. Bitcoin itself is a combo of 1) voluntary donations to Core devs and its associations and 2) companies building on Bitcoin for expectations of economic gain. I expect Nostr to be similar. It relies on economics for big scaling, but donations for the cypherpunk margins, for which there are legion. And these things tend to be responsive to input. If a network is running fine and everyone is engaging happily and without big pushback, people contribute less. If the network starts to be impaired by internal or external forces and there is no better solution available, people wake up and contribute more, and influencers wake up and convince people to contribute more.

Small edit: "And as a partner in a venture capital firm that puts seven or eight figures into a company depending on its stage" We put low or high seven figures into a company. Not eight figures currently. Bad math while typing longform.

Appreciate your thoughts on this. The last paragraph is especially prescient given the current situation with Telegram waking people up, and influencers over on twttr convincing people to get over here. Comfortable people don’t make change, uncomfortable people do.

Good post. 🙏 Your analysis though is missing a dive into the centralization gravity of the tech architecture itself. I understand your point that there will always be a psychopath willing to subsidize freedom. Maybe that’s true and continues. It’s been true so far. But psychopaths are not enough to keep nostr decentralized. Relays are NOT equivalent. A relay with 100k users is not the same as a relay with two users. Relays equal reach. Everyone wants the greatest audience for their posts and to never miss a post from someone they follow. This creates a natural incentive to connect to the largest relays. The problem with the architecture is that nostr clients limit the number of relays you can have. For example, @damus recommends ten or less. This means that when you’re limited to the number of relays, you want to connect to the largest (greatest cache of content and most connected users). Nobody wants to connect to the smallest. This creates a centralizing gravity where relays get larger and more concentrated. Eventually we could end up with 10 massive relays. There would be no need for the 11th so few people would connect to it. As you know from your analysis on shitcoin blockchains, they have a natural centralizing gravity. They need to be faster and cheaper than their competitors. This forces them to go POS and run fewer, larger nodes to increase throughput. Nostr’s architecture has this same centralizing gravity. This needs to be discussed, verified, and if confirmed… then fixed. Ultimately, we’re not on team nostr v1. We’re all on team freedom and privacy. @Excellion @ODELL @jb55 @Vitor Pamplona

its because they dont know how to fix it. I have a proposal for how to fix it, but no one believe in me lol.. (not 100% true because giacomo has vetted my idea and think its worth testing). check out my profile/notes and IF you think there is something to it, you can use ur status as influencer to help get attention.

There are loads of revenue driving activities that will justify running relays, big expensive relays, as well as small plucky ones. Todd's issue was people using term decentralised, relays are not decentralised, censorship resistance is achieved via resilience.

How do xmpp nodes/relays work?. That seems to have held up quite well for years maybe decades moving rich data. I have wondered if xmpp should not be the decentralized rich data base standard. Or bittorrent ? Bitorrent moves vast amounts of data. We have proven , distributed tech. Caveat : I am no expert on this.

FOSS maintainership isn't too different ! some people are happy to volunteer their time and resources to help others, moreso if it's doing a thing they enjoy doing. It really depends on community dynamics though, when communities grow it generally grows more thankless. So this would work best if the relays can stay small.

While I applaud your contribution, I advocate for a different use of the word psychopath, as it means something completely different, and something which we direly need a better understanding of in order to ensure the survival of humanity. (pls research political ponerology)