Oddbean

After several weeks of persistent effort, I'm excited to share Nostr Web Services (NWS). NWS makes your web service reachable without having a publicly accessible IP address or DNS. All you need is an npub and a set of Nostr relays. A wide range of existing services could be run on NWS without requiring any significant changes. NWS achieves this by establishing a TCP connection between client and server which can be used by these applications. Please keep in mind, that the software is in a very early state and not even released yet. https://github.com/asmogo/nws

This is a very powerful, useful and interesting new development. There's no reason to piss on it because it didn't also rebuild the entire world. Everything doesn't have to be relevant for every normal person on earth in order to be useful and exciting for some (at first).

All software I use was useful to millions of people from the beginning. Browser, media player, terminal emulator. Remember the app economy that didn't happen? Now you know it's cause the modern userbase chose 10 apps and nothing custom. Regardless, what problem does Nostr solve? Talking about bitcoin was never a problem

Cats should be skinned many ways. Different approaches are better or worse for different contexts. Also, surprising net-new discoveries are made beyond the frontier when you re-solve a problem with a new stack. Sometimes some property of the stack, in connection with the "already solved problem", reveals novel new territory. (Look at "the microblog UX" getting "re-solved" by Nostr)

I have no idea what this is, but it's probably cool. nostr:nevent1qqsv78sjt0u38tzgzvulema5kyf7f0va58xpcu0jcwn2esudtwg00vqpzemhxue69uhkummnw3ezuerpw3sju6rpw4ej7q3q6uq0cyx52lh2unczavzdw9dq2jphu69zutgpp9cnstz7zqtdex0qxpqqqqqqz089rnu

When someone tells you that Nostr is just a Twitter alternative, tell them that our developers are literally rebuilding the Internet. nostr:nevent1qqsv78sjt0u38tzgzvulema5kyf7f0va58xpcu0jcwn2esudtwg00vqpz4mhxue69uhhyetvv9ujuerpd46hxtnfduhsygxhqr7pp4zha6hy7qhtqnt3tgz5sdlx3ghz6qgfwyuzchsszmwfncpsgqqqqqqshazqcn

lol, discoverability is still a problem in nostr. But, suspending disbelief, the result of discovering something is an extractable address. We don't say that Twitter provides discoverability and then conclude that Twitter should implement a new transport protocol.

tor is slow, doesnt scale and its not flexible. A native nostr discoverablity layer (and anonimity layer) could be used in many ways. One of them is a better tor with lightning/ecash micropayment to actually scale the service

Tor is slow because it works and people use it. Bouncing requests through one or two nodes won't provide reliable anonymity, and using relays as TCP/IP will be unbearably slow if more than two people actually use it.

tor is slow because therse no anti-spam (actually they added a sort of proof of work client side, but it is not so effective), theres no incentive to run nodes that are the facto moslty feds and volountary. If you add micropayments as spam filter and as economic incentive for people to run relays, you can have a tor network that scales. Also its trivial to implement in a way that provide reliable anonimity, it just need to reimplement onion routing, all problems in theory are solved.

NWS main components Entry node: It forwards tcp packets to the exit node using a SOCKS proxy and creates encrypted events for the public key of the exit node. Exit node: It is a TCP reverse proxy that listens for incoming Nostr subscriptions and forwards the payload to the designated backend service. https://m.primal.net/JbPA.png

Hope this fix nostr ip leak into the relays itself nostr:nevent1qqsv78sjt0u38tzgzvulema5kyf7f0va58xpcu0jcwn2esudtwg00vqpz4mhxue69uhhyetvv9ujuerpd46hxtnfduhsygxhqr7pp4zha6hy7qhtqnt3tgz5sdlx3ghz6qgfwyuzchsszmwfncpsgqqqqqqshazqcn

By having all TCP packets proxied by the entry node, the number of incoming IP addresses for the relay operator is significantly reduced. This simplifies IP blacklisting in case of an attack, as NWS funnels all client requests through the entry nodes. Consequently, the distribution of requests is determined by the total number of entry nodes. If your goal is to DDoS Nostr relays, it's likely more effective to flood them with normal events.

Any contribution is welcome! Whether you want to be a contributor, an exit or entry node runner, or just help spread the word. I'm currently working on adding an HTTPS reverse proxy with auto-generated self-signed certificates. This will allow exit node runners to accept encrypted HTTPS connections from public entry nodes without enabling TLS in their backend services at all. https://github.com/asmogo/nws/pull/21

Weekly recap; nostr:nevent1qqsvzkwvvf0cq67lf7nddm4rtg7x8zaqdwurkw7nv9lx3yzcgx3andctt0vpy nostr:nevent1qqs93m8wedjpqxw5rxl869pzke45usgjqdhajxfm2609e3q743l55lse0je3h nostr:nevent1qqsq6uuhttuljvan690yc8hww4sy38sjwat5ldkqejzzdfa3hf8434grasj4v nostr:nevent1qqsv78sjt0u38tzgzvulema5kyf7f0va58xpcu0jcwn2esudtwg00vqn72g6q nostr:nevent1qqs2fp9zkylrxak94jkaznhj959systtsujdhvfxuwfjzvlemss25cgcl4emc nostr:nevent1qqstwe6n4qchk85zf79dn4r4332v4ulc484hf5zmrp0rt6kqcl7teugp54gf4 nostr:nevent1qqsxwjenpwf7wulg50sfhvkpjrvtrg7xrevkz5kpx70kya06ykslp2cdpfv5n nostr:nevent1qqspz3qg7n2fvtnx5m0504uew9x29kn4e6m2l2wtpugy0wc2wucecece7xwr3 nostr:nevent1qqsz4mtuhe0kamf9gu9n9thwnnkt98dq73n54qappqrkzhhwrdgznsspuckcn nostr:nevent1qqsdx35hmyxpsx2exxg73tjsd0lnrr4y6jyvmdgjw5fdw94t3xf4r4gcla6xy nostr:nevent1qqsdma665ydf7g9svzcxyt9za9nynkn4jzen6s73s2djyl0mweq6zmgw7afev nostr:nevent1qqsw98gy8yvknxgw0pmdd46dkkvrfnqlusafzjnj47h88kkllu20lvcqnmwx0 nostr:nevent1qqsqphqtj6jl25d05593zyum602s06d2ll5cncdec692rujp2n08n0g5rl9qx nostr:nevent1qqsge2w2w8xtvxuc4jfgkg25rh6frysrdnphv270tvl0xy0wseszwzq5gehzw nostr:nevent1qqsw077s2mzlz20449emvynlcwmwjz8p0k0rar6x70snnwn3wd78gkqpzdmhxue69uhkummnw3ezu7nzvshxwee0qgs8mez352yxc2r9yt838c9f0sfs86ey0ygh7e996qspx773957u95grqsqqqqqpvpn2w2 nostr:nevent1qqswgsx8qvx45h5hx8ln9c3ka95mf0jvn3m0c5xhg3puk0maswclrcqkvgj2y