PSA 🚨

Without a direct innovation in the monetization structure of #Nostr I think we should expect a highly successful #Nostr to evolve like other protocols before it. I think there are 2 most likely comparisons:

1. #Nostr ends up looking more like email. It is still open and decentralized, but dominated by a small group of companies with enormous insight into everything that is happening and acting as huge semi-centralized custodians of everyone's data and messages.

2. #Nostr ends up looking more like RSS & podcasts. It is open and decentralized, but most users and all serious content creators pay for hosting platforms (relays) that sell it with a bunch of other features, analytics, and secondary services attached to it - or built in advertising and monetization splits. 

Understand I'm not predicting that it will go either direction or that only these two options exist. I'm saying that --- without a significant innovation in the monetization method --- it will very likely take one of these two paths. Also understand that neither of these are bad outcomes, per se. Both present a VASTLY better internet sovereignty and user/server power dynamic than the current Web 2, but this is far from realizing #Nostr's true potential.

I only say this to get people thinking about the fact that we still have a very serious problem funding relays at scale, and it hasn't been solved, it's mostly been covered up with some very generous grants and *extremely* generous volunteer developers and relay runners. But it WILL have to be addressed or nostr's success will come hand in hand with some hard truths about how we use it and what we think it is. 

It won't be unlike the people who thought all #Bitcoin transactions were going to be free forever, settle instantly, and that the whole world could be sovereign with their own UTXOs. That's simply not how it worked, and we had to have a 4 year, vicious, all out civil war within the community when we were finally forced to come to terms with that reality.