Oddbean new post about login | logout Is there a "why not Tor"?
Exactly. I don't get all of the excitement around this, either.
Nostr provides discoverability
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.
Tor doesn't work in a browser without additional software. This will.
Furthermore, you can't trust Tor servers and a huge part of them are run by governments. The difference here is that we can choose the relay servers and avoid the ones we don't exactly trust.
nostr isn't protected against that either
Tor does work in the browser if you're prepared to run a proxy. That is additional software.
Correct, I wrote "without additional software". A proxy is additional software.
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
nostr:note1jaclnk5n5xf4fvnzuectlqtf57t30xkmv7kn8gx8rzya3nftr95q8qrhju
https://primal.net/e/note10kjsna96qpg4am8fm99t77589k286yehhlms86lyw4faeed7p8dsvvfem0
This Will guy gets it. I should see what else he's doing
Probably the best nostr dev, rn
