Oddbean

This is a message I wrote to a friend that owns a social media agency, feel free to plagiarise as you wish: NOSTR stands for Notes and Other Stuff Transmitted on Relays and it is a social media protocol in the same way http is a web protocol. The protocol is open and anybody can build upon it. It has some fundamental concepts that are very different to existing social media platforms. Firstly it is decentralised, it runs across relays and anybody can run a relay. They can be open or closed, public or private, free or paid. Secondly, as a user, you don’t have an account, you have a private key, this is used to secure your data. These are the same type of keys used to secure Bitcoin. Your profile (account) is yours, you own and control it using your private keys and verified by others with your public key. Your posts are yours and you can store them on your own relay in your own home or business or you can rely on free public relays or more feature rich paid public relays. All your public data is signed by your private keys to verify it is you that owns it and all your private data is encrypted so nobody can read it. Messages (i.e. think NOSTR WhatsApp) are encrypted with your private keys so NOBODY can hack it or listen in, not even the NSA through a companies backdoor. You message other users privately by encrypting messages to them using their public key, which they decrypt using their private key. Relays talk to each other in the same way Bitcoin nodes relay information using the Byzantine generals solution so brilliantly solved by Satoshi Nakamoto for Bitcoin. Think of it a bit like BitTorrent. Data is normally sent on the clearnet, but can be relayed across the darknet (Tor) in highly censored regions. Because it is built using Bitcoin principles and technology, so it has Bitcoin money built in, meaning you actually send / receive money from / to any participant. As money is built in, the commercial options are different to centralised corporate owned platforms. It would be technically possible to build a platform that supports advertising, however that hasn’t really happened to date because influencers can be paid directly from their audience in many different ways. Ad hoc tips, subscriptions, pay to view or pay per time models. The great thing for content creators is that they control, own and keep all the money they make. There is no third party intermediary or merchant deciding whether they are allowed to be paid or not. NOSTR is censorship resistant, as there is no way to stop anybody publishing anything they want, in the same way nobody can stop or interfere with a Bitcoin payment. From an end users point of view, if they want to self censor, they can do this in multiple ways. You can mute users individually, or you can choose to use relays that adhere to your views or interests, so if you don’t want to see certain categories of content, you would avoid relays that carry those feeds. You can even run your own relay and curate content that you then charge other like minded users to connect to. You can of course connect to multiple relays for multiple different type of feed. While NOSTR is a protocol, platforms have to be built to use it, so the first platforms were twitter like clients and they are still very prevalent. However, NOSTR now has clients that emulate most social media platforms, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, Soundcloud, WhatsApp etc. They are even creating their own categories as well as emulating other functions such as Office Suite tools or e-commerce shops. If you want to give it a go, the easiest, but not the best, way to get started is download Primal on your phone from here: https://primal.net/downloads It will create a private key for you and setup a Bitcoin wallet. Once you have done this, if you want to follow me and message me, I will send you some Bitcoin so you can get started “zapping” micro payments to other users. My public key is: @mike Or you can visit me here: https://primal.net/p/npub1aqakd28d95muqlg6h6nwrvqq5925n354prayckr424k49vzjds4s0c237n If you want to see a small part of the ecosystem, then visit https://www.nostrapps.com/ where volunteers are listing some of the many apps that exist already. NOSTR is being backed by Jack Dorsey, Twitter founder, and you can see his account here: https://primal.net/p/npub1sg6plzptd64u62a878hep2kev88swjh3tw00gjsfl8f237lmu63q0uf63m Or you can see his account like this: https://primal.net/jack Once you’ve setup Primal, you can use those same private keys to access any platform you wish and you can use a browser extension such as Alby to manage your keys: https://getalby.com/ Primal looks great, but there are other better functioning twitter like clients, probably the most reliable for iPhone is Damus: https://www.nostrapps.com/apps/damus which I would recommend using if you start to get serious. The content and user base is very Bitcoin and freedom focused right now, but more and more influencers are starting to use the various platforms and some are transyferring exclusively to it.