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
It worries me that the answer to this is always “don’t worry.”
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.
Outbox and blastr fix this.
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.
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