These are great points. I hear you on the concern around what happens if Jack's funding dries up. To be clear though, I've also invested in a number of companies who are using nostr as a part of their core infrastructure even if it's not their primary focus. Many of these cos are making money (with paths to profitability) and do run relays (though focused on specific subsets of nostr). Examples include Fountain and Alby (in addition to more obvious ones like Primal). 

I'm seeing demand for specialized paid relays for use cases like Nostr Wallet Connect. No one (at least not me) could have predicted that relay infrastructure would be used for something like passing lightning invoices around when nostr got started. Lightspark recently announced that they've built their UMA stack on top of NWC and now have economic incentive to run or pay for relays (although again only storing specific subsets of nostr data). 

All that to say, I'm seeing companies with real revenue using and paying for at least some nostr infrastructure. This was not the case even 6 mos ago so seems like we're headed in an at least somewhat promising direction. Some of those experiments are starting to bear fruit. To be fair though, while I really like and appreciate the grant funding, I'm much more bullish on startup investing because startups are trying to become self sustainable.

I agree things could certainly be better though. And I know I need to dive deper into #ditto. You like this model because it incentivizes communities to pay for relays? 

What else could we do to make sure relay operators are profitable? Again, pay to post relays make a lot of sense to me.  I hope to see experimentation there.