If you’re building a long-form note composer you should obsess about the quality bar that Substack has achieved
You may not love the centralizing forces present in Substack, but you can’t deny the composer is absolutely world class
Who’s going to be first to meet/beat that bar as a Nostr-native tool?
nostr development wins when each developer picks a focused problem and absolutely crushes and polishes the solution
e.g. if you’re building a client to do X, it doesn’t also have to have a social media feed
Is Nostr dependent on bitcoin?
nope. it's a totally independent idea to support free speech. though it does tickle some similar instincts in people
If you drop by Nostr even casually, it can often feel like you’re crashing a bitcoiner dinner party. The memes, the FOSS devs, the topics of conversation often seem to overlap with bitcoin culture. Is this just a case of “birds-of-a-feather” or is there more to it?
Nostr is an open protocol. It’s independent of the use or existence of any cryptocurrency. It uses cryptography, but nothing super fancy there. It’s actually kinda basic, tbh.
So why did so many bitcoiners show up? A simple explanation might be that fiatjaf, the creator of Nostr, was a bitcoiner and brought like-minded people along. But I think there’s more to it than just the initial seed.
The critical feature which Nostr gets right is that you can create an account just by doing math on your own. Of course, you can use a little program on your own computer to help do this math (i.e., creating public-private key pairs). This is cryptography at its best — a tool that empowers the individual.
You don’t have to go to a 3rd-party-issuer to create an account for you. You don’t have to subscribe to a particular cryptocurrency or political ideology. You could identify as a libertarian, anarchist, democrat, republican, labor party, or you may not accept any political labels at all.
On Nostr, you’re welcome to even dislike the concept of bitcoin/cryptocurrencies altogether. As long as you have a curiosity about, or interest in freedom of speech you may find Nostr to be a good place for you to share your thoughts. On Nostr, your ideas and your words are published without being subject to anyone’s permission. The separation of power between clients and data stores is what enforces your rights. It’s baked into the architecture. Not promised and granted to you by a demagogue. That’s the whole idea. https://image.nostr.build/5d23e5dcec75918ff08a8a382bb380c580c65b7511fc3df35e7f404b4f6b716e.jpg
I appreciate the contrarian take. I don’t have as much background on the full history of nostr — so thanks for contributing that.
I wrote what I did because some people look at nostr as tribalist around bitcoiners and I just wanted to say that the beauty to me is that it’s a different layer of technology that’s not closely coupled to a cryptocurrency belief — at least not today.
However, I don’t think the incentives of nostr will work long term without internet native money. At some point relays need to get compensated for the resources they contribute. Bitcoin is the only reasonable way to do this, imo.
I also don’t think advertising-based business models will work given the protocol structure, so again, we need bitcoin to help mediate the value exchange among people who create/consume on the protocol.
Thanks for contributing this history.
I didn’t realize fiatjaf was so liberal with his cryptocurrency endeavors :)
I agree Jack brought a lot of social consensus to galvanize early visibility (and contributed a lot of funding over time)!
I’ve heard the Taproot/identity point mentioned before, but I don’t know much about the relationship. Can you tell more about this? Are npubs/nsec specs inherited from something in Taproot?
How do you imagine this might be productized/useful to more people? I was not aware of this relationship and it seems like an important primitive, but it’s not immediately obvious to me what could be built. Do you already have ideas?
yup, we’ve all gotta be the customers!
Have you explored recommendations in the video context? seems like a needlessly polarizing topic. I suspect it’ll be important to have something like that before video will become a mainstream usecase on nostr.
doesn’t grab my interest, but I respect people experimenting with what can be done in a permissionless environment
I’m skeptical that we’ll see interesting new approaches to money outside of bitcoin for a long time so fungible tokens would probably be attempting to model something like our current equity systems.
I do think 100 years in the future we might have something like a more digitally-native equity ownership. These seem like pretty rough experiments around what that might look like. Too many unbounded human/social problems around how governance would/should work around such tokens so it’s not something I want to invest much of my time in.
I do find the foundational ideas of Ordinals/Inscriptions conceptually very interesting even if existing collections don’t grab my interest
Oh, I’d love to see what you do with Runes + Nostr… I agree it’s good that we’ve got some momentum around wallets/explorers/etc. which open up greenfield space for more experimentation
I am particularly interested in names (bringing it up since you mentioned “domain names”). I would like to see a system where we can have a neutral global namespace where a name can point to anything (a domain, a social media handle, a payment address, etc.) and the namespace is controlled by no one.
A friend proposed that maybe a Runes of supply size of 1 might be an interesting part of a solution. While I’m not currently much down the Runes rabbit hole I’m open to learning about it if it turns out to support new ideas/applications which I otherwise see value in
good to explore new ideas. just keep asking questions until you have confidence that the new technology is built primarily to serve you and not primarily to serve the creator of the new technology
for day-to-day transactions I find the USD is still the best tool for me — makes tons of freedom tradeoffs, but the acceptability is key for most use-cases. However, I wouldn’t want to hold it over time... melting ice cube
I moved Twitter off my mobile home screen.
I set a 10 minute daily timer on iOS.
I never let the Twitter algorithm tell me what to look at next.
I keep it around for when my friends send me links to read.
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