Here's my profile for Reason on Nostr and why it could very well change the world
Pasting a few paragraphs here, you can find the rest at the link
Feel free to spread far and wide 😉
*************
Can Nostr Make Twitter's Dreams Come True?
Twitter's founder says Nostr is “100 percent what we wanted”—an open, ownerless network
Alex Gladstein | 8.13.2024
Virtually everyone agrees that social media is broken. On Facebook, X, Instagram, and TikTok, people fear out-of-control algorithms, fake news, state actor censorship, and propaganda. Google and Meta collect vast troves of personal information on their users and receive hundreds of thousands of requests every year from governments around the world to access that data. YouTube has become arguably "the most powerful media platform in the history of humanity," yet its algorithm is an ever-changing black box to the creators that populate the platform with videos. During the pandemic, federal officials were in contact with every major social media platform, coercing them to remove content.
The problem is centralized control. We can't trust companies to run our primary communications infrastructure. Government regulation only makes matters worse because it creates new legal barriers to entering the industry, which protects incumbent players and stifles innovation.
What if there were an alternative, not owned by Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, or the Chinese Communist Party? What if there were a way to control your own data to prevent companies from harvesting and monetizing it? What if you had granular control over what you see in your feed, with the freedom to choose your own algorithms? What if you owned your identity, which could be accessed seamlessly across different clients? That way, if you disapprove of the changes that Elon Musk brought to X, instead of closing your account you could take your handle and followers elsewhere.
That alternative exists. It's called "Notes and Other Stuff Transmitted by Relays"—or Nostr.
The Decentralized Solution
Invented by a pseudonymous programmer and overwhelmingly funded by grants from non-profit foundations, this decentralized, free, and open-source protocol has been quietly evolving for the past three years. Like bitcoin, Nostr is a community-run digital network highly resistant to censorship and corruption. It has 40,000 weekly active users and a growing ecosystem of clients and applications ranging from social media to long-form publishing to payments.
Nostr is only necessary because our existing internet is so broken.
Fifteen years ago, social media seemed destined to decentralize the world and give power back to the people. In 2009, we watched as Arab Spring activists used Twitter and Facebook to organize, coordinate, and help topple several long-standing dictatorships. The promise was that these new social platforms, designed by Silicon Valley entrepreneurs, could help liberate the masses.
It was intoxicating—but turned out to be a mirage. The Arab revolutions stalled out when brutal military regimes cracked down. These platforms became tools for spying and censoring their users. X and Facebook have helped journalists and human rights activists reach bigger audiences, but they haven't fulfilled their revolutionary promise.
Jack Dorsey's Shift from Bluesky to Nostr
This was a major theme at the 2024 Oslo Freedom Forum, which is put on annually by the Human Rights Foundation, where I serve as chief strategy officer. At this conference for democracy and human rights, Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey told the audience that the problem was, actually, guys like him: The very fact that Twitter, now X, has a CEO makes it a single point of failure. Governments routinely pressured Dorsey to censor content; once the company's offices in India were raided. Dorsey says that under the new Musk regime X complies with whatever governments want.
The X network is proprietary. Known as a "silo," this construct traps a user's identity, followers, and data. X also has the power to evict anyone from the platform and delete what they've written. Several years ago, when he was still running the company, Dorsey became convinced that Twitter should become an application instead, where users could post content to an open, ownerless network. This would make it similar to how bitcoin works, where you use an application called a wallet to interact with the network, but the network itself is neutral and open.
Building a non-proprietary architecture was Dorsey's original vision for Twitter, but over time the need to maximize revenue to build a business and serve shareholders undermined that goal.
Nevertheless, in 2021, Dorsey encouraged the creation of Bluesky—an initiative bootstrapped in-house to create that open neutral base layer. But after Musk bought the company, the managers of Bluesky were afraid they would run out of money and started raising funds from venture capitalists, which undermined the vision of building an open platform. Dorsey grew disenchanted and left the Bluesky board.
At the conference in Oslo, Dorsey explained what happened next:
I asked a question: What open source initiatives should I be funding that would be helpful to the public internet? And people kept tweeting at me that I should be looking at Nostr. I found the GitHub that described it and it was 100 percent what we wanted from Bluesky, but it wasn't developed from a company. It was completely independent. Its paper diagnosed every single problem we saw and had. But did it in a grassroots and dead simple way, that felt like the early Twitter where any developer could get on and really feel it.
Escaping the 'Golden Prisons'
Nostr was created in 2020 by the pseudonymous Brazilian programmer fiatjaf, who describes it as "the simplest open protocol that is able to create a censorship-resistant global 'social' network once and for all."
Though nobody is in charge, Nostr works as promised and is thriving. "It is the solution we've all been looking for," says Miljan Braticevic, founder of Primal, one of the two dozen plus clients now available for the Nostr protocol. "Nostr is not a Twitter competitor or a Mastodon competitor. This is the biggest misconception at the moment. That's just the tip of the iceberg. Nostr is nothing less than the foundation for the new internet. Meaning almost every conceivable app we have today will be built on Nostr."
Braticevic's prediction is echoed by at least a dozen other prominent developers. Martti Malmi, the first coder to work on bitcoin alongside Satoshi Nakamoto, is now a Nostr developer. In a recent talk, he said he had started to work on similar ideas around decentralized identity in 2019, only to come close to giving up. But then he found fiatjaf's invention, which he called a "godsend."
"Bitcoin is freedom of money, and Nostr is freedom of everything else," Malmi said. "I was there" in the earliest days of bitcoin, "and Nostr is even more intense."
For something that could be world-changing, Nostr is quite simple. To join, you sign up with a mobile or desktop client, which helps you to create a public and private key pair. The public key (or "npub") is used as your identifier, and you share it with clients and other users so that people can find your posts or pay you for your content. The private key ("nsec") is hidden by the user, stored safely (just like a bitcoin seed phrase), and is your way to log in to different services. Unlike platforms like X or Facebook, no other information is required to set up and use Nostr.
This gives users a powerful range of sovereignty. You can use a client, for example, that has strong hate speech controls. Or you can choose one that doesn't have any at all. You can use a client with aggressive algorithms, just like the ones X uses today. Or you can use one without any algorithm at all. Today, when you log in to an app like Primal, you can sort your feed by what's the latest, by what's most popular, by what's most zapped, or by customized keywords. It's up to you.
Last month, the macroeconomist Lyn Alden, author of one of the best books on bitcoin, published a long essay about Nostr's potential:
[Nostr] is a simple set of foundational building blocks that, if widely adopted, could gradually reshape "the Web" as we know it. Instead of a separate set of siloed social ecosystems, we could gravitate toward a more interoperable set of ecosystems, with more of the power dispersed to the content creators and to the audience, and away from the middlemen corporations.
The Nostr network is constructed like a spider web that can morph and regenerate, making it almost impossible to censor. When you set up a client on Nostr (perhaps, Primal or Damus on iOS; Amethyst on Android; or Coracle on the web), you choose from a variety of relays to connect to. This architecture ensures no single point of failure: If you are connected to seven or eight relays, and half of them choose to censor posts, your feed remains censorship-free, as your app will display the net sum of everything broadcast from each relay. If the Chinese government decides to attack your relays—as it did in 2023 when Damus launched on the Hong Kong and mainland app store—then more can be spun up. "The enemy," said Damus creator Will Casarin, "is too numerous."
Prominent bitcoin developer and educator Gigi—who switched to Nostr and deleted his X account—says that what helped it become so resilient is that it has zero exit cost. If the Chinese Communist Party bans YouTube, its domestic users lose everything. There's no way to get back their profiles and followers. The same is true if a user voluntarily closes an account.
Gigi calls these corporate silos "golden prisons" with no escape. Nostr's spider-like architecture makes escaping easy. If one client goes down, or you fail to connect to one relay, you just find another client or connect to another relay. You keep your posts, photos, preferences, contacts, and even algorithms of choice. If you use X, you are an X creator. But if you use Primal, you aren't a Primal creator, you are a Nostr creator.
https://reason.com/2024/08/13/can-nostr-make-twitters-dreams-come-true/
If you would like to see a Nostr panel at SXSW next year (one of the world's biggest normie arts, culture, and tech festivals, tens of thousands of attendees, mostly C-level folks) then you can vote here to make it happen!
https://panelpicker.sxsw.com/vote/155651
Here's my full main-stage keynote from Nashville
It was spread across two days, so that's why I change halfway through 😂
51 minutes but I worked hard to carefully consider each minute
The talk is packed with lessons and examples that I have learned and seen across my entire career of people using Bitcoin to change the world in the most unlikely of places
I walk through how Bitcoin is a revolution for commerce, freedom, and electric power, citing dozens of examples in each case
This one is for every single person who has ever said Bitcoin is useless, just as much is as it's for every person who is curious about Bitcoin and wants to know more
Most people know that Bitcoin is a great savings technology, which is of course its primary use case, but I don't dwell on that
Here we get into everything else it does
No price talk, all utility
Hope this helps
So grateful for the @BitcoinMagazine team for giving me this opportunity
Onwards!
https://m.primal.net/JqMR.mp4
Helpful chart to understand why the people rose up in Bangladesh and tossed their leader out of power
Now the coordinators of the student body that led the protest against Sheikh Hasina’s authoritarian rule have declared the formation of an interim government with the country's only Nobel Peace Prize laureate, Professor Muhammad Yunus, as its Chief Advisor
Let’s hope they can start to build a free and prosperous society without military rule 🙏
https://m.primal.net/Jpdm.jpg
Happiness is not what you own, it’s what we share
A beautiful quote and something I feel so deeply
The ovation that so many of you gave me at the end of my keynote in Nashville filled me with enough inspiration for a lifetime
Eternally grateful to be part of this movement
We’re gonna win ✌️
https://m.primal.net/JhVS.jpg
"Louisiana is a leader in bitcoin—banning CBDCs and protecting self-custody. We should continue to lead by having a strategic reserve of bitcoin"
-The governor of Louisiana, just now
I wonder what the average person thinks when they read that in the news
Wild times!
Step 5 is wrong
It’s Bitcoin, not bullets
The collapse (or fading away) of dollar hegemony is inevitable but doesn’t mean chaos
Ending the fiat currency caste system will usher in a new age of global peace and collaboration ✌️
https://m.primal.net/Jacf.jpg
Not having control of your money takes on new meaning in some places: it can be the difference between life and death
In Gaza's "currency desert," people have to try and wait up to 15 days, dodging airstrikes, heatstrokes, and looters simply to withdraw their wages and remittances into cash
There are only 3 working ATMs, and living costs have quadrupled since October 7th. Most people can't access their money anymore and live on handouts
The craziest part: the paper currency that merchants most widely accept in Gaza are Israeli shekels. Meaning, the very notes issued by the state that is currently bombing Palestinians to smithereens
Fiat currency is so irredeemably broken
https://www.csmonitor.com/World/Middle-East/2024/0703/gaza-war-palestinians-cash-atms
Based on the fact that Gaza has been bombed and starved now for 9+ months with very little food and medicine or doctors and there are tens of thousands unaccounted for. There are massacres left and right every few days
We work extremely hard and produce a lot of change in the world and I am very very proud of all the things we do
If you don’t think the work we do is worth it, then simple, don’t donate
And BTW, just for clarity, any donations earmarked to the Bitcoin Development Fund go directly to developers, nothing is skimmed
Donors give us “general operating” grants when they want to support the truly awesome humans who work for us
This is very ignorant. We pay people way less than what they would make in the private for-profit sector. This is a constant issue for us, losing people to big companies who pay more
When I started at HRF in 2008 full time I made $30k a year
I have worked up to the executive level after working very very hard for 17 years and again am proud of it
General operating grants are donations made to us that aren’t earmarked for anything in particular
They support staff salaries and whole range of other things
I can assure you all of my colleagues kick major ass and are the kind of highly productive people one would want to support
Were not just sitting around doing nothing
No. You aren’t understanding what I am saying. We pay everyone fairly and offer them opportunities to make more as they progress in their careers. I have worked extremely hard to get where I am all the way from the bottom and it took nearly 20 years.
It depends. If someone donates to our Art in Protest program for example it may cover some of the salary of the director of that program. BDF is special and any grants earmarked to that go straight into grants with nothing taken off the top.
Let me be clear. We pay people fairly and I am evidence that you can grow a lot provided you work hard and are happy and productive for many years. At the same time, all of our salaries are proportionally less than working at a big company like Google or AirBnB or what have you.
We have two dozen programs. They are all unique. Some programs are 100% funding a person to do research or legal work. We hire lawyers to get people out of jail for example. Some programs are grants like BDF or specific programs we have to make grants to civil society in Belarus or Hong Kong. Some are event production like the Oslo Freedom Forum. Do you have a specific question? Would you like to make a donation to something?
We aren’t the Red Cross or something. We don’t exist to give money to other people. We have some special funds that do that like the BDF but we are generally speaking an advocacy organization. If you give money to for example the Freedom Fellowship it gets split across: a) paying the people who make it happen - the main cost b) some travel and accommodations for workshops and retreats c) a stipend we give the fellows d) some equipment and other smaller misc costs
There is something wonderfully strange about Bitcoin ATMs like these
Hidden among a bunch of ads, typically for booze or grass or lotto tickets: a real way out
Almost a bit like the Zoltar machine in Big
Something magical hidden among the mundane
A portal to another dimension
https://m.primal.net/JLoV.jpg
Newsflash: Kasparov stepped down and is no longer HRF chairman. Just happened in the past few weeks.
Anyway: Appreciate you outlining some of Putin’s downsides — they extend considerably to massive war crimes, attacks on children’s hospitals, civilian power and water infrastructure, etc
As for Z: IMO (personal view) there is Martial Law in Ukraine not because Zelenskyy is some power-hungry dictator but because the country was invaded by and is each day destroyed by a much larger military force
I am against conscription in general, especially for foreign wars and wars of choice. My father was conscripted to fight in Vietnam which was lunacy. But if someone invaded my home town I would find it hard to judge my community or government if they wanted to enact conscription to defend the land.
I am also against financial restrictions when it comes to forex, gold, or bitcoin, some of which have come to pass in Ukraine (and I’ve shared these btw on Twitter)
As far as elections, again I find it hard to question the status quo. Should a country just proceed as normal if it is being all-out attacked? This isn’t some fake war, Russia has tens of thousands of troops on Ukrainian territory. Today. Murdering and killing innocents. I have seen polls indicating that the public doesn’t want an election until the war is over. I would be happy to see elections but again I understand why they are not proceeding as normal.
I wish these abnormal things did not occur. But realistically Ukraine has two choices: fight for its own survival, or submit to Russian military occupation. I do not judge them for fighting back.
I am happy to unblock you on X if you want, just DM me your handle
HRF's financial freedom team
@Alex Li took the plunge as the first hire in Q1 2020 and we've been growing ever since
Grateful for the opportunity to work with such a fantastic crew!
https://m.primal.net/JIwR.jpg
Thanks!
Fedimint is NOT a replacement for self-custody. I tried to make that very clear
It is ecash — very private cheap digital money — that can be used in conjunction with bitcoin
Oddbean new post about login | logout
Notes by gladstein | export
Here's my profile for Reason on Nostr and why it could very well change the world Pasting a few paragraphs here, you can find the rest at the link Feel free to spread far and wide 😉 ************* Can Nostr Make Twitter's Dreams Come True? Twitter's founder says Nostr is “100 percent what we wanted”—an open, ownerless network Alex Gladstein | 8.13.2024 Virtually everyone agrees that social media is broken. On Facebook, X, Instagram, and TikTok, people fear out-of-control algorithms, fake news, state actor censorship, and propaganda. Google and Meta collect vast troves of personal information on their users and receive hundreds of thousands of requests every year from governments around the world to access that data. YouTube has become arguably "the most powerful media platform in the history of humanity," yet its algorithm is an ever-changing black box to the creators that populate the platform with videos. During the pandemic, federal officials were in contact with every major social media platform, coercing them to remove content. The problem is centralized control. We can't trust companies to run our primary communications infrastructure. Government regulation only makes matters worse because it creates new legal barriers to entering the industry, which protects incumbent players and stifles innovation. What if there were an alternative, not owned by Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, or the Chinese Communist Party? What if there were a way to control your own data to prevent companies from harvesting and monetizing it? What if you had granular control over what you see in your feed, with the freedom to choose your own algorithms? What if you owned your identity, which could be accessed seamlessly across different clients? That way, if you disapprove of the changes that Elon Musk brought to X, instead of closing your account you could take your handle and followers elsewhere. That alternative exists. It's called "Notes and Other Stuff Transmitted by Relays"—or Nostr. The Decentralized Solution Invented by a pseudonymous programmer and overwhelmingly funded by grants from non-profit foundations, this decentralized, free, and open-source protocol has been quietly evolving for the past three years. Like bitcoin, Nostr is a community-run digital network highly resistant to censorship and corruption. It has 40,000 weekly active users and a growing ecosystem of clients and applications ranging from social media to long-form publishing to payments. Nostr is only necessary because our existing internet is so broken. Fifteen years ago, social media seemed destined to decentralize the world and give power back to the people. In 2009, we watched as Arab Spring activists used Twitter and Facebook to organize, coordinate, and help topple several long-standing dictatorships. The promise was that these new social platforms, designed by Silicon Valley entrepreneurs, could help liberate the masses. It was intoxicating—but turned out to be a mirage. The Arab revolutions stalled out when brutal military regimes cracked down. These platforms became tools for spying and censoring their users. X and Facebook have helped journalists and human rights activists reach bigger audiences, but they haven't fulfilled their revolutionary promise. Jack Dorsey's Shift from Bluesky to Nostr This was a major theme at the 2024 Oslo Freedom Forum, which is put on annually by the Human Rights Foundation, where I serve as chief strategy officer. At this conference for democracy and human rights, Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey told the audience that the problem was, actually, guys like him: The very fact that Twitter, now X, has a CEO makes it a single point of failure. Governments routinely pressured Dorsey to censor content; once the company's offices in India were raided. Dorsey says that under the new Musk regime X complies with whatever governments want. The X network is proprietary. Known as a "silo," this construct traps a user's identity, followers, and data. X also has the power to evict anyone from the platform and delete what they've written. Several years ago, when he was still running the company, Dorsey became convinced that Twitter should become an application instead, where users could post content to an open, ownerless network. This would make it similar to how bitcoin works, where you use an application called a wallet to interact with the network, but the network itself is neutral and open. Building a non-proprietary architecture was Dorsey's original vision for Twitter, but over time the need to maximize revenue to build a business and serve shareholders undermined that goal. Nevertheless, in 2021, Dorsey encouraged the creation of Bluesky—an initiative bootstrapped in-house to create that open neutral base layer. But after Musk bought the company, the managers of Bluesky were afraid they would run out of money and started raising funds from venture capitalists, which undermined the vision of building an open platform. Dorsey grew disenchanted and left the Bluesky board. At the conference in Oslo, Dorsey explained what happened next: I asked a question: What open source initiatives should I be funding that would be helpful to the public internet? And people kept tweeting at me that I should be looking at Nostr. I found the GitHub that described it and it was 100 percent what we wanted from Bluesky, but it wasn't developed from a company. It was completely independent. Its paper diagnosed every single problem we saw and had. But did it in a grassroots and dead simple way, that felt like the early Twitter where any developer could get on and really feel it. Escaping the 'Golden Prisons' Nostr was created in 2020 by the pseudonymous Brazilian programmer fiatjaf, who describes it as "the simplest open protocol that is able to create a censorship-resistant global 'social' network once and for all." Though nobody is in charge, Nostr works as promised and is thriving. "It is the solution we've all been looking for," says Miljan Braticevic, founder of Primal, one of the two dozen plus clients now available for the Nostr protocol. "Nostr is not a Twitter competitor or a Mastodon competitor. This is the biggest misconception at the moment. That's just the tip of the iceberg. Nostr is nothing less than the foundation for the new internet. Meaning almost every conceivable app we have today will be built on Nostr." Braticevic's prediction is echoed by at least a dozen other prominent developers. Martti Malmi, the first coder to work on bitcoin alongside Satoshi Nakamoto, is now a Nostr developer. In a recent talk, he said he had started to work on similar ideas around decentralized identity in 2019, only to come close to giving up. But then he found fiatjaf's invention, which he called a "godsend." "Bitcoin is freedom of money, and Nostr is freedom of everything else," Malmi said. "I was there" in the earliest days of bitcoin, "and Nostr is even more intense." For something that could be world-changing, Nostr is quite simple. To join, you sign up with a mobile or desktop client, which helps you to create a public and private key pair. The public key (or "npub") is used as your identifier, and you share it with clients and other users so that people can find your posts or pay you for your content. The private key ("nsec") is hidden by the user, stored safely (just like a bitcoin seed phrase), and is your way to log in to different services. Unlike platforms like X or Facebook, no other information is required to set up and use Nostr. This gives users a powerful range of sovereignty. You can use a client, for example, that has strong hate speech controls. Or you can choose one that doesn't have any at all. You can use a client with aggressive algorithms, just like the ones X uses today. Or you can use one without any algorithm at all. Today, when you log in to an app like Primal, you can sort your feed by what's the latest, by what's most popular, by what's most zapped, or by customized keywords. It's up to you. Last month, the macroeconomist Lyn Alden, author of one of the best books on bitcoin, published a long essay about Nostr's potential: [Nostr] is a simple set of foundational building blocks that, if widely adopted, could gradually reshape "the Web" as we know it. Instead of a separate set of siloed social ecosystems, we could gravitate toward a more interoperable set of ecosystems, with more of the power dispersed to the content creators and to the audience, and away from the middlemen corporations. The Nostr network is constructed like a spider web that can morph and regenerate, making it almost impossible to censor. When you set up a client on Nostr (perhaps, Primal or Damus on iOS; Amethyst on Android; or Coracle on the web), you choose from a variety of relays to connect to. This architecture ensures no single point of failure: If you are connected to seven or eight relays, and half of them choose to censor posts, your feed remains censorship-free, as your app will display the net sum of everything broadcast from each relay. If the Chinese government decides to attack your relays—as it did in 2023 when Damus launched on the Hong Kong and mainland app store—then more can be spun up. "The enemy," said Damus creator Will Casarin, "is too numerous." Prominent bitcoin developer and educator Gigi—who switched to Nostr and deleted his X account—says that what helped it become so resilient is that it has zero exit cost. If the Chinese Communist Party bans YouTube, its domestic users lose everything. There's no way to get back their profiles and followers. The same is true if a user voluntarily closes an account. Gigi calls these corporate silos "golden prisons" with no escape. Nostr's spider-like architecture makes escaping easy. If one client goes down, or you fail to connect to one relay, you just find another client or connect to another relay. You keep your posts, photos, preferences, contacts, and even algorithms of choice. If you use X, you are an X creator. But if you use Primal, you aren't a Primal creator, you are a Nostr creator. https://reason.com/2024/08/13/can-nostr-make-twitters-dreams-come-true/