Here is my premise: Contracts have three major components:
-
offer
-
acceptance
-
consideration
Bitcoin/lightning gives people sovereignty around #3.
Nostr enables communication with distributed relays, giving people sovereignty over the first two pieces that are integral to economic action. There needs to be planning and decision-making prior to a transaction.
When people talk about "censoring bitcoin" it is really the idea of censoring the physical world aspect of the good or service being delivered on the other side of a bitcoin transaction. There is already censorship when different service providers collude with governments that repress movements of people, or their access to food. In a protracted dispute, logistics can become the chokepoint.
The p2p physical world
Imagine a world in which the ability to transport oneself via an Uber type experience cannot be selectively impeded, or one's ability to order food. In fact, almost any sort of supply could be ordered. Shapeways could be built on nostr and then you could get a 3D printed part delivered to you almost as quickly as it is printed. Now add in ground and flying autonomous vehicles for these deliveries.
If you have crime, you could buy defense services on demand.
In addition to freedom, costs would plummet and the quality of service would massively increase.
How might quality increase? Perhaps in addition to the usual ways, nostr might make it easy to have consumer demand shape the nature of markets e.g. with seed oil disrespect. It turns out seed oil disrespect can be replaced with disrespecting all but the modern high oleic variants, which solve the problems for human health. You could have this on nostr. https://twitter.com/unitimpulse/status/1606593047172907008
Maybe one day you will be able to order a surgeon from a nostr client and transact directly with them!
I am curious to hear what others think, especially those who better understand the technical nuances to nostr.
Reputation Key Management
Of course, one would need to not have service requests tied to a universal identity, but would probably have different child keys used for different services. How can reputation be established in a way that cannot be easily cheated? Actually, I am thinking of a possible approach now as I type this: if a client takes a rake on transactions, say a 6.15% fee (tiny fraction of what Airbnb, Uber, or whoever take), then reviews on either side are costly when they are weighted by transaction volume. Or perhaps this would be a specialized relay that holds reputation data?
This works very well for a series of transactions since one can prove that one has invested into the identity more than the amount that could be stolen on the order. Some people think the next shitcoin bubble will relate to identity, but 1) it may not be possible to sell the identity, it is only possible to share the private key, not send it the way bitcoin can be sent; 2) the value of these keys is very easy to establish and would not have any reason to acquire a speculative monetary premium.
Finally, I am also interested for anyone to tell me I am full of shit in thinking that there is a there there to any of this since it does sound a bit like "put it on the blockchain" to say "put it on nostr", and of course 100% of those things separate from Bitcoin were useless nonsense.
My nostr:
c1e7fc21b4f9c199e6086e095639f0f16a4e4884544547ce8a653ed7b5b6c4a7