Bitcoin solved the Byzantine Generals Problem with Proof of Work, a novel idea.
Which hard problem did nostr solve, and what is its novel idea?
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Bitcoin solved the Byzantine Generals Problem with Proof of Work, a novel idea.
Which hard problem did nostr solve, and what is its novel idea?
Social media decentralization
nostr is more than just social media. social media aspect was just to test the original idea, like a pilot.
If the social media aspect was just a test, did or will it pass its own test?
It works for social media, it's just not very good. It also works for secure messaging, but it's not very good at that either: all the json-inside-json means that if you really want this as a base protocol, you'll have to redesign.
It works for interoperability because there are SDKs. More than for, say,
ssb, which has always been a shitshow. I think that ultimately, for each product that you can imagine that nostr would be great for, there will be a competing protocol that is greater.The only moat is imho the existing developer base within the Bitcoin community. So if you need a comms protocol within the Bitcoin space, nostr is it.
Does most of the important discussion around bitcoin happen on nostr, and not on GitHub or Delving Bitcoin or on the mailing list?
I think he didn't referred to general discussions about Bitcoin, but how to use bitcoin communicating through nostr as protocol.
This is what I meant yes.
Ah ok. So you mean like for PSBTs? Or even just NWC or CLINK?
You nail it perfectly !
This is why, if in the future when redesign is inevitable (I'm convinced it has to happen) and as a community we don't want to waste time, building
nostr 2would be the path of least resistance, versus trying to build a competing protocol.Why?
Because its a poorly designed protocol...
I think right now is an amalgam of ideas, many apps built on top of a core based on cryoptography and and easy way to communicate. Is not anymore the original idea.
As Bitcoin motto was "fuck banks", we do not have such thing for nostr. With nostr you don't fuck anything. Maybe you fuck http comms b y using wss instead :)
Is communicating in Nostr better than on SN?
Are two different things. This question is like asking: how do you communicate better, through a billboard or an email / SMS ?
If you put together SN and nostr you understand nothing of both.
identity
Ever lost your key? That's like the most important thing it didn't solve.
Sure have
The whole concept of recovery is a problem that seems to have a wide ranging set of opinions depending on who you talk to.
I know many people who think some IT wiz kid should always be able to fix their technical problem if they complain enough. For these individuals I think they will always want identity tied to their person and they don't want to take personal responsibility for their Identity.
Flip side, I want the ability to spin up new identity when needed.
If opinions matter, it means there is no standard, no solution, so you've kind of made my point.
The problem is that keys must be replaced. So your key cannot be your identity. If I get your key then I change your NIP-05 (like some kid did to a custodial LN provider we shall not name) then all your identity would now belong to me.
This is why, not solving identity isn't the same as solving identity. It is the opposite.
Which services tied identity to you as a person, as in scanning your eyeball or fingerprint?
Hasn't it mostly been the case that you give a service an email address and password, and then you are responsible for keeping that password safe, or at least access to your email address so you can set a new password in case you forget it?
You didn't have a digital identity before nostr? How did you authorize bitcoin transactions?
It makes it "easier" to spin up a new digital identity then some other options.
NWC, I would say makes it more user friendly then trying to use BTC keys.
Just my uneducated opinion.
You can automate signing every possible PSBT too... do you want to though? "Come and take all my money"
No, it wasn't this the main goal. The main goal was some kind exactly opposite to this, so people will be free to post something online without being linked to a verifiable identity or censored.
I personally don't give a shit about my npub, I can create a new one in seconds.
You see, people try to make nostr a copy of twatter, but they are wrong. Nostr is something else than twatter.
On twatter you must build reputation with your verified identity. On nostr you build a reputation with what you say, independently of a npub. But nostr is more than just posting memes and notes online. Way more bigger than that. And NWC and nostr market is just the beginning.
Ownership of your relationships.
An email list may be better, but what with control of email by a few large providers and spam filtering, nostr may be a better option by now.
What does "ownership of your relationships" mean? How does one "own" a relationship?
I think nostr will end up not very different from email. I don't see anything built into the protocol to prevent that.
You CAN run your own relay, but most won't, and won't care about you or your relay, and the relays they use won't either. They'll just consider you spam.
Fwiw, I wrote about that a little bit in #950309.
Ownership of relationships was probably not the way to put it, but it seems to me that the thing nostr solves is that the web of relationships o create to other public keys, and their ability to have a relationship with my public key is no longer controlled by the platform: on x or tiktok, if you leave, you don't bring your follows or followers with you. Nostr gives you a way to maintain your social graph across many clients.
The portable social graph is indeed one of the few things I can see nostr has going for it
Digital freedom.
Do you have the freedom to delete your notes?
Are relays required to store your notes and allow anyone to access them forever?
Why would I store all my notes forever? I don't give a shit about what I posted a month ago and nobody also will read it.
I think nostr is something more than just posting notes and memes, but people still do not see it.
Digital freedom means to me that I can do whatever I want, and nobody can stop me, but is that really the case on nostr?
Yes you can. I've ran
strfryon a ROC-RK3328-CC with a T7 for hd. The most time went into building a clean non-sloppy image.What's the significant difference between running my own relay, or hosting my own website?
To host my own website, I don't even need to run a server, I can just use object storage.
I'd even say I have more freedom hosting my own website, because I can decide everything, like how it gets rendered etc.
Nostr clients decide how my content gets rendered.
Does the object storage not run on a server? You can run strfry in firecrackerd so that amazon can gaslight you that because there are no servers you pay more.
Also. No, you don't decide how it gets rendered to me. I do. If I don't like your site I will do things to it. For me.
It does, but it's not me maintaining it.
Technically, most aren't "running their own servers," because they are just virtual machines in some data center.
Fair! I was referring to HTML as a spec for how to render things. If you don't respect it, yes, I can't decide for you. More freedom to you, too!
Is a website same as a note or an event ? Keep in mind that over nostr we do not have only dumb notes or memes, we have also events.
I don't think you can compare nostr in general with a website, are 2 different things. Like many are comparing SN with nostr. That is dumb. Just because you can use zaps on both it doesn't mean they have the same purpose or could be compared.
Yes, not in general.
I was only comparing digital freedom on nostr vs digital freedom on your own website.
not really, you can't do anything you want on nostr. You still depend on a relay policies, if you do not run your own relay.
I think this is the point where most of people understand it wrongfully: they compare it with twatter.
Exactly, IF.
But are most people running their own relay? Could nostr “work”, as in provide a good user experience and/or scale to enough users to actually replace existing social media apps for most, if everyone ran their own relay, to actually achieve the digital freedom nostr wants to provide?
The mistake are doing people is to use nostr as a new twatter. I personally use it too, like that (even that I never had a twatter account), but just for fun and have a "public face"...
But the strong capabilities are when you:
Relays are like billboards : you can make them public or make them private. A lot of things can happen on private relays and nobody knows about or censor it. THAT is its strong argument.
If everybody run his own relay but make it public, it doesn't achieve too much thing. Is mostly noise.
Not sure if you remember the defunct MS SharePoint... something like that could be nostr, a private intranet but also can be extended to a public extranet.
Well, it's literally how nostr describes itself:
So I think it's fair to measure nostr using it's own measure stick.
Good points and hope that is not the case.
Nostr solved no “hard”, as in ByzGenP “hard” problems. Social media, or just messaging itself, is not a computer science problem. We have had open comms protocols like IRC since ‘88.
If nostr solved any problem, it was codifying a simple json encoding protocol that enabled arbitrary signed messages to be collected and relayed. It was simple, and allowed rapid development of web and mobile clients. It was extensible and permissive. Many people ran infrastructure for free to distribute notes via their relays. Because it was censorship resistant, a lot of the notes were spam.
Of the real world problems, not computer science, that may be solved using this nostr, these will exist in layers and extensions to the protocol.
I don’t believe social media is actually a problem to solve - it is what it is.
Nostr is not social media, it’s simply a protocol to sign and distribute and retrieve messages.
Smart client dumb server?
Is that a problem or a solution?
it's actually a solution.
I do like the nostr concept of
client side filtering, yes! It's been done before, but it is a good principle that most of the apps were built on.I remember when fiatjaf asked me in 2020 about his idea of nostr. He just wanted to get rid of twatter in a decentralized manner. But in the end he discovered something else, maybe bigger.
But I know that the original idea come not just from fiatjaf, but was way before 2020 from Ben Arc, with Diagon Alley market. They put together the ideas and that's how nostr come up.
Is not sure yet what is "fixing".
Nostr is gun without the graph DB, prototyped in the original ShockWallet
I just needed a way to communicate with keys over a simple socket server, gun overcomplicated it still since graphs are slow... Fiatjaf eliminated the lexical queries for simple tags
Everything I looked at was p2p nonsense, I wanted sockets so it worked reliably in browsers.
It's a standard not so much a solution, it's just json and websockets.
Ultimately it's just a document.
nostr opens up new channels/methods for the free flow of information thru man's kind and his technology; lightning super-charges that flow, giving it life; without bitcoin-lightning, nostr wud have been a dead/inanimate Frankenstein monster; resistance to the free flow of available current & proper information is bad, keeps people enslaved;
It solved the lack of public relays for p2p.
The novel idea was to do it in a way that is accessible to webapps and fueled by the current anti free speech politics.
Nostr basically fixes the big headache of building a real, censorship-proof social network that actually works—by keeping it super simple with clients talking to a bunch of independent relays, and using crypto keys so your identity and posts are yours forever, no matter what any relay does.
Bitcoin solved double spending problem, Nostr is an experiment that I don't see clearly what problem solved other than centralization of protocols, which I'm not sure it's pioneer either.
Nostr’s breakthrough: communication without consensus.
Keys as identity, signed events as data, dumb relays. No global state, no canonical truth.
Bitcoin enforces consensus. Nostr deliberately avoids it.
Probably yet to have solved anything. It does feel like it has something to it though. Maybe it's the simplicity or the open nature.
or a lot of money thrown at it 👀
He visto que hablan mucho de Nostr que es?
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