I am curious if we are ahead of ourselves in gauging whether Nostr will solve many of the problems we think it will. Is it too early to ask if we are getting ahead of ourselves?
One of my friends at Austin Bitcoin Design Club this week brought up this idea of the Gartner hype cycle concerning Nostr. Where are we?
Gartner hype cycle is a graphical presentation developed, used, and branded by the American research, advisory, and information technology firm Gartner to represent specific technologies' maturity, adoption, and social application. The hype cycle claims to provide a graphical and conceptual presentation of the maturity of emerging technologies through five phases.
fwiw am a fan of nostr see my previous post and coverage of it on thriller last year
That hype cycle doesn't apply to Nostr for the same reason it didn't apply to the Linux kernel. Both are developed by a community of programmers, so there's nothing to sell or invest in. Rather, all the money to be made is in using Linux/Nostr. And many companies pay programmers to write code for Linux, because those companies make lots of money using Linux.
However, Nostr is such a simple protocol that I doubt we will see companies paying for Nostr to be worked on in the same way as they do with Linux. Afterall, Linux is an implementation, whereas Nostr is a specification. So, if any company is going to pay Nostr developers, it's going to be for implementations of Nostr (e.g. some sophisticated library).
Another aspect is that the potential of Nostr has not even begun to be tapped yet. Most people seem to be using Nostr for micro-blogging, which is a trivial use-case. Maybe when the hype of micro-blogging wears off, Nostr developers will start looking for non-trivial use-cases for Nostr.
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As I see it as non-tech background economist it isn't even on the chart yet. I asked dozens of people between 20 and 40 years age - nobody ever heard about it. By the way: in Germany and here in Spain 99% of the people still don't have any trust in Bitcoin because they need to know who's responsible for it. Interesting, isn't it? After all these years of central bank fiat fraud...
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The miseducation of the people is real!
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Yeah and it's really one of the big mysteries of cultural evolution how progress even is possible if You take the persistence of established institutions into account. But it happens. It always happens. We are at the forefront
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We must be!
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Nostr may or may not pan out. IMO the protocol spec is starting to become a real disjointed mess and there is not enough discussion at the core on how to pull things back together. The "creator" also helped create LNURL which has seemingly been abandoned and has not had any real improvement.
With bitcoin, there is infrastructure in place for core developers to discuss things and coordinate, authors to summarize and report, and everyone can understand the state of the ecosystem. We have mailing lists, forums, newsletters, etc. Lightning sort-of has this, but not as cohesive due to diverging implementations. Nostr doesn't have any real core developer discussion at all, and the majority of the spec doesn't even have an upgrade path.
It is still early and there is hope to turn things around. But who will lead the charge?
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I agree that it might not work out. Also a fan of it and read a lot about it before it was even cool, but I'm afraid the rather inorganic explosion of traffic following Jack's flow of money and popularity might do bad to it.
I believe fiatjaf commented that nostr is in a very delicate situation right now.
Not trying to criticize it since I am hoping for a much better alternative to the currently centralized channels we have. As a messaging platform, nostr works great, especially with a private relay.
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my guess is the second dot on the graph
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