This post may read as a bit ignorant, but that's okay. When I'm stumped and figuring things out, I write. The writing (a) helps organize my thinking, (b) allows for anyone reading to clarify, and (c) may help any other fellow ignoramuses.
Today I saw an article about "Nostr Assets": https://www.cryptopolitan.com/nostr-assets-halts-deposits-surgingactivity/
The "Nostr" part is what caught my attention. The blurb above and subsequent tldr; in the article confused me, though. Some terms and phrases in particular threw me off:
- "Nostr Assets", huh?
- "on the Lightning Network"
- suspension of deposits
- suspended a third time this month
- unprecedented surge
- immediate maintenance
- "Fair Mint" launch
- "previous airdrop"
Okay, wait, I have questions. In no particular order...
- What's this suspension business? And immediate maintenance? Nostr has been working fine.
- Suspension deposits? You don't need to deposit anything to use Nostr.
- And "on the Lightning Network", what's that? Nostr is a separate beast from Bitcoin. They love each other, but they're two separate systems.
- What is this "Nostr Assets" anyway? It must not be Nostr, the protocol.
- And what in the world is this talk of "Fair Mint" and airdop.
Let's dig.
Quickly, I started to think there must be some type of confusion on my part regarding wording and naming. "Nostr Assets" must be something other than Nostr. A search led to https://doc.nostrassets.com/ which seems "official" for Nostr Assets, as best I can tell. That page sorta helps me, also rather confuses me further. What I conclude, using my chipmunk brain, is:
a. Nostr Asset Protocol (NAP) is a different critter than the Nostr protocol (Nostr).
b. NAP uses Bitcoin Taproot tech. NAP/Taproot essentially bridges between Nostr and Bitcoin to allow for deeper functionality. No change or fork is needed, yet, more things can be done with Nostr using NAP. As I understand, this is very similar to Bitcoin Ordinals (which also use Taproot to do what they do).
The Nostr Assets Protocol Medium has more info: https://nostrassets.medium.com/
Back to the original article that I saw, the parts about "Fair Mint" and "airdrop" were/are a bit worrisome. First, when I read someone pushing "fair", a red flag pops up in my head that says, "I want someone else to do more so I can get more, that's fair." That aside, I have heard of things like a, "Fair launch" of tokens. Generally, this means things like: it's announced up front, anyone can participate, there is no stupid pre-mine, there is no percent reserved for founders, emission is hard-coded and transparent, tokens are distributed based on something like...work.
What's more, I wondered, "There is no Nostr token, what launch are were talking about here?" I still don't know the answer to that question. But, it seems that the NAP somehow allows for token creation, somewhere. Again, this sounds to like Ordinals, like BRC-20 tokens. Maybe I'm wrong, but that's what I see.
Regarding "airdrop", again, my red flag jumps up in alert. I've never heard of an airdrop with Nostr. My "seems scammy" hairs on the back of my neck tingled. Airdrops usually come after a great big pre-mine minting of some coin. Combined with the idea of "deposits" being suspended, it sounds very questionable.
I guess, I'm mixed on reading this. I like innovation and increased abilities sound like a good thing to me. But, parts of this sound incredibly questionable.
If anyone can add insight in comments to help me try to figure this out, I'd be interested to learn.