312 sats \ 11 replies \ @k00b 22 May \ parent \ on: Nostr is not decentralized nor censorship-resistant nostr
I think the honest is answer is that it’s unclear whether it’s young or designed in a way that causes it to inherently centralize. It could be either and it could be both.
The argument for it not inherently tending to centralization depends on there being at some future date many many relays. Nothing about the design guarantees or strongly biases it that way though. It mostly just allows for there being many relays which is presumed to be enough to cause it to happen.
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331 sats \ 2 replies \ @k00b 22 May
An interesting thought experiment: imagine bitcoin's price didn't appreciate and there was no mining subsidy or tx fees paid to miners as part of the protocol. How decentralized would bitcoin be? It could be decentralized and censorship resistant if many miners found their own way to pay for the energy and equipment to mine, or did it for goodwill. It could have many wallets and L2's if non-miners were also intrinsically motivated to make them. In such a case the protocol doesn't need to change, merely the people do.
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243 sats \ 0 replies \ @elvismercury 22 May
I forget if it was Adam Smith or Russ Roberts, but one of them said something like: any scheme that requires a new kind of man is doomed to fail. This seems like that.
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52 sats \ 0 replies \ @k00b 22 May
All of that said, it might not matter if relays are mostly centralized. I'm still super excited about nostr because the identities are decentralized and that's where most of nostr's awesomeness comes from IMO.
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115 sats \ 2 replies \ @om 22 May
Despite the initial cocky stance of @fiatjaf that "it works because it's not P2P", I think that this article and the emergence of rebroadcasters prove the exact opposite. It is very possible that in the future P2P networks would emerge such that every node of such a network could be used as a relay and they would all give the same results.
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315 sats \ 1 reply \ @justin_shocknet 22 May
It working due to not being p2p has nothing to do with rebroadcasting, but that relays are literally web servers with SSL certificates and reachability. As such Nostr works in browsers where it's needed, also the "peers" being clients don't communicate with each other, they communicate as client-server infrastructure.
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0 sats \ 0 replies \ @om 23 May
I believe "not P2P" refers not to clients not communicating with each other (which is fairly common) but relays not communicating with each other. And that creates problems because relays are out of sync. Rebroadcasting is one way to address the issue.
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94 sats \ 4 replies \ @026180d3a3 22 May
I think domain names are designed to move things toward centralization for the simple reason of discovery and retention.
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115 sats \ 3 replies \ @k00b 22 May
They do tend to cause gravity to form around certain names more than it would if names didn't exist. But, names exist because people want to know things by name and share them by name.
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42 sats \ 2 replies \ @026180d3a3 22 May
Sure. But that convenience comes at an easily manipulated cost that totally subverts that purpose.
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226 sats \ 1 reply \ @k00b 22 May
So we need a solution that gives people the things they want in a way that isn't easily manipulated.
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100 sats \ 0 replies \ @026180d3a3 22 May
I'd replace "want" with "are searching for" but yes.
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