If people have to pay to post, nostr is dead. If there is a price tag associated with speech, then it's not free speech.
nostr:nprofile1qqsq3ppke5pel7ysw3rgl5e8lt8ky7zwavm5jrs2zx9tnu2vn5nydnqtnjel6 immediately asks the most important question imo. Do we ultimately need "pay to post" incentives? Will this be solved by other emergent business models (as we're already starting to see from companies like nostr:nprofile1qyx8wumn8ghj7cnjvghxjmcpz4mhxue69uhk2er9dchxummnw3ezumrpdejqqgzn9kpsmllqnsf7wh5tz3wgy4cclsftqqplv8tpayrhwgw8llunevgnmdf3 ). My intuition is that other business models will subsidize and keep the network sufficiently decentralized (ie enough relays storing notes).
I also think that Nostr is more about the identity layer and ability to find peers or other communities via relay rendezvous points, at which point you can use whatever transport layer you want.
But we'll see... Probably the biggest open question in my mind. Wdyt?
Discussion
Free as in freedom not free beer
Is there such thing as a free post?
How much did that comment cost you?
Phone/computer, internet, data packet transmission and storage, time, energy, etc.
There’s no such thing as a free lunch
And the time you took to transpose the text in the comment is worth more than all of those things combined. So if you want to be pedantic then fine. We're talking nano sats here man. It takes more energy to walk to the kitchen and get a glass of water out of the fridge than it takes to transmit and store a few bytes of data.
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