Replying to Avatar Manbyt

What I don’t understand about the invention of Nostr is;

What was possible that wasn’t five, ten years ago?

What did fiatjaf figure out that wasn’t apparent before?

#asknostr
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Glenn 2y ago

I’ll take a crack at this. I’m sure others will correct me if I’m wrong.

Like Satoshi did with Bitcoin, nostr:npub180cvv07tjdrrgpa0j7j7tmnyl2yr6yr7l8j4s3evf6u64th6gkwsyjh6w6 used existing technologies (websockets and JSON) in a novel way.

He chose a simple and fairly rigid data structure in events and chose a paradigm for relays which is (or seems to me) inspired by bitcoin. Dumb relays and smart clients.

For the network to be decentralized, the barrier to running a relay has to be as low as feasible. Like running a Bitcoin node.

Their simple data structure makes it extremely easy for developers to build applications which handle Nostr events.

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Manbyt 2y ago

Great answer thanks. Yea, I was wondering if it was similar to Satoshi piecing together several different innovations to make Bitcoin. But it seems like it was more of a need to be filled and someone (fiatjaf) figured out how to do it.

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fiatjaf 2y ago

Not really. Satoshi had multiple innovative insights and created a real innovation while piecing together several pieces. All I did was to claim that a dumb idea that added nothing new could actually work in practice.

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Glenn 2y ago

Too modest. Some dumb ideas can change the world.