A thought experiment:

What happens if all hosting providers ban hosting Nostr relays? Imagine they stage a false-flag attack on Nostr. Because there's too much crap going on there. Not because of what we’re talking about here, but real criminal stuff.

You’d need two groups for it: one group are the bad guys flooding the network with illegal stuff, and the other group are the "good guys" cleaning it up. But both sides actually come from the same place, the same origin. The bad guys get away with it, because they would use strong anonymization. Relays couldn't ban them fast enough, because IPs change. And we don't use any AI, do we? The point would be to create a situation where banning this technology seems totally justified.

Nostr would end up looking even worse than something like Tor, because it’s open and super easy to access.

So, they ban any kind of Nostr tech in basically every jurisdiction in the world. The West, the South, the Muslim world, Asia ... everywhere. No public repo or app store is allowed to host the code anymore. No hosting provider would be allowed to host relays, otherwise they'd risk being accused of "aiding and abetting a criminal network."

Maybe you’d still find some software on a couple of sketchy island nations, but the rest of the world would have clearly taken a stance against it. And a ton of people would jump on the bandwagon and condemn the technology because "humans just can’t handle total freedom without moderation." Influencers and people with public identities would bail like crazy, not wanting to be associated with it (understandably).

Keep in mind: the attacks would be brutal.

Because it’s not like P2P file sharing where you need special clients, and it’s not like Tor where you at least need the Tor browser. Nostr is just plain old web, accessible through any regular browser without restrictions.

So... what then? End of game? Or would we be developing new defense systems against such attacks?