Nostr Web Client

it's the crypto equivalent of the photo of the newspaper, like satoshi's headline in the genesis block, proof of can't have been created before that time.

Daniel Wigton 6mo ago

Yes. Just trying to figure out if it is worth the hassle. There is some question of what event or events to choose as progenitors. If you pick your own events then they could be somewhat precalculated, giving large error bars on the time. If you pick someone else's events then it really only has guaranteed meaning to that person.

You can pick lots of events to try to give it as much meaning to as many other people as possible. Or you can specially prepare signatures for each of your friends.

I actually considered the former a few years ago as a type of scalable Blockchain. A "block fabric" that way no one needs a complete global view. It is a sort of eventually consistent data structure. You only need to be up to date with the transactions that are "local" to you. If someone tries to sell you a coin with precursor events you don't recognize. They will have to wait until you can verify them.

I still kind of like the idea, but it has storage problems. You can never prune because you may need to provide the history to some unknown distant part of the network. It would blow up in size much faster than a Blockchain.

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ᴛʜᴇ ᴅᴇᴀᴛʜ ᴏꜰ ᴍʟᴇᴋᴜ 6mo ago

nostr is basically this block fabric tho. consider the format of discussion trees. root, and parent reply, and for extra funsies, usually tagging every single person in the discussion.

but there's no logical way to determine token issuance or fungibility from such a scheme. however, discussions are a currency of sorts, or at least a way to earn it.

the real problem is about who stores it, and how you get people to use the protocol to draw the viewers, and then you have to monetise their viewership somehow. those are already solved problems for the centralised networks. i think the whole point of nostr was to eliminate the viability of that, just that most people don't really realise that was the point of it, and carry on like rockstars anyway. primal helps keep this fantasy alive.

Daniel Wigton 6mo ago

Sort of, but nostr is it in miniature and every note is a new genesis block. There is also no real way to merge branches of the discussion back together.

But you did hit on some of the problems that I didn't mention. Token issuance being a big one.

My more recent ideas solve that, but I do have a centralization problem I need to solve. My current idea is completely decentralized in a way Blockchains can never be, but like anarchy, it opens the door for local bullies to force those around them to go through them. Your local supermarket, hospital, or bank for instance could start deciding which payments they want recognize.

I may need to take my current idea and back it with Bitcoin or something. Then it just kind of ends up being Lightning all over again.

ᴛʜᴇ ᴅᴇᴀᴛʜ ᴏꜰ ᴍʟᴇᴋᴜ 6mo ago

IOTA and i think Cardano use "block tangles" and i think some space chain shit that Bram Cohen is involved with, or was that um... some sprout thing...

there has been multiple attempts at doing concurrent chains. ah yeah, ICP is another one. And arweave too. all the hype about "rollups" is about this, and Liquid is basically a kind of concurrent chain attached to bitcoin, and all those ordinals are another kind of concurrent chain attached to bitcoin.

the thing is, they don't really solve a problem that wasn't already addresed by IP, DNS and HTTP... making the data transparently redundant, is something that nostr or similar type of event protocol is uniquely capable of doing though. IPFS is also similar, in that it has a primary key based on the content of the event data. but the real challenge is making it into a "consensus"

i think the problem is, you don't need to. you just pick your data sets, replicate them, and spiders can index everything and locate it. it's not a consensus, it's just a self-mapping system.

what's already happening to nostr's kind 1 feed and associated user metadata is already sprawling into a hive of near total replicas of the same data set, at least in the short time scale.

what i find most appealing about the protocol though, is the fact it lets you build anything on top of it. except for the One True Money Ledger bitcoin. but you can build a facebook, a snapshat, an instagram, a twitter. it is just a generic, open format for the same type of data those sites work with, that is deliberately designed to be leaky, so anyone can repurpose the data if they can read it.