Replying to Avatar Ava

I have been using Nostr for two years now, and the lack of a NIP-09 (event delete) or its equivalent standard on Nostr is, more than ever, a significant privacy and safety issue built into the current version of the protocol.

Snowden warned us of the dangers of a permanent record. Have we not learned anything?

Nostr, as it is right now, is a permanent record that seeks to tie all of your apps and your coin transactions to one key pair.

If that key pair is ever compromised, EVERYTHING is compromised.

If you accidentally doxx yourself, you are HOSED.

It's bad OPSEC. And it sounds like a honeypot waiting to happen.

Amber (event signer) is a decent workaround, but it has not passed a third-party security audit, and I still believe a parent/child key system is the way to go as it does not expand your attack surface by having to depend on a third party to keep all of your Nostr business safe.

Now back to event deletion...

The protocol is the protocol. Relays must use the protocol to participate in the network.

If the protocol requires honoring event deletion requests to participate in the network, then Nostr will have avoided this festering security and safety issue.

If certain #Nostr devs don't stop saying universal post deletes can't happen because of xyz (insert biased limiting belief/excuse here), and start figuring out how it can be done... it's a protocol design that's dead in the water to anything but mostly nameless, faceless anons.

The future is privacy-first, client-side computing, not relays. The clock is ticking.

Having the event is useful of course, but I don't think it solves the underlying privacy issues because relays still can decide to keep the "deleted" notes, secretly or publicly. And non-tech newbies gonna see the button and think that it works like a delete button on Twitter.

I really like the idea that people have to think about what they publish on Nostr.

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Discussion

Where posts are full of embarrassing ideas or typos, deleting is a sledgehammer to crack a nut. Surely an easy solution is, replying to yourself and putting in a disclaimer or explaining yourself better. That subscribes to the idea of owning mistakes and showing growth.

But where an error is disastrous, accidentally posting a private key, that needs some sort of consensus from relays to delete or within apps, some way of parsing and flagging before a final publish. Like where say URLs aren't recognised on some forums etc