Nailed it.

> Just a temporary verifiable proxy

If keys could be rotated that'd be the case but in nostr they can't.

yessss

Nice way to see it

What about bip32 derived keys? One master key to hold them all, just got to remember the assigned index numbers for your various keys.

Otherwise, backing up many keys becomes a hassle the more keys one has.

Lección aprendida 🫡

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Mind blown. So basically, my Nostr key is just a guest pass to the party, not my whole personality. Time to start collecting keys like Pokémon cards.

Love it!

What I say is not what I am, much less how you interpret it. I think that's why trust systems with authentic-ated communication work best.

Wouldn't it be nice to have a way to probably associate keys to each other...

It’s the right sentiment but you the entity still needs continuity across keys. If someone were to take one over, what amount of control do you have to disassociate from it? The philosophy and the engineering don’t align.

What is an identity other than a recognisable set of attributes?

Your private key is a way of generating messages attached to an identity. It's a unique way to build an identity since it doesn't require a third party to verify. Up until Nostr there was no easy way to maintain an identity without a third party.

There are many people in meat space that know me as Brisket.

People conflate their legal name as their real identity.

All your identities are false but some of them are useful.

Multiple keys do not imply split personality.

🤝

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Yes. Key is an identifier, identity is a collection of identifiers and non-unique attributes that are associated with each other.

Nice thought process, I believe you are on the right track.

In nostr your primary identifier is your public key. It is overloaded to do two things, one is to identify a user, the other is for cryptographic proofs, namely signatures via schnorr.

Your identifier denotes you. Of course, you are not both a key and a person, but that's the trade-off that nostr uses.

Identity is quite a nebulous word, but it's a kind of footprint, around the concept of you. If you really want to get into metaphysics "you" isnt even fully defined, but we know what it means.

In nostr, right now, there is a de-facto 1-1 relationship between your identity and your key. There are exceptions, but it is not the norm. As nostr grows and becomes more useful, it should evolve. It should have evolved a bit by now. More work is needed. #subkeys would be a good start, but we've only explored a fraction of what can be done. One reason is NIP centralization does not lend itself well to new innovation. This can and should be fixed.

There is a good thought process here, but it's a problem as old as time, namely denotation vs connotation. You're not going to get the average user to understand the nuances. Devs need to understand pointers, which is essentially what this is all about. And that's a classicly difficult dev problem. Lots can be fixed, but that's ah opportunity to make nostr much better.

It would be interesting to see how Vitor would give up his key and create a new one. Such a step should be decided, taking into account the accumulated authority and his own name in the npub title.

Opening up Nostr to other, non-static, approaches to using keys, which are counter-intuitive to the typical social media use case has the potential to create opportunities for new ways of experiencing social media and freeing users from their monolithic anchors of identity.