Excellent points!

I liked your post on democratizing relays, so we have lots of “escape hatches” if the big relays start censoring. If my grandmother can download and run a relay, and a person in a third-world village with and old phone can run a relay then Nostr wins as freedom tech.

Also paid relays sound like a solution to keep small free relays in business. The tech giants will always give stuff to us for free, because they want our data, like Google and Microsoft give away “free” email that they can read and censor. Most people will use free, but if some relays charge a few sats they could turn running relays in to a small business.

They could even charge to run “blinded” relays in which there is some encryption which doesn’t allow the relay runner to see who is using their service. This protects them from the very human desire not to help those we think are bad people, and also gives them plausible deniability to governments. “I would love to censor for you, but you see my system can’t even see who is using my relay so I have no means to censor.”

I don’t even know if this is possible with a social network-like protocol, but it would be cool if some censorship protection like this could be built in.

I consider myself a “Bitcoin maximalist” but I’ll admit that I play with Monero sometimes for that very reason. The entire Monero chain is giant question mark. There is no way for someone running a Monero miner or node to ever know if the transactions they are processing are funding terrorism or funding worthwhile charities. In bitcoin we must be constantly vigilant that the nodes and miners aren’t vulnerable to regulatory capture because the whole blockchain is visible to them. Of course every design choice has trade offs…

I’m not technically knowledgeable enough to answer these questions, but we do need to be asking them while Nostr is still young and flying under the radar.