Nostr Web Client

i'm not a fan of "single source of truth" the meme du jour, i'm sure you get why considering that this "singularity" comes from a massive distributed system wherein every node is verifying, i get how you can call it singular but it's not singular

i know that objective is a popular concept but it's not one that we can grasp with computation or sensing devices no matter how many we have, and pretending we can is hubris and dangerous

and every time i see this meme i cringe

it is an anchor, a point of reference, it is not truth, there is no truth in mathematics or computer science, and i would appreciate it if you would not abuse the language this way, because so many people do and don't even realise how abusive it is

what i will say, however, is that consistency does not need to be absolute for a system to work

bitcoin itself depends on a consistency that sets in after about an hour, on average, to become immutable, and the nearest thing to "truth" - it is basically infeasible that anyone with computation devices within any reasonable range of what we know is out there on our planet can beat, this is the "thermodynamic" equilibrium of bitcoin that is so compelling but you don't get until you understand and watch the system continue to aggregate computation capacity

Melvin Carvalho 1y ago

in practice it's fine, because you have an observable track record that builds up with time

the only danger is RBF, but I think you can turn it off

you dont need 60 minutes to confirm because even if there's a reorg, the utxo chain remains a chain of digital signatures

now add to this the resilience of nostr, esp with public and private relays, plus ability to mirror state, with realtime updates, you can build a very good system, which is local first, but has global reach if you want it

in fact, to a degree, nostr was made to facilitate this use case, it's not something that was bolted onto nostr

then add onto that a market place of DVMs, or similar, that compete to offer services, including turing-complete web-scale smart contracts, and you have the most powerful system out there

i think the main issue is that people are not yet ready for this, they are still coming to terms with what taproot as identity, and nostr brings to the table, and advanced use cases are hard for some to see, and frankly scare others into opposing them, so much patience is required!

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Discussion

ᴛʜᴇ ᴅᴇᴀᴛʜ ᴏꜰ ᴍʟᴇᴋᴜ 1y ago

as the cost of transactions inevitably rises against the things they can pay for, this is not feasible... any anchoring system that works with the bitcoin chain has to be very very sparing, and 1 per hour seems to be kinda expensive in the million dollar per bitcoin scenario

consensus doesn't have to mean anchoring to bitcoin, and it doesn't have to be as strong as that, that is a very expensive consensus, and unique, i say it's especially unique, because it can't be replicated, Knut Svanholm has theories about it that are intuitions but it's just simple economics

the value of the data, and the decay of this value is everything

Melvin Carvalho 1y ago

The market will set a price. Market participants will make trade-offs. For example some may with you use liquid, which also has taproot. While not as secure, it offers cheaper transactions. A group of nostr users or relays could run an Element server, and so on.

ᴛʜᴇ ᴅᴇᴀᴛʜ ᴏꜰ ᴍʟᴇᴋᴜ 1y ago

yes but what is the point of a consensus for a pubsub system?

the whole point is just best effort delivery of messages to interested parties, anything else is missing the point

a mechanism for creating E2EE DMs would be much more useful direction to query in - like, so, we have these schnorr pubkeys and schnorr signatures, how can we use this with taproot style tweaks and such to make it possible to have a stateless, metadata leakproof messaging protocol

now, you answer that one and you have actually solved a real problem

ᴛʜᴇ ᴅᴇᴀᴛʜ ᴏꜰ ᴍʟᴇᴋᴜ 1y ago

note that such a solution would have bearing on the brittleness of lightning network state channels

Melvin Carvalho 1y ago

I am working on a chat system too, but I need other things in place first.

I see it the other way round. It's not a consensus system for pubsub. It's a pubsub system for consensus. Imagine global conensus, turing complete, infinite use cases, strong privacy, double spend protection, with a social aspect, and realtime updates.

That's what timechain + nostr gives you.

It's timechain + nostr. Not nostr + timechain. Hint: always has been.

ᴛʜᴇ ᴅᴇᴀᴛʜ ᴏꜰ ᴍʟᴇᴋᴜ 1y ago

nonsense

anyhow, i've been on record for a long time about how the bitcoin p2p network could use something better than the ad-hock rambling propagation pattern than it has, in order to create an intermediate staging consensus, a mempool consensus, i think i first started talking about it a year ago maybe

nostr protocol can do such a thing but it's overkill and it isn't a consensus it's just a propagation mechanism

https://arxiv.org/abs/1911.03291

this is much more like a possible thing to augment the mempool into an intermediate consensus

Melvin Carvalho 1y ago

Well this is another different idea. But it seems fine in principle. Nostr could do checkpointing, for example. Why not.

An important aspect of bitcoin is that the emission was a level playing field. That has taken 15 years of track record, and millons of proofs. We are bout 96% done.

After emitting the coins fairly and as a level playing field, much of the hard work of consensus is done, the emission part. What remains is a robust ordering system. It is possible to innovate in that space, the harder thing would be to get universial consensus.

ᴛʜᴇ ᴅᴇᴀᴛʜ ᴏꜰ ᴍʟᴇᴋᴜ 1y ago

you need to seriously study distributed systems, i mean badly, i'm not continuing this conversation, you are throwing out every single naive idea that i had 10 years ago that doesn't work

Melvin Carvalho 1y ago

What does work then? Show, dont tell.

ᴛʜᴇ ᴅᴇᴀᴛʜ ᴏꜰ ᴍʟᴇᴋᴜ 1y ago

if such a thing existed we would be talking about it, i never claimed to have the solution i just said that none of these things make one

Melvin Carvalho 1y ago

Then it's just an appeal to authority from someone that has neither designed, built or used such a system, saying that something cant be done. Thanks for your thoughts, but we can agree to differ on that one.