Replying to Avatar jb55

Welcome new folks! I’ve been getting these questions a lot in the past couple of days so here we go:

1. What are zaps?

Zaps are receipts of bitcoin lightning payments to posts or profiles on nostr (the name of the underlying protocol). By attaching a lightning address to your profile via a wallet like wallet of satoshi, you can send and receive any amount of money to anyone in the world in under a second. This is all possible without any intermediaries. Its uncensorable money over an uncensorable speech protocol.

2. What are relays and why do we need them?

Relays are regular servers and regular databases. When posting notes or following users, it sends your notes/contact list/profile/etc to multiple relays at once controlled by different people. We do it this way because we believe no one should have the ability to unilaterally deplatform you.

3. How do you make money

Still trying to figure that out.
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Hydra 2y ago

Is #nostr built on the lightning network as an L2 or another public blockchain?

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nobody 2y ago

Neither. It's not a Blockchain at all. It's a protocol with a set of rules - like Email.

We all use email, but we access it through different Apps/Programs.

Nostr is the underlying infrastructure - on top of it are all the Apps (we call these Clients).

This is a a video I found helpful to conceptualize: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yIccRIEr2gQ

Built into most of these Clients is the ability to send fractional Bitcoin payments called 'Sats' via a Bitcoin L2 option called Lightning.

Crude analogy would be - it's akin to email's ability to send attachments.

https://nostr-resources.com/ this is good too.