yes, I was talking to someone who claimed that nostr can be censored by ICANN because nostr relays "must" (according to him) have an ICANN-registered domain name, and when a device tries to look up the corresponding IP address, ICANN may simply refuse to say what it is. I told him that relays don't need a domain name, they work fine with a raw ip address, so he asked me to prove it, which is why I did so.

And it really is a cool feature of nostr, imo. It would be neat to see a client designed with the assumption that relays are just random ip addresses, shared with followers via nprofile strings, such that the only time a user interacts with them directly is if they are replacing one that goes down.

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It’s a very cool feature and we probably need an ip resolver on nostr. The idea is that every relay has a pubkey and they send an event to say theirs ips.

ICANN censorship is very very rare as it is. The moment "they" start doing that on the regular they open pandoras box and undermine the whole thing. Not saying it is impossible or it won't happen, but when we are at that stage i would not worry about DNS, i would worry about deeppacked inspection and/or just an outright permissioned intranet instead of the internet.

All of which are not indications you need better fancier cypherpunk tech, but that you are behind on your hanging quota and it is time to enlarge your pile of skulls