If my bitcoin seed haven’t been compromised for years why would nostr 🔑 will be compromised? Right now we are not there yet with the key management but I don’t think that’s going to be a problem in the future.
Discussion
Bitcoin seeds (when stored well) are much more secure, assuming they’re offline.
Nostr keys are “hot” in pretty much every circumstance. Perhaps there’s a way to generate a nostr keypair offline with dice (I have no idea) or with a HWW-style random number generator…? But even so, it would need to be able to sign so many activities on a regular basis…
But then again this gets me thinking - a personal “yubikey” style nostr signing device for most digital activities. You could choose to have multiple if desired. It could serve as an ID (for work, or apartment access, etc.), or it could be anon and used for payments. Or any other permutation. It’s an interesting idea.
But your initial question was about a universal *client*, not a universal keypair, which comes back to the issue that if the client is compromised, your keys might be too.
I.e. your seed phrase is fine in your coldcard, but if you import that seed to BlueWallet and then your phone gets hacked, bye-bye money.
Ava, I’m curious to hear your perspective - “honey pot” was your first reply, & you’re the cybersecurity professional, not me 😉
hot keys for sure. i replied above. and yes a yubikey style signing device is being discussed rn. i spoke with vitor about it and have seen a repository on github attempting something similar. it can't get here soon enough imo.
Every message you send in nostr is signed with a private key. I’m assuming you’re not signing that much with your bitcoin seed.
Lightning keys are hot which is why you should only keep as much as you’re willing to lose in lightning.
Another reason is privacy. You don’t really want to associate your life savings with your social identity.
I know that ! My point is that you can generate your nsec offline and allow sign events like for few months. nostr:npub1tv8gmfhalwnxxquxjzeh6gtdsdz6vg7vx0s3rt7s7uuw6aujh32qn77wn2 had some sort of this idea using seedsigner back in the days
Unless I’m missing something, you can’t just “allow” sign events with the key offline. Maybe there’s some delegation protocol, but you need access to the nsec to sign every message. Signing can’t happen without access to the private key.
The closest we have is something like the VLS (validating lightning signer), which is a dedicated, internet enabled signing device that supports encoding permissions about limits on what the device will sign. Unfortunately it still falls victim to the problem that your private keys are still exposed to the internet.