Nostr Web Client

Heh, I applied for a $20k grant to do a proper analysis of Nostr's decentralization on Saturday. Same idea (and similar cost) as my recent L2 Covenants article. Only took them one business day to reject it (took them 6 weeks to reject my grant request to keep OpenTimestamps running).

I'm not surprised. I strongly suspect there isn't much good to say about Nostr's decentralization and I hear OpenSats is funding a bunch of Nostr. Nostr needs a serious redesign.

Peter Todd 1y ago

Re: the OpenTimestamps grant request, the problem is right now while the protocol scales in theory, the backend does not. It would be quite easy for a bad actor to DoS attack OpenTimestamps out of existence because I simply can't throw servers at the problem: the backend code just doesn't scale.

I need funding to put in a bunch of hours to fix this. So far, no luck in finding that; OpenSats is one of a few sources I've tried.

Frankly, I suspect that there isn't actually much interest in time-stamping.

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Discussion

Peter Todd 1y ago

Ironically this reply guys are a really nice example of a problem with Nostr's decentralization claims...

nostr:nevent1qqswwej6zrtr7au8h5qk3ptuzfeshzvvm6nmqfyg77qpq6utpu7p6rgpz4mhxue69uhhyetvv9ujuerpd46hxtnfduhsygq3rq8vzf6xwk7xcfmev9trx44yl7jejzvcyty24xqq0rxthyj82upsgqqqqqqszrcew8

Brunswick 1y ago

Do you know of an article that describes the concern you and nostr:nprofile1qqsrhuxx8l9ex335q7he0f09aej04zpazpl0ne2cgukyawd24mayt8gprdmhxue69uhhyetvv9ujuam9wd6x2unwvf6xxtnrdakj7qgnwaehxw309amk7apww468smewdahx2tckuej4c have about nostr's lack of decentralization and what other systems to compare it with that meet the standard you are applying to consider it sufficiently decentralized?

AU9913 10mo ago

What does the reply bots have to do with Decentralization?

the axiom 1y ago

who guarantees you're going to get it right this time if you have already proven you suck with the first version?

Leo Wandersleb 1y ago

What have you built and gotten perfect from the start lately? But nice roast.

vinney...axkl 10mo ago

Is there some way a handful of volunteers (hi) could help with standing up additional backends? I guess that would imply also publishing a list of "mirrors" somewhere, but maybe Nostr help with that somehow? ...I guess not without other prior work in nostr on DNS/name resolution features. Hm

Peter Todd 10mo ago

Good news: Simple Proof has promised me an initial $20k of funding to work on OpenTimestamps.

So far I've partially fixed the scaling issue. I rewrote Riccardo Cassata's Foxglove timestamp request aggregator in modern Rust (the previous version didn't even compile anymore).

https://github.com/opentimestamps/foxglove

Foxglove is now running live on both my Alice and Bob calendars.

This means that I can now scale timestamp _creation_ by throwing servers at the problem. So if someone tries to DoS attack the OpenTimestamps calendars, given enough money to run extra servers, you'll (probably) at least be able to create new time-stamps.

Timestamp _verification_ still has a significant scaling problem that needs to be fixed, and this will be a significantly harder challenge to implement. But I'm making progress at least.

nostr:nevent1qqsfp6cjwn7k73jn3merxhd6qz2g7zysga3krkne0yfnkv8jyh4xw4cpz9mhxue69uhkummnw3ezuamfdejj7q3qej493cmun8y9h3082spg5uvt63jgtewneve526g7e2urca2afrxqxpqqqqqqzljtltl