Great answer thanks. Yea, I was wondering if it was similar to Satoshi piecing together several different innovations to make Bitcoin. But it seems like it was more of a need to be filled and someone (fiatjaf) figured out how to do it.
I’ll take a crack at this. I’m sure others will correct me if I’m wrong.
Like Satoshi did with Bitcoin, nostr:npub180cvv07tjdrrgpa0j7j7tmnyl2yr6yr7l8j4s3evf6u64th6gkwsyjh6w6 used existing technologies (websockets and JSON) in a novel way.
He chose a simple and fairly rigid data structure in events and chose a paradigm for relays which is (or seems to me) inspired by bitcoin. Dumb relays and smart clients.
For the network to be decentralized, the barrier to running a relay has to be as low as feasible. Like running a Bitcoin node.
Their simple data structure makes it extremely easy for developers to build applications which handle Nostr events.
