there’s always risk, but so far there’s no obvious impossibility and it’s generally true that “life finds a way”
are you more concerned about UX for mainstream users, technical scalability or something else?
Discussion
There are several issues:
- Adding relays is everything but intuitive
- The size off relays is another factor. I recently read that the Damus relay meanwhile is app. 294 GB. It's nothing that can't be solved with payments, but it's still a challenge to get most people to realize why the freemium model isn't any good.
- GDPR is an European issue, but to people living in the EU it's important: there are lot's of rule that you'll have to comply with f.i. regarding the duration of data storage, KYC regulations etc. As soon as #nostr scales it could become difficult for users within the EU to run a relay.
- also with regard to bitcoin there are many open questions: how will sovereign nation states react when they come to realize that they can't control the money...
In the end, I really hope that nostr and bitcoin prevail, but it's still a long walk
there is definitely a lot required to get from here to “the promised land” of self-sovereign freedom in communications, but the hardest thing, imo, is to get some social consensus/activation energy that people want to keep showing up, keep creating, keep building on nostr and I think we’ve got that at the moment
+ no one has seriously explored new UXes on adding/selecting relays - it’s a big area of opportunity to explore/improve UX, but we’ve only seen minimal experimentation there so far, as it becomes more important people will self-organize to attempt solutions
+ I think most people would pay if they felt they were getting enough new value, but this is just beginning. Apps are primarily Twitter clones so far. We haven’t really seen massive new types of innovative application value getting created yet. Open source software and aligned incentives of contributing to something that no one controls is pretty substantial and has never been tried. I bet developers come up with really interesting services that people are excited to pay for. Relay operators will probably find a way to get paid for the cost/value they subsidize today
+ if EU is hostile toward relay operators maybe they will primarily operate outside the EU? EU citizens can choose to connect to whatever relays they prefer even if they’re not inside national borders - this highlights a pretty important ingredient we’ve never seen before - everything in the ecosystem is in competition with everything else to serve users’ preferences
+ nostr is not tied to bitcoin, though I think it’s the most logical choice for payments - your question is one that bitcoiners have been contemplating for a long time and there’s no real answer, but we’ll get more empirical data as more people opt-in to trying it