What is Nostr built on? How does it work? Is it crypto?
Discussion
Nostr is not a “crypto” nor a blockchain. It is a protocol made for relaying information in a decentralized fashion. There is no nostr token, think of it like the internet, TCP (TCIP?) is the protocol layer for how the internet works, no one owns it, they can just build on it, no one owns nostr, people can just build on it
Nope it’s just built on the basic functionality of computers and networks.
When you post something, you send it to those generous relay operators, who are storing all of our posts and follows etc.
Then your client (Damus, snort, etc) acts kinda like a web browser. It asks for info from the relays and displays it for you in a nice format.
There is cryptography in that posts are signed by your private key. But there’s no “crypto” in the sense of shitcoins
A good starting point is the main Github page.
Happy to help make sense of anything if it sounds like gibberish.
As others mentioned, it is not tied to any cryptocurrency or blockchain. Apps can be made without any mention of Bitcoin at all, we're just the biggest co-hort of early adopters, so many of the clients have been built by the Bitcoin community or have catered to us.
Thank you!
Why Nostr Matters
My favorite analogy is email. Even though there are lots of differences and nuances, i think it makes it easy to understand. A communication protocol on the internet, that can be built on top of. Think of your clients on nostr like yahoo, gmail, aol, etc. you can access the email protocol with any of those “clients” and send messages across clients. But on nostr, instead of sending a message to a predetermined recipient, it’s sent to a global timeline based on your relays. Another difference is that your email service stores your emails/data, but here it’s the relays that act in this manner, and the relays are independent from the clients.
This is extremely oversimplified, but I think it’s a good big picture view.