I'd say it's a better scenario than "prove your encryption algorithm is secure", although still hard (to prove). The former is essentially impossible but as you say "test of time" at least moves you probabilistically towards proof. The latter "prove that the system is censorship resistant", I would say, is better, even if not possible to define fully formally, and both of those things are because "the censor" is not a clear concept. There are certain powers that may have the ability to censor with the threat of violence, in different geographies, different times, different corporate entities etc. And they are capricious: they might ignore nostr for 4 years and then suddenly be 100% focused on it. So it's only better than the encryption case in that, when the attack really comes, it will give very clear evidence whether there is an effective censorship resistance or not, but that attack may not come for a long time (or never, also possible if nostr is not hugely successful).
Discussion
I think I get what you're saying. So if I'm to summarize in my own words:
We can't really *prove* censorship resistance because different groups have different censorship capabilities, but we can think it through a bit and game theory it out.
Nostr was created to combat *platform* censorship, like Twitter/X banning a sitting president or dissidents. This works well because platforms are only really able to censor within their own infrastructure. They can't reach out and control the rest of the TCP/IP network at large.
But if a *state* wanted to censor, like China and their great firewall, they could crawl the network, assemble a massive list of nostr relay IP addresses, and carpet ban them all at once. Making it very difficult/unrealistic for Nostr users to reconnect and communicate.
If Nostr is to become censorship resistant at the state level, we need relays more like TOR that can be truly anonymous (both location and operator). But the trade-off is that they are slow, low-bandwidth, and not great for the use cases like social media.
Good point to compare with a platform. What I'm really saying is just that: yes, a set of (changing occasionally) relays is clearly superior in cens. res. over a single corporate platform, but it's not really enough; say there are 4 really popular relays, a censor attacking them is enough to make nostr not work very well. Even maybe 10 instead of 4, you could imagine it being effective. *Killing* a protocol like nostr, totally, is not viable - it's for sure decentralized enough to stay alive. But I'm saying that in practice it can be heavily damaged if relays are all clearnet and/or the operators are threatenable.
(And it's worse, arguably: if you can convince several "main" relay operators to block an account or message, you might be able to convince basically all of them, under some variant of public pressure. Only a fully anonymous operator is immune to that pressure. But I admit that at this point, I'm setting the bar a bit too high!)
Makes sense. Totally agree. From my point of view we have three options:
1. Make nostr more about the self-validating event structure rather than transportation method. Normalize sending nostr events over different channels, like Tor relays or bluetooth like Samiz ( https://github.com/KoalaSat/samiz )
2. Find more incentives to run more relays, scaling out rather than up, more smaller relays. Harder to censor entirely if we have hundreds of thousands of relays and clients are good at crawling to find the right ones ( i.e. outbox model https://www.whynostr.org/post/8yjqxm4sky-tauwjoflxs/ )
3. Instead of focusing on censorship resistance, Nostr focuses on something it is already very good at - data interoperability. Connecting lots of data to each other, making it useful across a number of apps, unsilo-ing the web.
While number 3 doesn't really address censorship resistance, I can see a scenario where Nostr uses this peace-time (where nobody is being censored) to become so valuable censoring it would cost more than it is worth. Like if a government today tried to shut down or censor the Internet, it would have massive economic costs to a large chunk of the economy, being so unpopular it could potentially stir an uprising.