I think you might be confused about zaps. Zaps arent sent “over nostr”. They are just regular lightning transactions, with an extra protocol for signaling to the nostr network that the transaction has occurred. It’s just adding a social element to lightning transactions. The transactions themselves haven’t changed.
Discussion
I understand that. Zaps could be implemented the same way anywhere. Damus isn’t special in that sense, Twitter could do the same. You only need to look at 90% of the the big influencers on Twitter who moved and promoted Nostr… they always say something like “it’s better there, and zaps are a motivation”. And those are just the influencers… most common folk come for the same reason, by
Nostr, and Damus especially, aren’t proof of work, they centralised in the same way shitcoins are.
Sure they’re more resistant to censorship than you average social media. But are they some bitcoin-esque decentralised? No. Therefore I don’t get why we worship this protocol so much. Sure I’m being pedantic, but people are acting like it’s going to save the world. Our standards are low it seems
Well zaps are a nostr spec, they are decentralized in that sense. If Twitter wanted to implement zaps they would have to implement nostr or somehow get lightning providers to upgrade their infrastructure to sent twitter-zaps when someone sends bitcoin on twitter. I don’t think it would be as easy as you think. The reason wallet of satoshi and alby implemented zaps is because it’s an open protocol. Twitter is not an open protocol .
I don’t understand what your complaint is, it sounds like you are changing complaints? The protocol is decentralized. Damus is an iphone way to access the data, but you can use a different client on your computer, like snort or astral. You can use amethyst on your android phone.
I think it’s neat that damus tracks the amount of lightning that a post generates.
We were discussing prisms at our meetup last night, and how nested zaps could maybe waterfall back to the original poster and also the person that shared the content.
This protocol, and the clients that access it are being built while we are using it. I think that’s pretty amazing.
H/t #[5]
🤙
Nostr is just a websocket protocol for data exchange. A twitter clone is one use case. That’s why people are excited.
You are turned of by influencer types which is valid, but you are not fully understanding the ramifications of open, censorship resistant data exchange
There’s no way #Nostr is as centralized as any shitcoin. You are comparing orange to bananas in the first place.
#Nostr is not a blockchain, does not have any token or any form of consensus.
#Nostr is a protocol for Clients and Relays to communicate:
⚡️Clients can only send 3 types of messages;
⚡️Relays can only respond 2;
And that’s it. That’s revolutionary cause it’s simple, and a Relay is analogous to a #Bitcoin node in the sense that it’s super easy and cheap to get one to yourself, and the reason there’s plenty public ones to choose from.
You fail to understand that basically nothing would want to, or even try to - because it would be impossible - be as decentralized as Bitcoin. This kind of decentralization is irreplicable social phenomenon and not necessary anyway. Conditions are non existent to ever happen again.
What we want is sufficiently decentralized - which is exactly what we get here, through the way it’s designed - to achieve what we want:
Tamper proof, resilient and censorship resistant internet.
Have you read the GitHub repo?