Nostr Web Client

Is Nostr dependent on bitcoin?

nope. it's a totally independent idea to support free speech. though it does tickle some similar instincts in people

If you drop by Nostr even casually, it can often feel like you’re crashing a bitcoiner dinner party. The memes, the FOSS devs, the topics of conversation often seem to overlap with bitcoin culture. Is this just a case of “birds-of-a-feather” or is there more to it?

Nostr is an open protocol. It’s independent of the use or existence of any cryptocurrency. It uses cryptography, but nothing super fancy there. It’s actually kinda basic, tbh.

So why did so many bitcoiners show up? A simple explanation might be that fiatjaf, the creator of Nostr, was a bitcoiner and brought like-minded people along. But I think there’s more to it than just the initial seed.

The critical feature which Nostr gets right is that you can create an account just by doing math on your own. Of course, you can use a little program on your own computer to help do this math (i.e., creating public-private key pairs). This is cryptography at its best — a tool that empowers the individual.

You don’t have to go to a 3rd-party-issuer to create an account for you. You don’t have to subscribe to a particular cryptocurrency or political ideology. You could identify as a libertarian, anarchist, democrat, republican, labor party, or you may not accept any political labels at all.

On Nostr, you’re welcome to even dislike the concept of bitcoin/cryptocurrencies altogether. As long as you have a curiosity about, or interest in freedom of speech you may find Nostr to be a good place for you to share your thoughts. On Nostr, your ideas and your words are published without being subject to anyone’s permission. The separation of power between clients and data stores is what enforces your rights. It’s baked into the architecture. Not promised and granted to you by a demagogue. That’s the whole idea.

Justin (shocknet) 1y ago

Obligatory contrarian Lightning Maxi take coming in hot...

Nostr's roots are as an iteration on how GUN was used in ShockWallet and Lightning Pages, as a means to have a web-friendly overlay network to connect Lightning to WebApps

This continues to the primary usecase for Nostr today even as a leaner and more flexible successor to GUN.

Users are funneled through the Lightning ecosystem for connecting LN to WebApps: Zap Signaling, NWC, kind 21000, accessing sat monetized services, and and more, is why any users are here to begin with. Heck, even these notes are about Lightning.

Without the network effect of Lightning as a native payments layer, Nostr its just another combination of websockets and json.

Anything that it's capable of is only in context of it making better Lightning Apps, because key-based identities, webservers, and json aren't otherwise novel.

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Discussion

Melvin Carvalho 1y ago

Gun a very different project. I know it well. Nostr is a cut down version of SSB. Martti came over from gun to nostr, too.

Justin (shocknet) 1y ago

Not very familiar with SSB but im assuming it doesn't use web relays, that's the key feature inherited from our use of GUN

Enabling apps that work in any browser and solve the networking issue is and ultimately what enables distribution where lightning can't reach.. keys and data only matter where they can be delivered to

David King 1y ago

I appreciate the contrarian take. I don’t have as much background on the full history of nostr — so thanks for contributing that.

I wrote what I did because some people look at nostr as tribalist around bitcoiners and I just wanted to say that the beauty to me is that it’s a different layer of technology that’s not closely coupled to a cryptocurrency belief — at least not today.

However, I don’t think the incentives of nostr will work long term without internet native money. At some point relays need to get compensated for the resources they contribute. Bitcoin is the only reasonable way to do this, imo.

I also don’t think advertising-based business models will work given the protocol structure, so again, we need bitcoin to help mediate the value exchange among people who create/consume on the protocol.

Justin (shocknet) 1y ago

Yep the death of advertising is my thesis in lightning.video, the incentives of users paying for hosting are a micro level are much better.. nostr as the overlay for that transaction metadata is going to reshape the Internet

David King 1y ago

yup, we’ve all gotta be the customers!

Have you explored recommendations in the video context? seems like a needlessly polarizing topic. I suspect it’ll be important to have something like that before video will become a mainstream usecase on nostr.

Justin (shocknet) 1y ago

Kinda, I think the first page you see (discover) when you land there was a waste of time for us... we did it because it's what people expected to see when visiting a video site not because it adds any real value. The overwhelming majority of our traffic is direct links to content or channel pages.

I plan on replacing it with a landing page that better explains the value prop of the site.

My long range thoughts on the direction of discovery is that ultimately everyone is a curator, who you follow should ultimately dictates what you discover, and that apps will support bring your own algorithms that recommend stuff from your extended social graph.

This won't be possible in a performant/scalable way with existing nostr clients that directly talk to the relays unfortunately. I'm hoping we'll get time to work on a indexer with reproducible results that would enable it... Once we do we'll inject it into LVa and finally get that fully Nostrfied