Bittorrent worked.
Granted p2p note forwarding would be harder to engineer, but I’m thinking about it harder when I see this kind of trajectory…
Discussion
Bittorrent did not work any better than nostr. It still required centralized trackers and search engines. It offers ways to discover some peers with another peer but without a tracker that dies out pretty quickly.
A torrent tracker is like a nostr node.
Nostr was directly inspired by BitTorrent trackers. BitTorrent trackers are the most amazing invention in all of p2p technology. Simple made easy.
Wrong. Trackers were not like relays, they were directories of relays (coming to nostr already) seeders were more like relays, except they were all dumb and not empowered to censor shit.
Current design direction of nostr towards relays being the “brains” moves it closer to smtp / pop model than torrent.