Replying to Avatar Vivek

Too late to ask but I am wondering how the private, encrypted chats fit into the #nostr ecosystem.

On one hand, we don't allow editing notes. We even celebrate that any note cannot be deleted in a guaranteed way. These things show auditability as a feature of nostr. Auditability prevents bad behaviour.

On the other hand, we allow private 1:1 chats where no one knows what happened. This is not auditable by anyone including relay operators. So bad stuff can possibly happen using DMs and chats.

If my understanding is correct, censorship-resistance is the highest priority in nostr, closely followed by transparency (it's all out in the open.) to discourage bad actors.

How do private chats fit in here?

#nostr #confused #musings
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iru@localhot $_ 2y ago

I don’t see that as a problem. On the other hand it must be noted that while the chats are encrypted the metadata is open to see. Anyone logging with your public key can see that you’ve sent private messages to person B. They can’t see the contents but they know you’ve contacted that person and apparently most of the times is enough to incriminate you. I’m sure there are people working on making chats more private but as of now please refrain from wrong activities on nostr private messages!

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Vivek 2y ago

Thanks for the response 🙏

With the ability to generate n number of identities (keys) it would not amount to anything as anyone who does bad stuff will do from a new key.

I am confused about this whole aspect of fitment with nostr at the moment

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Freakoverse 2y ago

Oh, ok.

Someone can get your npub key and see who you are DMing/PMing, but they can never see the content of those messages because they're encrypted with either side of each party's nsec private key.

nostr:note1lfhynx8f7adzptan275vzam79v82ga2dnchy772c6493l2qzcyrsmeakz8