Excellent points!

I liked your post on democratizing relays, so we have lots of “escape hatches” if the big relays start censoring. If my grandmother can download and run a relay, and a person in a third-world village with and old phone can run a relay then Nostr wins as freedom tech.

Also paid relays sound like a solution to keep small free relays in business. The tech giants will always give stuff to us for free, because they want our data, like Google and Microsoft give away “free” email that they can read and censor. Most people will use free, but if some relays charge a few sats they could turn running relays in to a small business.

They could even charge to run “blinded” relays in which there is some encryption which doesn’t allow the relay runner to see who is using their service. This protects them from the very human desire not to help those we think are bad people, and also gives them plausible deniability to governments. “I would love to censor for you, but you see my system can’t even see who is using my relay so I have no means to censor.”

I don’t even know if this is possible with a social network-like protocol, but it would be cool if some censorship protection like this could be built in.

I consider myself a “Bitcoin maximalist” but I’ll admit that I play with Monero sometimes for that very reason. The entire Monero chain is giant question mark. There is no way for someone running a Monero miner or node to ever know if the transactions they are processing are funding terrorism or funding worthwhile charities. In bitcoin we must be constantly vigilant that the nodes and miners aren’t vulnerable to regulatory capture because the whole blockchain is visible to them. Of course every design choice has trade offs…

I’m not technically knowledgeable enough to answer these questions, but we do need to be asking them while Nostr is still young and flying under the radar.

Thoughts from my morning coffee and drive around:

Do we have highly resilient, scalable relays? Is #nostr being held together by sticky tape and bandaids?

Democratize relay hosting. It should be really really, REALLY easy.

But also, "productionise" high availability, high scale relay hosting.

& Finally, find time to work on the above 😂

#relays #decentralize #coffee

I’m still not sure I understand how relay nodes are incentivized on Nostr.

I’m sure some people will run them just because they love the protocol and want to enable it (I would try if I was more technical).

But it seems that as Nostr grows the data and processing needs of relays will increase, right? This seems like it will push out the “Uncle Joe” who runs a relay out of altruism, and leave relays in the hands of the companies and apps making enough money off Nostr usage to make running a relay worthwhile.

Big corporations owning the relay structure seems like an easy target for regulatory capture…

Which would make the “decentralization” of Nostr a lot more like the etherium network than bitcoin network. Sure it’s decentralized, but the deciders are few and their interests alight more with the government than with users.

Do any technically more knowledgeable people who are reading know of a solution that protects relays from corporate capture and keeps them in the hands of end users?

The data on this thing is going to be a lot more than the bitcoin blockchain will ever hold... How do we keep cypherpunks with raspberry pies in charge?

air-gapped kubernetes