the pressure...

Value for value is alive and well on Nostr.

pretty sure this is the future of funding content

Thank you sir.

Are Paid Relays a Shitcoin?

Last night on Nostr Spaces, we discussed potential implications of paid relays. I believe we Nostriches all understand that paid relays are needed for 1) to pay for the service that we're using as nothing should be free 2) relay operators need funds to pay for relay hardware infrastructure and 3) to thwart spammers.

#[0] said that he thought that paid relays were Shitcoins. What did he mean?

With a Shitcoin, anyone can create one. There is no Proof-of-Work in this process. The creator makes promises about their current offerings or future offerings. And lastly, they want payment and take user's money.

#[1] mentioned that he believed paid relays should operator on a Web-of-Trust model. What does this mean?

Do you know the relay operator? Do they have an older or well known Nostr public key? Did they previously run a free relay? Do reputable people use and recommend this relay? It's fairly easy now to form a Web-of-Trust with well known actors in this space and community.

As we move forward, we do need to watch for scams. A relay and operator could appear out of nowhere. A relay could promise the moon on speed and resources. That relay and relay operator could also disappear in a day or a week or a month, after they've reached their fund raising goal.

Right now, using Nostream to operate a paid relay at least requires a ZBD developer account. This is right now behind a gatekeeper. #[2] needs to approve relay API access. This will get easier in the future. In the future, Nostream will work with other providers and I would assume even end up working with your own node. In the future, we'll need to be more diligent when choosing paid relays.

Start building your Web-of-Trust now.

If you are doing Medical Info over nostr, hit me up. We need to meet.

These spammers and name-squatters are relentless. They just do not care about giving us bitcoin. We block IPs and pubkeys and they just come back with different sets of them. It's incredible.

Part of me thinks that they just do not understand what they're doing. They don't understand what NIP-05 means or how it works or why a multi-million or billion dollar brand would ever use a domain that isn't their own.

That said, the amount of DAO, NFT, MetaMask, etc. IDs makes me think it's scammers and shitcoiners looking to do their thing.

Just complaining out loud here, transparency and all.

"The Diaspora in America of each European country in Relation to the Country's Population" map from Reddit implies that there are 6.2x more Irish Americans than people living in Ireland.

My design skills are failing today.. but this will have to do for now.

test2 image on matrix on nostr

This rocks thank you

Going forward all social networks have to start with Nostr and either provide better experience or brand. The incentives are clear. If you could get a million users from a day one on your new app - would you say "nah, I don't want that"?

This really underscores the massive difference between protocol and a platform. With platform there are artificial bottlenecks, like deplatforming, API limits, competition prevention, worry of being rugpulled in future. With protocol you can't get de-protocoled, anyone can handle as many API calls as they can handle, etc.

And somehow magically this just so perfectly fits in the current geopolitical and econ situation. With the current interest rates, money is no longer free and so we are no longer chasing the biggest captured userbase, but rather the profits & time-to-sustainability.

"Captured userbase" just doesn't matter as a metric anymore. It no longer makes any sense. Do you have userbase? Yes. All applications can have userbase of millions in a single day if they choose so. And what does that remind me of? Yes, that's why we bitcoin!

#[0], #[1], I'm interested in whether this is completely wrong take :)

Oh cool, Breez wallet just added Tor support ⚡🧅

Going forward all social networks have to start with Nostr and either provide better experience or brand. The incentives are clear. If you could get a million users from a day one on your new app - would you say "nah, I don't want that"?

This really underscores the massive difference between protocol and a platform. With platform there are artificial bottlenecks, like deplatforming, API limits, competition prevention, worry of being rugpulled in future. With protocol you can't get de-protocoled, anyone can handle as many API calls as they can handle, etc.

And somehow magically this just so perfectly fits in the current geopolitical and econ situation. With the current interest rates, money is no longer free and so we are no longer chasing the biggest captured userbase, but rather the profits & time-to-sustainability.

"Captured userbase" just doesn't matter as a metric anymore. It no longer makes any sense. Do you have userbase? Yes. All applications can have userbase of millions in a single day if they choose so. And what does that remind me of? Yes, that's why we bitcoin!

#[0], #[1], I'm interested in whether this is completely wrong take :)