Nostr

🚨NostReports Sunday Oped Special🚨

Many new Nostrich hatchlings know the feeling. You open up whatever client you hear about (astral.ninja, snort.social, nostrgram, etc), you figure out that you have to hit the “Generate Key” button, you somehow save your private keys in a way that would make Satoshi cry, and you stare at a constantly updating global feed from a bunch of usernames you have never heard of. Now what?? That was me, the week before Christmas 2022, what the hell do I do now? That’s when I noticed a guy named @ npub1tvqc82mv8cezhax5r34n4muc2c4pgjz8kaye2smj032nngg52clq0rkrq4 on the global feed who kept using the hashtag #plebchain.

Now, we all bring some Twitter baggage with us to Nostr, and for me, that baggage was not feeling good enough to follow people randomly. Why should I? I’m a nobody, and it’s not like they will ever follow me back. But this was a new platform and a new paradigm, so I put that behind me and I followed Quiet Warrior. To my surprise, he responded to me in the simplest of words - “Followed. #plebchain.” Quiet Warrior FOLLOWED ME BACK! Why would he do that? I have Chungus in my name? Pleb after pleb, I started seeing “Followed. #plebchain.” Over and over again. It was magic.

In one of Quiet Warrior’s first posts, he explained that #plebchain was about the concept of value for value, you follow me, I follow you, and let’s do it before all the big accounts and bots get here. Little did we all know that this simple concept would blossom into a movement.

I reached out to Quiet Warrior to get his take on how this has grown, and here is what he said:

“I was really one of the forgotten plebs on twitter. Our first week on Nostr was like a birds first flight, absolutely liberating. I have never talked to so many like-minded, beautiful people. There is tremendous power in the community. I wanted to secure that. Hence #Plebchain. As it progressed my mind continued absorbing the power that the chain really can provide. Satoshi writes about a peer-to-peer network. What are the peers? Plebchain. In essence the Bitcoin network is built on the plebchain layer 0.”

“I also wanted anyone coming in fresh to Nostr to have a simple way to connect and secure the same experience I was having. Follow for Follow is powerful because when you gain followers you gain a voice. The algos kill our voice.”

As I think about Quiet Warrior’s words, I can’t help think about what #plebchain means to me. It is all about breaking the top down communication network of Twitter, where massive influencers tell you how to think. The plebchain is a hive mind for good ideas to propagate.

Why does Nostr and this plebchain concept resonate so well with Bitcoin? As Robert Breedlove says in his “What is Money” podcast – “In a central bank economy, if prices go up, you don’t know if it’s Jerome Powell’s monetary policy, or real people, expending real resources, to obtain a real asset that cause the price increase. #Bitcoin disentangles signal from noise.”

In a centrally controlled communications protocol, if a message propagates, you don’t know if it’s the twitter algorithm, or its real people, expending real attention, to express a real fact. #Nostr, and specifically the #plebchain, secured with #lightning, disentangles signal from noise.

That is what #plebchain means to me. What does the #plebchain mean to you my fellow plebs?

Written by:

@ npub1pvuugp6fyj6t6yeq9ajzv28p54w07sg6jpxvzuu5yc7qmu9edpkqm2d7a5