Some (legal) thoughts in response to a question on whether governments could ban Nostr:
It’s important to consider two things – whether governments can pass laws to make something illegal, and whether those bans can be effective (i.e., can they be enforced).
In England and Wales, Parliament is sovereign. If Parliament so wished, it could pass a law making gravity illegal. Much as in the case of Bitcoin or Nostr, this would of course have no effect on gravity. People would carry on falling downstairs, and Bitcoin and Nostr would at a protocol level be completely unaffected by a ban.
So, we should consider whether enforcement is possible, and if possible, what is the cost of that enforcement to the government. Distributed systems greatly increase the cost of enforcement and reduce the likelihood of enforcement at the same time (in an extreme example, where thousands of people are running their own relays at home behind TOR, a government might need to spend time and resources on house-to-house searches to shut down the relays). This would of course be prohibitively expensive and wouldn’t stop anyone accessing relays outside that government’s jurisdiction. Enforcement might then become retributive – for example, imposing heavy fines and penalties on anyone using Nostr.
However, this once again upsets the balance of power, as they’d have to find you first, and there are very many ways of carefully preserving one’s privacy online (all of which we should be practicing and learning right now in case we ever need them). A government might temporarily shut down access to the internet, which is why I think that investigating continuity solutions such as GoTenna, mesh networks and satellite phones might also be prudent in the longer term.
In short, the government could make Nostr and using Nostr illegal, yes, but such a law would be very hard (if not impossible) to enforce, and enterprising citizens would find ways of ensuring continuity of access to the protocol even if both a ban and enforcement action were ongoing.
nostr:npub1qny3tkh0acurzla8x3zy4nhrjz5zd8l9sy9jys09umwng00manysew95gx - appreciate the sats! You are obviously also a total badass 🤙💜. Keep up the amazing work fighting these bastards
Privacy is necessary for an open society in the electronic age.
https://video.twimg.com/ext_tw_video/1676279294572769282/pu/vid/1280x720/MdYe2IAmZhviHxua.mp4?tag=12
Fucking hell, Meredith is an absolute badass
Great idea!
Also it's pretty damn obvious if you think of it simply as Monopoly. If the banker in the game doubles the amount of money they have, what happens to the value of your money in the game world as a result?
Ha ha I'm sure it can be done in less than two hours though 😉
But yes - that's what we're here for
Of course they must. Bitcoiners have been saying this for years
https://twitter.com/freddienew/status/1675723684235866117?s=20
A ping of 21 back to nostr:npub1zyu436swwkt59evja5ejgn9dxeqesk42n48qmhnlwhn60uwwj4tsqtuu25. Just because we can 😉. Fuck KYC in all its forms.
This is suddenly like old Nostr again. It's exciting, we're going to slig a lot of sats around.
Thank you to the anon pleb who just zapped me 420! A legend, whoever you are.
I'm not a refugee but I love the badge!! Nice work.... Pretty please?
No. Bitcoin only.
I tried to send you your first zap!! Connect your lightning wallet eg with Get Alby and enable one touch zaps!!
