Out with Very Good People normie friends. Trying to purple pill. Slow going. Send reinforcements.

Are you sure your relays haven't loaded yet... I'm on the latest and still see my followers

Haven't seen a NIP for this yet, but I'd love to see some proposal for reputation/web of trust. This could be very useful for and sort of peer-to-peer trading or interaction, especially if we can get different algorithms for figuring out how much to trust someone. Might need a different way to relate than follow, though.

It's not about mooning, it's about getting scammed, paying 20K sats to use a relay and then a week later getting rugged. This potential exists. We as a community need to not just add every single paid relay that pops up. They need vetted. We need to build our Web-of-Trust.

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.

This is awesome. I'd like to personally thank the SEC and Kraken for giving us today's bitcoin price action. Hopefully we can get back to sub $20K!

Sorry, for the price talk, Nostr. But sometimes, we have to celebrate when we're able to stack more bitcoin on the cheap.

NFT fans want to move over to Bitcoin Inscriptions because Bitcoin is the only decentralized and censorship resistant timechain that exists and will last for hundreds of years. It makes sense from that standpoint.

Finally getting a chance to test out Damus. Was using a different client originally, and then wasn’t online much.

Pretty smooth experience!