yeah, on paid relays there's no noise since spammers usually don't pay and if they do, relay operators have a financial incentivize to kick them out
if you use Damus, which I saw you were using on one of your notes, if you have paid relays it will simply not show the cesspool of free relays on the global feed.
😉
yeah, I used bitcoin as a proxy to "censorship-resistant money".
It could be read as "something-with-bitcoin-properties," but the point is that censorship-resistant technology cannot be built on top of non-censorship-resistant money+payment rails
here is a list
this is still extremely early so the "contract/expectations" of a paid relay are highly subjective/trust-based
I expect this will change, but aligning economic incentives is a cornerstone.
how else can infrastructure providers and builders run things without being subject to defunding?
users/customers.
There are paid, and there are free relays; I pay for a bunch of relays I use.
normalize going through someone new you stumble on and zapping old notes
certainly,
someone somehow has to operate relays. The cost of operating relays must be settled somehow (i.e., paid relays)
If the relay operator were to use a non-censorship-resistant money + payment rail, the funding of that relay is *subject* to the approval of whoever can censor that money or those transactions.
Say a relay operator were to take USDC as payment: the US government could instantly shutdown that relay by knocking on the issuer of USDC and blocking those funds.
Some people are still confused why nostr DEPENDS on bitcoin to be decentralized.
It's not the zaps, it's not spam prevention
Building and running nostr infrastructure has a cost,
Like anything that incurs a cost, the underlying layers of how that cost is settled determine its attributes.
Layer 1: Money
Layer 2: Payment rails
Anything built on top of these layers can be as censorship-resistant as the layers themselves, but not more.
If these layers are not censorship-resistant, anything built on top of them will by necessity also not be.
any day one learns something new it's probably a good day 🙌
nostr is brutally sticky, and we are at 0.0001% of its potential
There are so many untapped bitcoin-adjacent communities my mind is spinning (context: I'm at a #worldschooling hub in Vietnam 🇻🇳)
Values of freedom, independence and self-soveriegnity are spread out; it's not just bitcoiners.
These people should use and understand bitcoin much the same way bitcoiners should understand the tradeoffs of schooling, food security, etc.
Many of us are cypherpunks: we write code or words to solve human problems.
There are incredible opportunities to, in roundabout-way, orange-pill hundreds of worldwide communities.
How?
You tell me.
I agree; all that content belongs in nostr; 100x the functionality as it gets exposure to nostr’s network effects for free
Algo marketplaces will be a thing.
Opt-in.
Power to the user 🤝
Interruption advertisement will die a quick and nasty death.
Copywriters will flourish.