Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Why I’m betting on Nostr

hivemind.vc

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

31–40 of 166 posts

Re: Why I’m betting on Nostr

#31

Post by unboxingelf »

troupo wrote: post #28
unboxingelf wrote: post #5

as a dev and nostr user, here’s my elevator pitch: everything is an event. events are signed using pki so it’s easy to know who sent the event and it’s authentic. they’re human readable json objects. events flow over websockets so it’s “real time”. you can build literally anything on this platform - listen for a type of event, do something, emit another. it can all interoperable. we started with basic twitter clones…

> listen for a type of event, do something, emit another. If everything is an event, and you can send any types of events, then you can trivially saturate the network, the clients, and the relays with bogus events. > but are rapidly moving into uncharted territory - people are building music distribution apps, ai agents, and so on. None of this is uncharted territory. Uncharted for Nostr, maybe. But time and again an…

The network is a collection of relays and relays are free to permit - or reject - what they want. You can’t saturate a protocol. You can saturate a given relay (server).

It’s uncharted in the protocol. The protocol has nothing to with crypto other than 1) it depends on cryptography and 2) there is an event type that cares about bitcoin lightning payment receipts.

Re: Why I’m betting on Nostr

#32

Post by jazzyjackson »

evbogue wrote: post #15

I tried Nostr for awhile, and I appreciate that they're picking up where Scuttlebot left off. There are a few things that bug me about it that I wish they'd fix, or that some future protocol will solve. First, I want a replication strategy. Nostr messages get lost in time, and many of the clients end up just blasting an entire message history at your client. Because there's no clue in the protocol how messages are re…

IPFS is so heavy and unperformant, just not a lot of bang for your buck when paying for a host. As far as I can tell it owes its success to VC funded blockchain startups subsidizing hosts with 8:1 payouts for hosting other peoples' stuff

I'm betting on webtorrent paired with seedboxes - your peer just has to serve whatever mp3/mp4 you're hosting to the first few clients, and as long as their browser windows are open they can help seed any viral growth, handling DDoS/hugs-of-death without issue. If there are multiple hosts in a community they can enter peering agreements and sync their seedboxes to keep media available, solving bitrot

if only I could figure out how to get paid to implement it

Re: Why I’m betting on Nostr

#33

Post by jb55 »

evbogue wrote: post #15

I tried Nostr for awhile, and I appreciate that they're picking up where Scuttlebot left off. There are a few things that bug me about it that I wish they'd fix, or that some future protocol will solve. First, I want a replication strategy. Nostr messages get lost in time, and many of the clients end up just blasting an entire message history at your client. Because there's no clue in the protocol how messages are re…

Hey, author of https://damus.io here (ios twitter-like nostr client)

> First, I want a replication strategy. Nostr messages get lost in time, and many of the clients end up just blasting an entire message history at your client. Because there's no clue in the protocol how messages are related other than a timestamp this also means you can fake timestamps and write fake messages in the future or back in time

You can do this with email or git too and it doesn't make it any less useful. I actually like the backdating feature as it allows you to copy your account to a new key.

As for replication, at damus I am working on https://github.com/damus-io/nostrdb which is intended to be a "sqlite for nostr". I plan on implementing set-reconciliation based syncing with strfry relays (using a technique called negentropy), so that replication is very efficient.

> Second, I don't like that many Nostr clients are using the same signing key for messages as they do for lightning transactions.

This is simply not true.

> Third, someone needs to delete some of these NIPS. The arms race to make Nostr as complex and difficult as possible to implement is not going to do much for the ecosystem in the long run. In the beginning Nostr was simple to implement from scratch, they should get back to that!

All nips are optional except for nip01, you can ignore them all for the most part.

> Fourth, it needs a dedicated blob store protocol. Yah, I know IPFS isn't great but someone should come up with something that is simple and works.

It does not, in the same way email or git or any text-based protocol doesn't need a dedicated blob store. These are separate concerns and they should be a separate protocol. nostr clients can of course integrate and link to any blob store it wants via new NIPs that describe this. I believe there are a few already in the nips repo.

Cheers!

Re: Why I’m betting on Nostr

#34

Post by clarkmoody »

All the degenerate token-fueled web3 hype of 2021 sold a bunch of dreams about decentralization and owning your social graph to unsuspecting retail and then delivered nothing but rugpulls and bankruptcy letters.

Meanwhile, nostr built a system people actually use on top of open protocols. No tokens, no blockchains. Only notes and other stuff transmitted over relays.

Re: Why I’m betting on Nostr

#35

Post by mhink »

MuffinFlavored wrote: post #29
unboxingelf wrote: post #5

as a dev and nostr user, here’s my elevator pitch: everything is an event. events are signed using pki so it’s easy to know who sent the event and it’s authentic. they’re human readable json objects. events flow over websockets so it’s “real time”. you can build literally anything on this platform - listen for a type of event, do something, emit another. it can all interoperable. we started with basic twitter clones…

> events are signed using pki so it’s easy to know who sent the event and it’s authentic. what problem does this solve? how many people are publishing events (tweets) that are inauthentic? you need to be logged in via password + 2fa on twitter to post. if somebody can post from your twitter account on your behalf, they are logged in as you. i don't see how "PKI" on top fixes that?

The problem is that network architecture of Nostr is different from Twitter (and from Mastodon, for that matter). One of the core ideas of the Nostr protocol is getting rid of the idea of "logging in" or "creating an account" on any given relay, and as such it needs some way to reliably identify which posts were made by a particular user.

That's where PKI comes into play: it's not layered on top of a login system, it's a complete replacement.

Re: Why I’m betting on Nostr

#36

Post by jron »

Damus has come a long way since this article was written.

Android also has a great client, Amethyst: https://github.com/vitorpamplona/amethyst

Gossip is a cool rust desktop client: https://github.com/mikedilger/gossip

Strfry is used by most of the large relays: https://github.com/hoytech/strfry Doug Hoyte is a wizard.

Re: Why I’m betting on Nostr

#37

Post by jazzyjackson »

unboxingelf wrote: post #5

as a dev and nostr user, here’s my elevator pitch: everything is an event. events are signed using pki so it’s easy to know who sent the event and it’s authentic. they’re human readable json objects. events flow over websockets so it’s “real time”. you can build literally anything on this platform - listen for a type of event, do something, emit another. it can all interoperable. we started with basic twitter clones…

I love the programmatic payments. what's the key rollover story? social key recovery? IMO these are table stakes for PKI to reach the general public. There's a technology called KERI (key event receipt infrastructure) that I'm bullish on, has to do with signing new keys with the old, with witnesses, with configurable threshold cryptography (m-of-n key reconstruction)

my favorite part about that last one is the possibility of social key revocation - if you're in a community misbehaving, the same people you trust to save key fragments in case you lose your private key can conspire against you to lock you out of your account, a kind of cryptographic ban hammer.

Re: Why I’m betting on Nostr

#38

Post by jb55 »

nacs wrote: post #6

The number of users is almost irrelevant in the context of Nostr because many clients generate a new ID. These aren't email-verified/phone-verified users -- this is literally just a new key/ID being generated. Some web apps auto-create a new ID and join the network every time you use them. Also, the signal to noise ratio is really bad with a lot of spam and almost all discussions related in some way to crypto. Nostr…

Correct user counts need to have a web-of-trust applied if you want an accurate count of "real followers", but I suspect that's the same on X as well.

As one of the largest accounts on nostr I can say there aren't many "crypto" fans on the network, those are all on farcaster. Lots of bitcoiners and freedom lovers though! Maybe try following #grownostr, there is lots of non-"crypto" content, mostly gardening, homesteading, etc.

You have to curate your feed to see the things you want by following specific people. There are no algorithms that automatically tailor the feed to your interests. If you go into the "global" or "universe" feed you will see lots of crap, but that is just noise that can be filtered out by setting your global feed to only show paid relays.

Re: Why I’m betting on Nostr

#39

Post by evbogue »

jb55 wrote: post #33
evbogue wrote: post #15

I tried Nostr for awhile, and I appreciate that they're picking up where Scuttlebot left off. There are a few things that bug me about it that I wish they'd fix, or that some future protocol will solve. First, I want a replication strategy. Nostr messages get lost in time, and many of the clients end up just blasting an entire message history at your client. Because there's no clue in the protocol how messages are re…

Hey, author of https://damus.io here (ios twitter-like nostr client) > First, I want a replication strategy. Nostr messages get lost in time, and many of the clients end up just blasting an entire message history at your client. Because there's no clue in the protocol how messages are related other than a timestamp this also means you can fake timestamps and write fake messages in the future or back in time You can d…

> > Second, I don't like that many Nostr clients are using the same signing key for messages as they do for lightning transactions.

> This is simply not true.

I'm sorry if I'm wrong about this one. How does it work?

Re: Why I’m betting on Nostr

#40

Post by MuffinFlavored »

unboxingelf wrote: post #30
MuffinFlavored wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> events are signed using pki so it’s easy to know who sent the event and it’s authentic. what problem does this solve? how many people are publishing events (tweets) that are inauthentic? you need to be logged in via password + 2fa on twitter to post. if somebody can post from your twitter account on your behalf, they are logged in as you. i don't see how "PKI" on top fixes that?

It removes trusting a 3rd party.

I don't get it. Either I validate who I am when I log in to Twitter, or I validate who I am when I set up my "Nostr" identity?
Post reply on HN