Live data from Hacker News

Why I’m betting on Nostr

hivemind.vc

131–140 of 166 posts

Re: Why I’m betting on Nostr

#131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You generate a public/private key pair. When you want to send a message (tweet), you sign it with your private key and broadcast it to relay(s). The messages contain your pubkey so others know who sent it. Your messages are signed so others know they came from you.

How is trusting a third party to deliver you the authentic public keys isn't "trusting a third party"?

They are ignoring the problem of how do you know the other person's public key. And you don't. That's why people post their public keys on their own websites or on X or whatever - basically, a third-party THEY trust and believe you can trust as well, so yeah, this doesn't remove trust on a third-party as that's impossible.

Re: Why I’m betting on Nostr

#132
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…

Isnt IPFS effectively the same thing as trackerless torrents? i.e. its a DHT for registration and lookup of distributed resources where segments can be downloaded from multiple sources in parallel.

I think the main difference is that in IPFS the content ids (equivalent to torrent hashes) support multiple encodings, etc, and peer connections are more flexible than bittorrent "nodes" in their addressing - i.e. multiple protocols/transports, etc.

Re: Why I’m betting on Nostr

#134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Keep it simple. Just post the SHA256 hash on the note and when publishing keep sending the file to some file hosting server (as done today). The file host will be gone one day, hopefully some other server will have the same hash. SHA256 is not enough? Just use a tag like file:sha256:blablablabla and you now support better hashes in the future. Nostr isn't about blockchain nor a crazy fear of losing data. It is intend…

We have the same idea, a sha256 is all you need to construct a magnet link and start peering, my suggestion is for a nostr client to support this use case and webtorrent to replace the hash with the embedded file on the front end. not to make any change to the protocol.

Re: Why I’m betting on Nostr

#135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Would tweaking PeerTube not work for that?

i'll have to take another look at their technology stack, are they torrent or IPFS?

They were using Gun db at some point too maybe but it's been some time since i checked, maybe it was a clone.

Re: Why I’m betting on Nostr

#136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Keep it simple. Just post the SHA256 hash on the note and when publishing keep sending the file to some file hosting server (as done today). The file host will be gone one day, hopefully some other server will have the same hash. SHA256 is not enough? Just use a tag like file:sha256:blablablabla and you now support better hashes in the future. Nostr isn't about blockchain nor a crazy fear of losing data. It is intend…

We have the same idea, a sha256 is all you need to construct a magnet link and start peering, my suggestion is for a nostr client to support this use case and webtorrent to replace the hash with the embedded file on the front end. not to make any change to the protocol.

so long it remains as standardized hash. The problem with torrent hashes is that it remains specific to torrents. Most common scenario are volunteers setting up large storage space that indexes all files according to SHA256 where anyone can regenerate those hashes again easily if needed.

Maybe time for a NIP on this topic?

Re: Why I’m betting on Nostr

#137

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?

> how many people are publishing events (tweets) that are inauthentic?

Pretty much everyone, because Twitter doesn't provide a way to tell a tweet written by a user from a tweet written by someone that controls/works at Twitter.

Re: Why I’m betting on Nostr

#138
post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How does that work in the context of the whole system where I need to link a key pair to a person? If I know you in real life we can check key fingerprints or something (GPG suggests statistically nobody will) but otherwise I have to trust a third-party who says that the Bob I want to talk to has keys X, Y, and Z. If you don’t do that, as soon as it becomes popular enough to attract scammers you’re going to have Mall…

Nostr is quite open for what options people use to become more trustable. People can pay couple thousand sats to get a verification, or as you say Nostr can also do the same with shifting to web of existing sources of identity. E.g. it is well known that this Jack is CEO of Strike (strike.me) and so any nostr client can verify that https://snort.social/p/jack@strike.me is trustable, because it serves his public key h…

So that’s trust based on the DNS and web PKI systems, not the Nostr protocol.

Re: Why I’m betting on Nostr

#139
post #94

I liked the punchline at the end. > Edit: Please note that I changed my Nostr public key identity. My last private key was compromised, likely from using it to log into a web client last month.

nostr being an offshoot of crypto/bitcoin tech influences the protocol in important ways, like everything crypto/bitcoin you need to read documentation to understand the terminology being used and you need to 'invest' in the culture, which is bitcoin evangelist culture w/ all the baggage.

Which essentially limits adoption to less than 1% of humans, a problem centralized social networks don't have to contend with.

Re: Why I’m betting on Nostr

#140

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?

IMO it would be mobility. It's true that a logged in account can also offer validation but that identity is kept and stored on the provider's database whom in turn can withdraw consent to use that. There is some mobility on Mastodon but it still requires cooperation from the instance administrator.

On nostr if a relay or even client decides to ban you from posting you can just post from another client to another relay using the same identity.

Post reply on HN