Originally published: July 2024
It would be powerful if you could bring your digital identity, content, and followers from one social ecosystem, such as Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, or Substack, to another.
Imagine if you could publish content and send messages in any of those types of ecosystems, with one continuous digital identity rather than separate accounts. And imagine if you had more control over the algorithms and user interfaces with which you discover content within those ecosystems and interact with others inside of those ecosystems.
Nostr is a public domain communication protocol that stands for “Notes and Other Stuff Transmitted by Relays” and it’s emerging as a credible way to add that kind of interoperability between ecosystems. For a long time there have been plans and developments by people to create a technology like this, but with Nostr, the concept is actually bootstrapping to some degree and providing a real-world experiment for people around the world to build on.
In short, it’s an open-source protocol that enables decentralized social media, but also a lot more. It’s a simple set of foundational building blocks that, if widely adopted, could gradually reshape “the Web” as we know it. Instead of a separate set of siloed social ecosystems, we could gravitate toward a more interoperable set of ecosystems, with more of the power dispersed to the content creators and to the audience, and away from the middlemen corporations.
At the very least, even with modest adoption, it’s an optional alternative to the way things are done now for those that want it, and a powerful one at that. I currently use Nostr as one of my two most active social media ecosystems alongside Twitter, and I also find that Nostr’s social graph aspects already make my Bitcoin/Lightning wallet experience better as well.
I first wrote about Nostr back in April 2023 with an article called “Implications of Open Monetary Networks and Information Networks.” After that, my August 2023 book Broken Money seems to be the first printed book to have mentioned Nostr.
Nostr development has continued at a rapid pace since that time, and I have gained more clarity on some of its key value propositions, which is why I’m writing about it again now.
Here’s an example of a post on Nostr, summarizing Nostr:
This article will consist of three modular parts, for digestible reading:
- Part 1) Decentralizing Social Media
- Part 2) Building a Public Payment Directory
- Part 3) The Potential “Other Stuff”
A straightforward way to get started with Nostr is by going to Primal.net. That’s a popular open-source client for Nostr that’s available on desktop, iOS, or Android.
But as we’ll see in this piece, there are myriad ways to use Nostr, and that’s the whole point.
Part 1) Decentralizing Social Media
Before we delve into social media, let’s look at how email works for a second, at a high level.
When you use email, you are typically using a client built on top of a communication protocol called Simple Mail Transfer Protocol or “SMTP”. As a user, you don’t need to interact with the technical details of SMTP directly; you just need to know how to use your webmail client app of choice, like Gmail for example, and let it handle the technical details for you.
SMTP, being a public domain communication protocol, is owned by no one. It’s like a shared language that clients can choose to use to communicate with each other. And communication protocols, much like spoken and written languages, build up very large and long-lived network effects once they become dominant. SMTP was created back in 1981 and is still going strong.
A key element of what makes a communication protocol successful is that it tends to be very simple, with most complexity and customization pushed to the higher layers of the network and/or to edges of the network, so that at its core it hardly has any aspects that could be obsoleted. And a communication protocol can be updated over time in backward-compatible ways if needed, which again is just like a language.
Gmail, Apple Mail, Outlook, Yahoo, Proton, and other webmail clients all use SMTP, because that’s what allows them to interoperate with each other. Someone who uses Yahoo can send an email to someone who uses Gmail. Someone who uses Gmail can send an email to someone who uses Outlook, and so forth. They are interoperable ecosystems.
Email clients don’t have to make sure they are compatible with every other individual webmail client; they just need to make sure they are compatible with SMTP, and by doing that it makes them interoperable with each other. There are some other protocols involved with email, but SMTP is the main one.
Individual webmail clients are controlled by companies. They’re centralized. They can add features and unique aspects to their user experience. They can decide how they filter incoming email, or what options they give the user to filter incoming email for themselves. They can decide to ban certain users from using their services. Their government could prevent them from onboarding users from certain jurisdictions or force them to turn over data on their users. They can choose to filter out incoming emails from small self-hosted webmail servers, and only receive email from other big players, and thus contribute to some oligopolistic tendencies.
But SMTP itself is decentralized, in the sense that it’s in the public domain. Nobody can be “banned” from all of SMTP, per se. It would be like getting “banned” from the English language; that’s just not how that works because nobody owns it or controls it.
However, social media ecosystems, like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, TikTok, and others do not operate like email and SMTP. A Facebook user can’t send a message to a Twitter user, and vice versa. If someone decides to leave Twitter and join TikTok, they can’t bring their followers with them. The way that Web 2.0 has developed is that a handful of big, centralized, siloed corporate ecosystems have grown up that use their own internal communication methods, and that are not generally interoperable with each other. They have designed themselves to be walled gardens, and they control their users’ identity rather than the users having control over it. They use some foundational Internet and Web protocols to make sure they can interoperate with their users’ devices, but beyond that most of them try to retain everything internally.
Nostr works differently. It’s a very simple public domain communication protocol like SMTP is for email, but it’s written more for social media. Users control their own identities.
Each Nostr user creates a unique public/private key pair. The public key is their permanent identifier, and their private key is what they use to sign their various events to publish them and prove that it came from them. In addition, their private key lets them read direct messages sent to their public key from other users or claim ecash tokens sent to their public key, and perform other similar private actions.
Nostr’s ecosystem consists of many relay servers and application clients, built by various companies and individuals, which all make use of the Nostr communication protocol. Each user, using their private key along with their desktop or phone client application of choice, can create “events” that can consist of written content, updated profile information, or many other things, and publish those events to multiple relays around the world to store them and make them publicly available. Users’ client applications regularly reach out to multiple relay servers and retrieve events from them, so that they can see what others have published. A user can choose which relays to connect to.
The importance of the key pair, in addition to serving as your identity, is that it serves as verification for your content. Every piece of content that you publish on Nostr associated with your public key is signed by your private key. So, a malicious relay server can’t just publish a bunch of fake pieces of content and attribute them to you, and can’t change the content that you’ve posted. By signing your content with your private key on your client interface, you verify it.
In practice, using Nostr mostly feels like using any other social media. You open up your client app on your computer or phone, post things, read things, watch things, comment on things, and so forth. What makes it unique is that if you don’t like using one client, you can input your private key into another client (securely on your local device), and bring your digital identity, your followers, your follows, and your publication history with you. Or you can use multiple different clients at the same time for different purposes or on different devices, and yet still have the same digital identity, following list, follower list, and publication history, across all of them.
Each Nostr client, such as Primal, Damus, Amethyst, Snort, and others currently, can determine how their user experience will be, what features they will implement, how they will manage spam, and so forth. Users can change clients, can use multiple clients, and can even make their own clients.
There are different types of Nostr relays, and anyone with some basic resources can decide to run a relay. Most users will not; they will just use clients. But various companies and power users can run limited or full-service relays to suit their needs and/or the needs of their customers.
In other words, Nostr separates the client layer from the public domain communication protocol layer for social media, in a similar (and even more thorough) way that webmail clients separate the client layer from the SMTP public domain communication protocol layer for email. This allows for more interoperability, and gives the ownership of users’ digital identities back to them.
The Technical Sweet Spot
On one hand, a centralized social media company like Facebook or Twitter or Tiktok, runs a central server. It’s efficient, but it’s permissioned and closed. The company that runs it decides what content-sorting algorithms to run. They decide who can create accounts, and who gets banned. They decide what kinds of content is allowed or disallowed. They can read your private messages. They can delete your content or even change the content that you’ve posted and can technically use your account to publish content that you didn’t create. They can remove some or all of your followers. They can make your account follow or unfollow any account. They can be compelled by governments to perform certain actions or share certain data. They can decide which payment methods, if any, users can use within the ecosystem, with all sorts of cross-border regulatory frictions. They can block outside developers from interfacing with the ecosystem, by closing off much of their information and data.
But on the other hand, it would be impractical for every social media user to run their own server. That would be incredibly redundant and expensive, which is why people don’t do it.
And so, Nostr sits in an interesting sweet spot on that spectrum in terms of decentralization and practicality. It’s decentralized and distributed in the sense that there are many application clients and many relay servers, regular users can switch between them, and power users or companies can make their own. But it’s also efficient because realistically, most users will just use a client and benefit from the fact that there are many relays out there. And by controlling your own key and automatically using it to sign content that you publish, it prevents any sort of alteration or forgery of your content by others, including by the relays of the ecosystem.
Having your content stored and accessible on dozens of relay servers is a lot better for decentralization than one central server. If a particular relay decides not to accept your posts, then that’s fine because you’re sending your content to multiple relays for redundancy and accessibility. This makes it way better than other attempts at decentralized social media like Mastodon.
Nostr is simple, which has allowed for rapid development at low cost, and enables high redundancy and interoperability. A lot of other digital identity schemes have existed for a while and are more complex, but they exist mostly as theory, whereas Nostr is out in the field and being used, and an early network effect of users and developers is building around it.
In this early stage, some of the user experience details have more friction than centralized social media companies, and there are indeed some significant challenges still to solve with Nostr development, especially around the speed of the user interface and private key management techniques. However, its open nature has also allowed big advances in some areas compared to centralized social media, such as the ownership and verification of one’s own identity and content, and such as the development of zaps.
Social Media Tipping via “Zaps”
Nostr itself is not a blockchain, but it does make use of the Bitcoin network and its various layers for micropayments.
In addition to “liking” someone’s post, or reposting it, or commenting on it, most Nostr clients also let you “zap” someone’s post. This is a tip, paid in fractional bitcoin units called sats, that flows from your wallet to theirs immediately. Much like how the number of likes and reposts show up on a social media post, on Nostr the amount of zaps also shows up on a post.
From a content creator’s perspective, this lets you earn money directly from your content creation. From the perspective of a reader, it enables you to financially support those who make content that you like, while you interact with their content. Nostr’s ecosystem provides a publishing layer with built-in transactions tied to that published content.
Some other social media ecosystems incorporate tips as well, but what’s powerful about Nostr zaps is that they are open-source and interoperable. You can plug in different wallets to your various Nostr clients. Someone can send a zap from their custodial Lightning wallet to someone else’s non-custodial Lightning wallet, and vice versa. This allows for both domestic and international payments, including micropayments. And more recently, Chaumian ecash zaps are being developed on Nostr as well.
Some wallets can store value in other units if the user wants to, such as dollar-denominated stablecoins or dollar-denominated ecash tokens. There are all sorts of possibilities.
I think these zaps are a much bigger deal than most people realize, but I’ll leave those details later for Part 2 of this piece.
Choice of Content Discovery
In early June at the Oslo Freedom Forum, I had a fireside chat with Jack Dorsey (co-founder and former CEO of Twitter, and co-founder and current CEO of Block) about Nostr, since he has been a big proponent and contributor to it. You can watch the talk here.
We all know that social media companies can restrict who gets to use their platform and how they can use it, and in many cases can be compelled by governments to take certain types of content down. However, Dorsey stressed the importance of algorithms and content discovery mechanisms, and I agree with him.
Social media algorithms can feed us information that enrages us, that polarizes us, and that keeps pulling us in with dopamine hits. It can amplify government or corporate talking points while diminishing the reach of others. It can collect information about us with a level of detail even our loved ones don’t have, but then use that information to bring out our worst natures against each other.
Here were Dorsey’s words from our chat:
This is going to sound a little bit crazy but I think the free speech debate is a complete distraction right now. I think the real debate should be about free will.
We feel it right now because we are being programmed. We are being programmed based on what we say we’re interested in, and we are told through these discovery mechanisms what is interesting. And as we engage and interact with this content, the algorithm continues to build more and more of this bias. But the algorithm, even if it’s open-source, is effectively a black box. You cannot predict 100% of the time how it’s going to work, what it’s going to show you, and it can be moved and changed at any time. And because people become so dependent upon it, it’s actually changing and impacting the free agency we have.
I think the only answer to this is not to work harder at open sourcing algorithms or making them more explainable about what they’re doing and why they’re doing it, but to give people choice. Give people choice of what algorithm to use from a party that they trust, give people choice to build their own algorithm that can plug in on top of these networks, and see what they want, and they can shift them out as well. And give people choice to have, really a marketplace around an algorithm that you can choose, “I want to use this for these reasons, I don’t trust that party anymore so I’m not going to use this, or I’m not going to use anything at all: I want to be the discovery mechanism.”
And that’s really the biggest problem and why these corporations became so large and so valuable, is because they solved the discovery problem on the Internet.
We talk a lot about the public square, but the public square cannot be owned by one company. The public square, by default, is the Internet. But the problem with the public square is it’s very hard to discover and to be matched with the things that you’re truly interested in. And that’s where the value of a Google came in; it helps you discover. That’s where the value of a Facebook; it lets you discover your friends. The value of a Twitter; helps you discover news and interesting content of the day.
But if we can solve the discovery problem in an open-source way, in a free agency way, that you get to choose how you see the world and what algorithms you’re using and more or less how they’re working and that you can turn them off and see everything, that’s really powerful and that’s what we need.
And we just haven’t seen a lot of motion there. Twitter took the first step some time ago when we enabled you to turn off the algorithm and just see who you’re following. But the problem with that is that you miss tons and tons of content, because there’s just millions and billions of tweets going by, and you need some help. But to be able to trust the help I think you need to be able to choose it and have agency over that. Otherwise it really is attacking free will. It’s programming how we think. And we can resist it all we want, but it knows us better than we know us because we tell it our preferences implicitly and explicitly all the time. It just feels super dangerous to continue to rely on that without choice.
-Jack Dorsey, June 2024
For social media, Nostr takes the digital public square out of the hands of corporations via a public domain communication protocol, at least for those that decide to use it.
With Nostr, content can be stored on multiple relays across the world so that no central entity can take it down. Nostr lets users pick which client to use and thereby which discovery algorithms to use, and lets users customize their user interface, all while bringing their identity and followers with them as they move from one part of the ecosystem to another. It incorporates payment and monetization via different interoperable wallets. It challenges closed siloes, and offers to connect them back together in interoperable ways.
How to Try Nostr Out
Some of this may sound complex, but it’s pretty straightforward in practice. Every technology we use is more complex under the hood than what we experience as a user.
You can try out Nostr by downloading Primal, one of the most popular clients that has a desktop version, an iOS version, and an Android version. You can find it on Primal.net or in your app store. I use primal as one of my preferred clients, and am an advisor to them.
Primal helps you generate a public key “npub” and a private key “nsec” to get started. The npub becomes your public identity, and you should write down your nsec and store it offline like a password, known only to you. That private key is what gives you power to control your account, and to move your identity and follows over to another client if you want. If you lose your phone, or Primal disappears as a company, that’s okay. You’re in control as long as you securely hold your nsec private key. So that’s the main technical part to take very seriously.
With Primal, you can also quickly generate a Lighting wallet with minimal personal information, which lets you send and receive zaps on Nostr. In addition to sending zaps to people with that wallet, you can use it to send or receive bitcoin payments over the Lightning network to other people outside of Nostr.
Over time, you can experiment with other Nostr clients. Or you can plug in different wallets to whichever client you are using. If you’re in a jurisdiction where you can’t use Primal’s wallet, then that’s fine. You can try out a different wallet within Primal’s desktop or Android versions, or try out a different client and a different wallet setup altogether, and you’ll still be able to send zaps to other users. That’s the power of Nostr: customization and interoperability.
Part 2) Building a Public Payment Directory
For me, one of the most exciting features of the Nostr ecosystem is that it happens to be the best global public payment directory that’s been built so far.
In fact, this is the key feature that re-energized me toward Nostr a second time after my initial experience with it.
Bitcoin and Nostr combined together work like an international decentralized open-source Venmo. It’s a method of payment combined with payment discovery.
Let’s back up and see what that means. I’ll start with an example.
Over a year ago, I provided someone a small favor that was worth some money, and in response he asked for a Bitcoin or Lightning address to pay me back. I told him not to worry about it, partly because he was my acquaintance, and also partly because I couldn’t be bothered to send him a QR code, payment string, or my LNURL address. So I just handwaved it away. But he insisted, and asked again to pay me back. Notably, he needed my permission to pay me since he didn’t know my payment information, which is kind of an interesting friction if you think about it.
I was about to deny him again, but then instead just wrote back and said, “I mean, it’s really not a big deal, but if you insist then you can zap me on Nostr.” It turned out that now that I was recently on Nostr, and with one of my Bitcoin/Lightning wallets connected to my profile, he didn’t need permission to pay me anymore. He could just unilaterally look me up and pay me.
Other than with physical cash, paying someone else is often a remarkably friction-filled event compared to how simple it could be. The act of paying someone digitally or with banks usually involves both the payer and the payee taking some steps. It’s a bilateral process.
First, the payer has to ask the payee what their payment information is. What’s their checking account information? Or what’s their Bitcoin/Lightning address? Or what email address or phone number is their Zelle linked to? Do they have a point-of-sale method to accept debit/credit card payments? Second, the the payee has to provide that payment information. It could be a string of numbers, or a QR code, or a human-readable LNURL or Bolt12 Lightning address, or confirmation about Zelle details, or something like that. Third, the payer has to take that information and perform the payment.
In recent years, some countries and some services have started to make this easier, by enabling what we can call payment discovery. Venmo, for example, combines a social graph with a payment method, so you can just look up (“discover”) your friends on the app and pay them.
But those useful services, like Venmo in the United States, are closed-source, centralized, proprietary, and tend to only work in one country or region. They’re not interoperable, and they’re not global. They often require providing some sort of identity information to a corporation to verify an account.
What if someone wants to look someone up and pay them internationally? What if someone establishes an online identity with a good reputation that is separate from their real-life identity, like perhaps a human rights activist in an authoritarian country or a pseudonymous content creator, and wants to be able to receive convenient payments or donations without doxing their in-person identity?
The combination of Bitcoin’s Lightning network and Nostr provides a payment method with payment discovery, and it does so in an open-source, interoperable, international way.
Here’s another example, with me as the payer this time. A lot of times when I go to investment conferences over the years, there are various events, dinners, and so forth to attend. It’ll often be the case that I share an Uber with someone, or some of us have an informal group dinner. When someone offers to cover the Uber or the dinner for the group, I’ll often say, “let me know the best way to pay you back.” Or if it’s at a bitcoin conference I’ll say, “what’s your Lightning address, so I can pay you back?”
Much like me, they’ll often respond with, “don’t worry about it, you can get it next time.” Part of it is just generosity, but the other part of it is inconvenience and friction. Nobody wants to pull out a phone, exchange a QR code, or otherwise go through the process of the payee providing their payment information and the payer using it to pay them, in that moment.
But if the payee can just say, “I’m on Nostr”, or if the payer already knows they’re on Nostr, then it becomes easy. That’s a Venmo-like experience, but it’s the international, interoperable, and open-source version. The payer can unilaterally pay the payee at any time, and attach a message to it.
My friend Preston Pysh, for example, has covered a couple Ubers that we shared at events and has always refused payment. Without him providing me with payee information of some sort, there wasn’t much I could do about it. I lacked payment discovery for him, meaning I lacked a way to verify where to send digital payment to him. Well, since he’s on Nostr, for the sake of this article I just unliterally sent him a Lightning payment right now from my Mutiny wallet.
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Mutiny isn’t even a Nostr client per se. It’s a Lightning wallet that happens to use Nostr as an optional payment discovery tool. Since Nostr is a public domain communication protocol, all sorts of applications including Lightning wallets can use it.
Thanks to Nostr, it’s easy for me to look a lot of bitcoin enthusiasts up and pay them with the variety of Lightning wallets that I use. Those wallets might directly utilize Nostr, like Mutiny wallet. Or I can apply some elements of Nostr to my other wallets manually, like I could look up someone’s LNRL on their Nostr profile, and then paste that into any Lightning wallet that doesn’t directly utilize Nostr.
Nostr has enabled a self-building decentralized public payment directory that works globally. It provides payment discovery for wallets of various types.
Why This is a Bigger Deal Than It Seems
In theory, it would be awesome to have a giant international opt-in payment directory. That’s a big public database where everyone can put their payment information, so that a payer can look a payee up and send them payment. We’ve already got centralized local ones, like Venmo in the United States. But imagine an open-source one, globally available, controlled by nobody, redundant across jurisdictions to protect against takedown attempts, interoperable across wallets and payment types, and with substantial privacy options.
If we had that, we could unliterally send anyone a payment, easily.
In practice, however, we can immediately see why such a thing does not yet exist. What’s the incentive of putting your payment information on a given directory vs any other directory? What’s the incentive to keep the directory updated if your payment information changes? What’s the incentive to stop a thousand spammers from pretending to be Preston Pysh or Lyn Alden and entering all sorts of fake payment information for semi-public figures? Who is going to control and maintain this giant international payment directory? Whose server is it going to run on? What if a powerful force wants to shut it down?
The growth of Nostr is bootstrapping such a payment directory, because it has brought together the right set of incentives to solve those various problems.
Miljan Braticevic, the CEO of Primal (a client creator and relay operator for Nostr), has described Nostr as four things:
- Identity layer
- Web of trust
- Messaging layer
- Publishing layer
All of these work well together when building and maintaining a robust global public payment directory.
As a starting point, Nostr’s decentralized social media aspect provides an incentive to establish a known identity on it with a public/private key pair, and to use Nostr’s ecosystem of clients and relays as a messaging and publishing platform, at least as a backup for starters. It’s a way to broadcast information from a source that only you control (as long as you keep your private key safe) to multiple relay servers that other clients can access, regardless of whether your other social media accounts are hacked or banned or otherwise compromised.
And then, there’s an incentive to attach a wallet to your profile so that you can receive zaps from readers for any content that you publish, and so that any Lightning wallet user has a way to look you up and pay you. It’s very easy to do, and some Nostr clients build a wallet right in.
But then there’s the problem of spam and impersonation, which would plague any open payment directory. How do you know if someone is really who they say they are? What if there are a thousand fakes for a well-known person? That’s where Nostr’s web of trust helps tremendously.
On Nostr, people can follow each other to receive their content and messages, given that it’s a social media ecosystem rather than a pure payment directory. If you see a Jeff Booth with 10 followers, or a Jeff Booth with 100,000 followers, you can probably figure out which one is really him.
But we can go further than that. I link to my genuine Nostr profile on the sidebar of my own website, to help verify that my Nostr identity is really me in addition to my follower count. I also follow exactly one Jeff Booth, which I do because I want to receive his posts, but it also helps signal to others (both humans and algorithms) that yes, that is the real Jeff Booth. His identity is therefore verified, one step removed, directly from my website. I have multiple forms of communication with Jeff, so I would be able to confirm if it is not him or if his digital identity is otherwise compromised. And there are other know people following that same Jeff Booth profile, many of which also have verification from their websites.
This web of trust helps organically sort out the real accounts from the impersonators, whether on a big scale or a small scale. Follower counts, specific high-impact followers, and various real-world anchor points (such as my website linking to my real Nostr identity) help build a self-organizing web of trust. Even at a much smaller scale, once you verify with a couple friends that their accounts are real, then who they follow can help build a genuine web of trust among your friend group. This paper goes into a lot more detail on social graphs, webs of trust, and anti-impersonation techniques.
Of course, other social networks have web of trust aspects as well, but what’s different here is that Nostr’s open nature allows us to take that web of trust and apply it to other things, like payments.
So in addition to a decentralized social media ecosystem, we have a decentralized global public payment directory with good incentives to create it, and it comes with built-in impersonation prevention.
Even while Nostr remains niche as a social media ecosystem, that payment directory is already having a noticeable impact on Bitcoin/Lightning wallets. For the Bitcoin ecosystem, many types of bilateral payments are now becoming unliteral payments, which improves the user experience, especially between friend groups.
Money and communication inherently go hand-in-hand. They strengthen each other. Transferring money is a social activity. Nostr’s open-source nature allows clients to integrate interoperable cross-border payment methods better than any centralized social media ecosystem, which gives it a unique value proposition against incumbent ecosystems. And by building a self-organizing social graph, it makes those payment methods better.
Part 3) The Potential “Other Stuff”
As previously mentioned, Nostr stands for “Notes and Other Stuff Transmitted by Relays.”
Apart from enabling decentralized social media and a decentralized payment directory (two very powerful and self-reinforcing things), what else can it do? What other stuff?
There are already dozens of apps that have integrated Nostr. It’s about as simple as a social media communication protocol can be, so it’s very quick and inexpensive to integrate it and develop things that make use of it. Whether it’s short-form content, long-form content, a Twitter-like experience, a Reddit-like experience, a Pinterest-like experience, a Telegram-like experience, an Instagram-like experience, podcasting, music, videos, photos, recipes, reviews, or marketplaces, there’s a Nostr app for that. And there will be more. We’ll see which ones stick around.
It’s very early, and most of these apps are self-financed and rough around the edges, but there are more built every week and the existing ones keep getting better. Plus, some apps that have been around since before Nostr have been restructuring their backend to become Nostr apps.
Since it’s a communication protocol, Nostr exists in the public domain and thus any app that wants to integrate it can do so. Apps that integrate Nostr become interoperable with other apps that have integrated Nostr. By adopting the extremely simple shared language of Nostr, apps allow users to seamlessly come and leave with their existing online identity, their social graph, and their data.
The main incentive for an app developer team to integrate Nostr is that it allows the app to plug into Nostr’s existing network effect and userbase. User identities, user social graphs and webs of trust, data storage, and data availability are already there.
It’s hard for an app to bootstrap an initial userbase, but Nostr can help with that. If you make a new app and interface with Nostr, then immediately any Nostr user can use your app, and the virality of social interaction is already built-in.
Larger ecosystems are likely to be slower to integrate Nostr than feisty up-and-comers, since those larger ecosystems already have big network effects and userbases. But the larger that Nostr gets, the more incentivized some of those ecosystems would be to integrate with it as well.
Money and Data: Parallel Networks
Although they don’t inherently require each other, the Bitcoin protocol and the Nostr protocol work well together. Each one makes the other better. They are both distributed redundant systems, since there are Bitcoin nodes and Nostr relays running around the world.
A blockchain is a decentralized database that can maintain a global consensus state, meaning that every participant in the world agrees on the current state of that database. And since the current state is a result of a change from the prior state, it means every participant has to agree on the entire history of all past states since inception of the blockchain in order to agree on the present state.
In other words, there is one objectively true and verifiable answer for exactly how many bitcoins there are right now and what the full list of bitcoin transactions looks like, whether you’re in Tokyo, London, Cairo, New York, Cape Town, Sao Paulo, or anywhere. You can look up any confirmed transaction in Bitcoin’s history going back to 2009, and there is no disagreement about its details. That one global consensus gets updated every ten minutes on average, across the entire world.
That’s incredibly costly to do for each unit of information contained within that global consensus, and thus the network requires a lot of trade-offs to keep it reasonably inexpensive. Bitcoin, as a decentralized settlement layer with its own monetary units, trades away as much complexity and throughput as possible in order to allow anyone with a basic computer and internet connection to be able to verify and constantly sync with that global consensus state. Most complexity and throughput has to be built on top of Bitcoin in layers, rather than on the base layer, for that reason.
On the other hand, most things other than digital money do not require one true global consensus state. And by not having a global consensus state, it frees up a lot of complexity and cost. That’s why most things that people say a blockchain could help with, don’t really need a blockchain.
Imagine, for example, if all email clients in the world had to repeatedly come to a consensus regarding the exact number and full history of all emails ever sent. The one true global consensus state of all emails. That would be completely unworkable. Email is without a global consensus state, meaning that there is no one official agreement on the current state of all emails. We each only care about the emails that are important to us. I care that my webmail client stores my emails until I delete them, and reliably sends my emails to the recipients. If people in China are sending emails to people in Kazakhstan, that doesn’t affect me, and neither me nor my webmail client has to reach out and make sure to record and categorize all of those emails between China and Kazakhstan. Entities in China and Kazakhstan don’t have to keep track of my emails. Trying to put “all emails on a blockchain” would be totally unwieldy and provide no benefit for that cost. It’s important that all webmail providers use SMTP as a shared language if they want to be globally interoperable, so that someone from China or Kazakhstan can email me and vice versa. But nobody other than intelligence agencies have a desire to keep track of all past and present emails globally forever, and even they don’t have the capacity to fully do it.
Nobody indexes the entire Internet for all websites and maintains a global consensus on the state of every website, either. Google is the biggest website indexer in the world, but even they don’t have all of it. They just have the most relevant portion.
Facebook as a massive centralized server and ecosystem operator can come to a consensus on the current state of all content on Facebook (at extraordinary cost), but as a closed company it’s the only entity that can do so. And due to that power, Facebook’s operators can ban people from using Facebook, can alter content or remove content or determine which content has more reach than others to their users, and so forth.
Nostr is without a global consensus state, and that’s what makes it work so efficiently. No relay server stores everything on Nostr, although the big relays store a large percentage of recent content, and also store a lot of content from the past. It would be too costly and friction-filled for all relays to coordinate to ensure that each of them is storing everything. That would require all sorts of constraints that would limit Nostr. A user can run their own relay and store and make available all of their own stuff in perpetuity, if they want to.
As a user, I want relays to store my content and make it available to myself and others. And I want relays to store the content of other people that I’m interested in, and make it available to me when I want to access it. I don’t care that relays don’t necessarily agree on the state of every piece of Nostr content ever created; I just care that the network is good at making the right content available to those that want that content. Realistically, I want to be able to access basically any English-written content throughout the Nostr ecosystem, and want as many English-speaking users as possible to be able to access my content. But I have less of a need to reach deep into the Mandarin relays and keep track of everything that’s going on there. An American who lives in China, however, might ensure they’re following those relays, so that they can do exactly that. But then maybe neither of us is deep into the weeds on the Brazilian relays, and that’s okay. If for some reason we develop a need to perform content discovery deep into Brazil, then we can opt into that.
Much like how a frequent user might be willing to pay a cloud storage operator or a webmail client for premium service, a frequent Nostr user might be willing to pay certain relays for a higher degree of data availability for their content, compared to someone who is just posting cat memes for their friends. Nostr provides that degree of flexibility wherein the foundation is incredibly simple and decentralized, and then how much data availability we want within the ecosystem is up to us and the resources we’re willing to expend on obtaining it.
Nostr is very powerful. It stores arbitrary data globally and redundantly in an open-source way, and provides verification that it’s unaltered by the one who published it regardless of which relay it is on and which client it is being read by. But much like email, Nostr does this without the burden of trying to come to a global consensus on all of that data all the time. That capability offers a great set of building blocks for new and better interoperable applications.
The Bitcoin ecosystem greatly benefits from having Nostr’s global network of social graphs and data availability, and the Nostr ecosystem greatly benefits from having Bitcoin’s global network of open-source money.
