Good point. I think its the minimalistic protocol which enables many parties to interact using keys. We had email protocols but they don't handle encryption or signing, all efforts to encrypt/sign emails failed.

Useful isn’t the result — it’s need for the other parts of the solution that people are flocking to. People don’t care about how the public and private key stuff work, but they’re so much more dissatisfied with what they have now that they are looking for hope and feel like Nostr can be a solution. To take power away, and protect them from cause they’re scared of getting canceled.

This makes Nostr super critical in many ways cause with all the UX difficulties it as a solution means more to them that they’re willing to learn about private keys or pay attention to where they store their data (replays).

And/or scalable?