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302 sats \ 18 replies \ @petertodd 5 Feb 2023 \ on: Nostr sucks: A contrarian viewpoint nostr
Is there even an argument that nostr does scale? I haven't had the time to examine it as closely as I should. But my understanding is there's no mechanism to spread the load on popular relays; even simple things like avoiding DoS attacks aren't clear yet beyond "paid relays". Which of course, isn't a very decentralized way of moving data around.
At small scale these problems are probably not a big deal as lots of people can step in to run new relays. But at Twitter scale, if big relays went down it'd take quite a lot for someone else to take up the slack and for users to switch over.
Nostr is a hobbyist project right now. It probably scales to about 1 million users with the 200 or so relays run by volunteers
Need more and bigger relays for it to scale to say 10 million. Hopefully companies like Tidal which have PB of storage and lots of bandwidth can help
Nostr definitely needs help to level up into serious infrastructure
As a proof of concept, it is surviving ... for now
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Nostr definitely needs help to level up into serious infrastructure
Which will certainly centralize it.
What nostr needs is a better design that allows large numbers of people to collectively run the nodes that make it work, without coordination. But nothing I've seen indicates that doing that hard work is going to happen.
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Nostr crossed 1000 users just over a month ago, now it's heading to 1 million
That is hard given the project is grass roots without funding
I dont think of it as decentralized like bitcoin. I think of it more like RAID with websockets. If one relay goes down you (hopefully) have a few more so that you dont lose your account and you are not disrupted
It's an experiment built on taproot and schnorr. That unlocks a certain amount of creativity that fills a gap in the bitcoin eco system
Scaling it will be a challenge, but maybe not impossible, we'll have to see where we are in a year
I think bitcoin will benefit from a social layer. And nostr is one candidate to do that. If people want it enough, it has a chance.
Regarding the hard work of scaling, we need that. I personally think your idea around single-use seals could add a great deal to the existing digital signature infrastructure by anchoring commitments to a time chain, or even check pointing
Couple that with a reputation and trust system that is getting built out, and you have a number of models for contracts and incentives that could create a rich eco system. Time will tell. We are early!
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Where can I find more information about those reputation and trust systems?Thanks.
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There is no funding for infrastructure
At this point a $5 VPS would make a difference
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Which will certainly centralize it.
I don't think that nostr would work well with too many relays.
The fact that nostr uses public key cryptography makes it inherently better than alternatives such as Mastodon, where you're screwed if the instance just bans you.
With nostr you can take your identity to any of the relays available.
Therefore it just takes one of the relays to accept you.
In the worst case where literally every relay has banned you, you can self-host a relay.
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If you goto the main nostr github repo https://github.com/nostr-protocol/nostr it says this:
About a truly censorship-resistant alternative to Twitter that has a chance of working
To achieve
censorship-resistant would mean, in my opinion, you must be decentralized. Also to achieve an alternative to Twitter you must be able to achieve an at-scale global feed.reply
For some, censorship resistant simply means no single point of failure - not bitcoin level decentralization. Nostr at the very least doesn't have a SPoF.
Alternative to Twitter does not necessarily imply global scale. It does imply a core set of features and core utility. Regardless, it's kind of irrelevant what Fiatjaf's Vision™️ was originally. It's more interesting to discuss the power and limitations of the current design.
IMO as is, at global scale, nostr will either:
- need some kind of hierarchical design where all layers can somehow economically benefit
- become fragmented at the relay level on some arbitrary basis - topic, community, cost, format, etc
- centralize into a oligopoly
A lot of nostr advocates seem pretty happy with either (2) or (3) being the terminal state for the time being. I don't think that's what they ultimately want though.
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I think it is most likely under any technical design for nostr to end up at 3.
It seems that no matter which built-in economic incentives we create for many players to run relays, there will always be capital-rich player that is willing to provide everything for free until competition dies. That's how Amazon and others keep winning.
Given that, what's left is that the core design allows me to have all my data saved, backed up, moved etc. That means I can use whatever big (free) player there is, until it starts misbehaving. Then I can switch.
Might that be enough to make nostr different?
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It certainly makes nostr different. The way I've been thinking about it is that nostr isn't so much decentralized as it is less centralized. Less centralized is still a big deal as it changes incentives a lot. Does it change them enough? Will some killer app or experience emerge as result? Will the average internet user pay the switching costs? We'll see.
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Scale is a fiction invented by SV to capture and control the market.
It is healthy for nostr if big relays are difficult to run. It helps prevent centralization. By design, no single relay will ever achieve “twitter scale” and that’s a good thing.
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It helps prevent centralization.
No it doesn't. A single, very expensive, computer can probably run all of Twitter. There's entities out there who will step in to run those very busy nodes... but only a few entities. That is a clear centralization problem.
Your argument would only be correct if the scale was so enormous that no entity could handle all the load by itself. Which is certainly not true even on the individual computer level, let alone with clusters.
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The critical detail is that Nostr clients are supposed to be thick and relays thin. That means that problems should be solved client-side as much as possible, including dealing with relay downtime. So, if you want maximum reliability of communications with your friends, you and your friends would use clients that talk via multiple relays (not necessarily all relays at once, perhaps trying one relay at a time until the message gets through). And each relay would be none-the-wiser.
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I think relays will end talking to relay transactions to share the load.
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this is a huge computer science to solve if you want to allow data transmission to remain free but also prevent span between relays. See Activity Pub downfalls https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21763572
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Paid relays are probably a good way to incentivize decentralization, as it incentivizes relay operation - something lacking in Bitcoin nodes.
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Importantly bitcoin node operators have pretty strong indirect incentives to run nodes. It’s not as strong as direct incentives, but stronger indirect incentives than say torrent seeders.
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