175 sats \ 6 replies \ @melvincarvalho 5 Feb 2023 \ parent \ on: Nostr sucks: A contrarian viewpoint nostr
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
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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