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64 sats \ 6 replies \ @om 5 May 2023 \ on: Introducing Nostr Sovrn: Self-Hosted Nostr, Lighting and Email Addresses nostr
- pay a government-approved registrar to temporarily "own" an NFT in a government-controlled DNS system
- yay, sovereignty!
Thank you for your feedback. The Nostr Sovrn initiative/concept has absolutely nothing to do with NFTs, it's odd that you would think so. Furthermore, the setup process can be applied to a wide span of hosting plans/web servers and TLDs, so it's not limited to specific governmental jurisdictions.
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Domain names are NFTs even though there's no blockchain.
And yes, you can move your domain to a new country if governments start to play whack-a-mole with you. But then the true source of your sovereignty in this case is the fact that your identity is your public key.
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Thanks for clarifying. Although domain names can indeed be thought of and treated as non-fungible, digital properties (to a certain extent), they can't reasonably be compared to NFTs, which are merely references to extremely fungible data.
Yes, importantly, the source of sovereignty for all Nostr users is the exclusive ownership/control of a cryptographic private key. The purpose of the Nostr Sovrn initiative is to help Nostr users reach a significantly higher level of sovereignty/control with regards to their NIP-05 identifiers, also known as Nostr addresses, which are human-readable references to public keys.
By simplifying the process of setting up and managing a Nostr address on a self-hosted, privately owned domain (and web server, ideally) and by providing technical assistance to those who need it, far more Nostr users can enjoy the benefits of NIP-05 identifiers without having to trust and hand over control to a centralized, third-party provider (the same applies to Lightning forwarding and email addresses). It very effectively mitigates the various risks and limitations that users of centrally controlled addresses are subjected to.
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they can't reasonably be compared to NFTs, which are merely references to extremely fungible data.
Those are pathologically broken NFTs. Actual NFTs are, almost by definition, not that fungible. Behold: https://opensea.io/category/domain-names
the source of sovereignty for all Nostr users is the exclusive ownership/control of a cryptographic private key.
Yes, YESSS!
privately owned domain
You're doing good service, I get it. All I'm saying is that domains are a potential attack vector:
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Thanks, your input is much appreciated. Absolutely, domains remain a potential attack vector. That said, potential risks and attacks at the domain level are also significantly reduced when using a private as opposed to a centrally issued identifier. With the former, they only apply to one individual using an independent identifier/domain. With the latter, the same risks and attack vectors at the domain level apply to all users of the centrally issued identifiers but on top of that, all users are completely dependent on the issuer, which introduces further (and arguably more significant) risks. It also drastically increases potential attack vectors, as the incentive to attack a domain that so many individuals rely on is far greater compared to a domain owned by a single individual.
Using a self-hosted Nostr address does not eliminate risks or attack vectors entirely but it effectively brings it all the way down to just one fundamental component: a privately owned and controlled domain, which is relatively secure and censorship-resistant (very much so in certain jurisdictions). The vulnerabilities at the server level (i.e. hosting provider) remain intact but here too, they are far less meaningful than they are for a server that's used by multiple people and owned/controlled by a central actor. In the event of some server-impairing event, a person using a private server/hosting account can simply move their identifier files to another server and point their domain (nameservers) to that server. A person using a third-party server does not have that option and would see their Nostr identifier (as well as their Lightning forwarding address and other services) abruptly terminated, as they were trapped all along.
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I agree with everything you said, I just want to explain that I don't mean that the alternative is using a third party server. There are multiple other namespace solutions but Bitcoiners don't have a sufficiently Bitcoin-friendly one yet (maybe Web5's ION?). Brave browser for example will accept .bitcoin TLD but it will resolve it through Polygon. Then there's also this: https://btc.us/ but again with a shitcoin.
DNS is just a distributed database. So is Bitcoin. Therefore Bitcoin doesn't need DNS in principle. We need a pure Bitcoin-based name service - perhaps through Ordinals - and then we can leave DNS to bsky people and other boomers.
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