Legitimate criticisms of Nostr \ stacker news ~nostr

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9160 sats \ 25 comments \ @brandonsbytes 1 Sep 2023 nostr

What are people's thoughts on the criticisms of nostr posted here on hackernews?

First, I want a replication strategy. Nostr messages get lost in time, and many of the clients end up just blasting an entire message history at your client. Because there's no clue in the protocol how messages are related other than a timestamp this also means you can fake timestamps and write fake messages in the future or back in time. This doesn't have to be an append-only log, but you need some idea of message order to avoid wasting bandwidth to get someone's timeline and detect when a message has been posted out of order.

Second, I don't like that many Nostr clients are using the same signing key for messages as they do for lightning transactions. We don't know how many of these web Nostr clients are secretly sending your private keys back to their servers, and everyone will run from Nostr as soon as some untrustworthy dev starts emptying lightning wallets.

Third, someone needs to delete some of these NIPS. The arms race to make Nostr as complex and difficult as possible to implement is not going to do much for the ecosystem in the long run. In the beginning Nostr was simple to implement from scratch, they should get back to that!

Fourth, it needs a dedicated blob store protocol. Yah, I know IPFS isn't great but someone should come up with something that is simple and works.

I think the third one is valid because it could just end up a mess like activitypub, but at the same time people want features...

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2535 sats \ 13 replies \ @k00b 1 Sep 2023

Strong butthead energy. Gets it just enough to think he can critique it.

Second, I don't like that many Nostr clients are using the same signing key for messages as they do for lightning transactions. We don't know how many of these web Nostr clients are secretly sending your private keys back to their servers, and everyone will run from Nostr as soon as some untrustworthy dev starts emptying lightning wallets.

I don't think any client does this. Nearly all of them are noncustodial. They do have NWC strings but you can limit those.

Nostr messages get lost in time, and many of the clients end up just blasting an entire message history at your client. Because there's no clue in the protocol how messages are related other than a timestamp this also means you can fake timestamps and write fake messages in the future or back in time.

Eh this is like a scottish egg but with a turd on the inside.

Nostr messages get lost in time

wut

Because there's no clue in the protocol how messages are related other than a timestamp

This is just untrue. Notes can reference each other.

Third, someone needs to delete some of these NIPS. The arms race to make Nostr as complex and difficult as possible to implement is not going to do much for the ecosystem in the long run. In the beginning Nostr was simple to implement from scratch, they should get back to that!

They need to be better organized - for sure - but experimenting ain't free dude.

1989 sats \ 2 replies \ @cryptocoin 1 Sep 2023

TIL: You can call someone a butthead without calling them a butthead.

156 sats \ 1 reply \ @jennann 1 Sep 2023

Nice. I will use that tactic and prepend an adjective like 'strong' and append a noun like 'energy' when I need to harshly critic something. My other favorite is 'Bless your heart.'

0 sats \ 0 replies \ @brandonsbytes OP 1 Sep 2023

"Strong not-as-correct-as-your-husband vibes"

Yep. This will work.

741 sats \ 0 replies \ @JohnRawlins 3 Sep 2023

i will say the following:

i hadn't used nostr since april, then went back recently. nostrgram.co had stopped working correctly and wasn't showing anything since april. i'd sent some messages through it as DM's, and could not see them on nostgram. i even tried on iris.

iris was showing new content from others, but i could not for the life of me figure out how to display 'likes', or 'replies.' it just appears now to be one giant amalgam of "favorites and replies and some mass of streaming posts from people all in one place." (i may be wrong but it looks like the dev broke it, and simultaneously tried to organize it better, but failed.)

i ended up remembering snort.social and that indeed allowed me to send new DM's and get a response.

so that's interesting.

110 sats \ 7 replies \ @m00ninite 1 Sep 2023

Re: messages getting lost in time.. Can we really expect that every message posted to nostr will be stored by somebody forever? Doesn't seem realistic. In theory torrents also last forever thanks to the decentralized nature, but in practice they die pretty fast.

Happy to be corrected on this. I'm still learning about nostr myself.

Edit: think I may have misunderstood what "lost in time" meant in this context, but my point about data permanence stands.

100 sats \ 6 replies \ @k00b 1 Sep 2023

If he's talking about data permanence, they are probabilistically lost not certainly lost, ie they could be lost in time and if you were to store them yourself they wouldn't need be lost at all.

1122 sats \ 4 replies \ @m00ninite 1 Sep 2023

Probabilistically lost is pretty much as bad as certainly lost if you're trying to store anything important. That demo that popped up storing a decentralized password manager comes to mind.

I think there's a lot of space for using nostr as a communications protocol for short-lived stuff, but I still have a lot of questionmarks about Twitter-like implementations where data can be impermanent

828 sats \ 0 replies \ @supertestnet 1 Sep 2023

I still have a lot of questionmarks about Twitter-like implementations where data can be impermanent

data is impermanent on twitter too

https://www.wired.com/story/twitter-purge-old-accounts/

if you don't self-host whatever you find important, don't expect someone else to host it for you

unless they find it important too they will eventually delete it (e.g. when they stop profiting from it)

100 sats \ 2 replies \ @k00b 1 Sep 2023

I don't disagree.

It's early though. I suspect some high probability of permanence can be achieved with incentives eventually.

1100 sats \ 1 reply \ @m00ninite 1 Sep 2023

I hope so. The possibilities of nostr dramatically rise with the promise of permanence. Use cases far beyond simple social media stuff.

100 sats \ 0 replies \ @k00b 2 Sep 2023

That's what's kind of cool about open protocol development. Up only™️ until people lose interest or hit a serious road block. Nostr is wildly underutilizing bitcoin imo but they aren't ready to accept the tradeoffs of that yet I don't think ... they need to hit some road blocks first.

0 sats \ 0 replies \ @brandonsbytes OP 1 Sep 2023

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0 sats \ 0 replies \ @brandonsbytes OP 1 Sep 2023

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111 sats \ 0 replies \ @kepford 1 Sep 2023

I was expecting to read about user privacy with regards to relays... Or, private key invalidation.

110 sats \ 1 reply \ @Lux 1 Sep 2023

I'm just waiting for nostr version of tweetdeck. c'mon devs, you can do it

100 sats \ 0 replies \ @benthecarman 2 Sep 2023

Jb55 has teased this a bunch

110 sats \ 0 replies \ @WeAreAllSatoshi 1 Sep 2023

I don’t really follow nostr protocol development but I do see a lot of new NIPs being proposed. I’ve felt the same thing, it seems like an explosion of people trying to be influential early on. Some things just aren’t necessary

100 sats \ 0 replies \ @danieltapa 2 Sep 2023

it's still early, we're not very familiar with the decentralized aspect of a network/ecosystem.. most of these critics are biased in a 'big-tech' way of development.. things will get more organized.. bad ideas will wither.. good ideas will flourish.. it's less time eficient, but more robust in the end.. like nature!

100 sats \ 0 replies \ @pkbyron 3 Sep 2023

Nostr posts could be pegged to a Bitcoin Block, as posts are immutable once published. Then clients/relays can display in sequential bitcoin blocks. Downside: this loosely interconnects Nostr to Bitcoin protocol - but is this such a bad idea? (Zaps are interconnected too). Perhaps adding block number as meta data can be done by a concerned relay rather than a protocol soft fork.
Not sure I understand the problem here - was thought the Zap link (LNURL?) just opens my Lightning wallet (separate app), so Nostr isn't involved in handling Lightning (Private Keys) and only hands off the Zap link to the preferred App.
Add time - abandoned NIPs, special interest NIPs, these will be filtered out into side projects. Probably a Nostr Steering Group will emerge with more adoption over time.
At the moment distributed data (a billion copies) is cheaper (from a relay's view) than a distributed file system (who want's to store everyone else's junk?).

I like the premise of your critique. But you're a smart dev (you're here and early on Bitcoin), so take the next step and be the change you want --> write NIP's and write code.

cheers

100 sats \ 0 replies \ @Zepasta 2 Sep 2023

Nostr Clients need to get better and less buggy.

100 sats \ 1 reply \ @tomlaies 2 Sep 2023

Because there's no clue in the protocol how messages are related other than a timestamp this also means you can fake timestamps and write fake messages in the future or back in time.

I didn't know this was a thing.

But is easily solvable by making a signature of the hash. Probably also better identifiers than timestamps only.

0 sats \ 0 replies \ @CruncherDefi 2 Sep 2023

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10 sats \ 1 reply \ @mallardshead 2 Sep 2023

Fiatjaf's very first HackerNews post on Nostr in November of 2020 here.

Be patient is my criticism of the criticism.

100 sats \ 0 replies \ @badabing 2 Sep 2023

Nowadays, all the spoiled iPhone users expect stuff to just work flawlessly out of the box. Same with Bitcoin. Like, guys, this is open source tech, there's experimenting, trial and error, etc.

Whatever happened to being patient and constructive, iso instantly rejecting smth based on first impressions.