226 sats \ 15 replies \ @Undisciplined 22 May \ on: Nostr is not decentralized nor censorship-resistant nostr
Is this a young technology issue or inherent to how nostr works?
I think the honest is answer is that it’s unclear whether it’s young or designed in a way that causes it to inherently centralize. It could be either and it could be both.
The argument for it not inherently tending to centralization depends on there being at some future date many many relays. Nothing about the design guarantees or strongly biases it that way though. It mostly just allows for there being many relays which is presumed to be enough to cause it to happen.
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An interesting thought experiment: imagine bitcoin's price didn't appreciate and there was no mining subsidy or tx fees paid to miners as part of the protocol. How decentralized would bitcoin be? It could be decentralized and censorship resistant if many miners found their own way to pay for the energy and equipment to mine, or did it for goodwill. It could have many wallets and L2's if non-miners were also intrinsically motivated to make them. In such a case the protocol doesn't need to change, merely the people do.
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I forget if it was Adam Smith or Russ Roberts, but one of them said something like: any scheme that requires a new kind of man is doomed to fail. This seems like that.
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Despite the initial cocky stance of @fiatjaf that "it works because it's not P2P", I think that this article and the emergence of rebroadcasters prove the exact opposite. It is very possible that in the future P2P networks would emerge such that every node of such a network could be used as a relay and they would all give the same results.
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It working due to not being p2p has nothing to do with rebroadcasting, but that relays are literally web servers with SSL certificates and reachability. As such Nostr works in browsers where it's needed, also the "peers" being clients don't communicate with each other, they communicate as client-server infrastructure.
I think domain names are designed to move things toward centralization for the simple reason of discovery and retention.
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Sure. But that convenience comes at an easily manipulated cost that totally subverts that purpose.
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Ok, so potentially a client could solve this, which would make that client censorship resistant?
Considering that there will always be some concentration in the most popular clients, it seems like there will always be some concern about these issues.
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Middleware solves this, but that also would run contrary to what @fiatjaf feels clients should be...
Imagine if your email client reached out to every mail server that you wanted to receive emails from... it would be unusable. This is Nostr today, and so everyone uses a few relays to minimize connections.
(in reality email has become this too due to anti-spam rules, now the overwhelming majority of email comes from big cloud)
A middleware would act like a email server does today, its always online receiving messages for bulk users, indexing, and serving them to your client efficiently. It would be no more centralized than email, but still better due to Nostr using signing/encryption natively that could better resist centralizing forces.
Primal is the only Nostr client I'm aware of that's doing something like this, and therefore most usable. I hope to eventually get around to making something more generalized to integrate Nostr closer into our apps.
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