Why Nostr Wins

Apr 09, 2023

For the busy reader, this is a bullet point list on why Nostr is winning as a new network. It is much more than ‘just a twitter replacement’.

Started end of 2020 with a bunch of lightning and bitcoin devs - led by fiatjaf, a pseudononymous lightning dev
Nostr is less than 2.5 years old (as of April 2023)
11 million Total users including bots and spam, writing events
~ approaching 2 Million profiles with bio
Daily average users approximately ~250,000, including low quality, high quality ~ just under 10k
27 Million posts (kind 1) total
DM's (kind 4) , 2 Million total
Lightning usage integration 2023, about 10% of profile network with active addresses
Lightning Zaps - Sent 400k + per day
Relays that serve events: 1339 at last count

Jack Dorsey's Blue Sky - 10 Million dollars in initial funding - and all I got is a wait list for a decentralized twitter.
Nostr - $0 dollars in initial funding, < 2 years and millions of users, instant payments and potential for infinite applications

Nostr - Notes and Other Stuff Transmitted over Relays
Nostr - also means "Our" in Latin
Nostr - classic websocket client/server model but deconstructed. Its not federated, its deconstructed.
Dumb Relays, Smart Clients, and End User Keeps the keys
Different model from Mastadon b/c you don't have one server that is keeping all the credentials and you can easily move if you don't like the relay.
most apps are built such that the data and login credentials are on the server side, not controlled by the user
In Nostr's case the pub/private key pair gives the user the control to publish to any relay they subscribe to, and they have the choice of any client they want to download and use on their phone or desktop.
The relays can control who can access their relay, many are free but there are also many that are pay to use. If you don’t like a relay and you can move relays or run your own.
Clients can help users filter and help specify what kinds of data that is published or subscribed to.

Users can cross over to any clients with the click of a button and bring their entire social network with them.
How do you mean? Like being able to login to twitter but also login to ebay or etsy or medium or substack and use the same credentials but also bring your entire social network with you, and the companies don't control the credentials, you do.
You can also run your own relay and pub/sub to keep your own archive of data published
A copy of your data is published to every relay you subscribe to, and you can also export your data and reload it elsewhere if you want.

Fiatjaf said - when you have censorship to a domain, "just move", its dumb and inelegant but it works.
- An Example of censorship where they still can't kill a website, Sci-Hub.
There's no perfect model, we just need one that’s 'good enough' and people are willing to use it.
Why Its not a perfect model: people have questioned the censorship resistance of it, a relay can easily be targeted and blocked as it did when damus app was available in china; however, you can move relays

Lets look at what are the competitive advantages of Nostr -

Competitive, Open Development cycle

Core group of FOSS (Free open source software) developers who started working on their own without a company
Simple enough protocol so easy for developers to build on, a moonlighting weekend dev can easily deliver an impactful project on a weekend or in a few spare hours. Hobbies can get serious and be monetized and turned into businesses immediately with the lightning network as a payment rails.
There are many different implementations of the same client or relays. Competition to develop good apps and services.
Rapid innovation and feedback cycle - Devs put out early beta, then users rapidly adopt and test and close the feedback loop for immediate improvement. Everything is open and in the wild.
Contrast that to a hierarchical corporate structure, they spend a lot of money refining product and hiring engineers to work on it full time, the cost to build is expensive if complex and full time.

Network Effects

Network of users who are willing to adopt already exists (bitcoiners), helps with initial traction
Non-bitcoiners are also joining, after Snowden and Jack Dorsey joined; the influencer effect + plus people are tired of censorship
Jack Dorseys' old boss, Rabble, pivoted from another social media network - scuttlebutt to work on nostr full time.
People who are getting fed up with Twitter are migrating to Nostr
High signal not interrupted by the twitter algorithm, e.g. posting an external link will down rank you profile

Taking it to the next level + Growth concerns

As with any new network, there are hiccups and things break constantly; even more so since this isn’t a network that’s being developed with uniform controls.
Discovery might be tricky, there are search tools, but it doesn’t work smoothly like a centralized search. Nostr.band is one of the early search engines on nostr.
If you don't have the spirit of trying new things and a high shit tolerance, Nostr is not for you; you can wait until later, of course but the exciting stuff is always at the beginning
There is means of exchange already built in parallel to Nostr, its the Lightning Network, Bitcoin’s Layer 2, you can choose to use it or not.
- Freedom of choice - relays and clients can choose what NIPs they want to implement, nobody is forced to do anything, only the 1st protocol which defines the data structure is mandatory; everything else is optional.

Get started with Nostr here: nostr-resources.com
Nostr protcols: https://github.com/nostr-protocol/nips
Nostr Stats: https://stats.nostr.band, https://nostr.watch
LNBits.com - Wordpress for lightning, includes nostr relay, nostr client, nostr market
Blogging on Nostr like medium or substack: https://habla.news
Lightning Network (LN) decentralization graph: https://lninsights.com/
Info on LN Wallets by DarthCoin: https://darthcoin.substack.com/p/lightning-wallets-comparison
Follow me on Nostr: https://iris.to/bitkarrot, bitkarrot.substack.com, twitter @bitkarrot, github @bitkarrot
Nostr podcast: https://nostrovia.org

BitKarrot’s Substack