Nostr¶
Follow me on
Nostr
with the self-verified
isbitcointrue.com
identifier,
using your preferred Nostr client.
Or use the following public key,
npub1w4w9apn7yjd3atqzu3f4umctxpx2u3tcq3uadj2zgxndwavpd49smxj8ar
What is Nostr?¶
Nostr is a protocol for decentralized social networking. In other words, you can use any Nostr client and you'll be looking at the same social network. This replaces twitter, telegram, and any other centrally controlled social network -- allowing an open and uncensorable social network.
Technically, email and websites are based on similar protocols. Imagine if one company owned all websites and all email -- censoring your emails and prohibiting what you can write on your own website -- this is effectively what social media companies have attempted. Nostr simply puts the power back in the hands of the user. You decide what you want to read, not an "algorithm" written by moral busybodies and propagandists.
As such, a Nostr client app is like a web browser. Regardless of which web browser you use, you will be looking at the same website. Regardless of which Nostr client you use, you will be looking at the same Nostr feed.
Why is Nostr?¶
The early Internet was decentralized: emails, websites, usenet groups, gopher, private FTP sites, or even the infamous bulletin board systems (BBS) -- all were completely decentralized and uncensorable. Users did not reveal their personal identity, preferring pseudonymous "handles". Using a personal identity was considered, well, too personal.
Most all of this still exists, relegated to the so-called darkweb and nearly forgotten. Even personal websites fell out of favor, all replaced by the dystopian surveillance panopticon brought about by FAANG companies and their ilk. Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Netflix, and Google -- along with the other "big tech" companies that never made it into that dumb acronym (Twitter, Microsoft, Slack, etc).
Few questioned the wisdom of this centralized corporate fascism, ignoring the heavy-handed influence of government and military "defense" agencies -- let alone the corrosive influence of political parties and the various dictators and human rights abusers (often calling themselves activists and other absurdities). Not only are true names the expectation, they are increasingly required -- with pressure from nation states (and unelected central planners) to encourage and even enforce this level of tracking. Everything you do and say, both online and off, what you type, where you're sitting, your buying habits, your political views, everything -- all these formerly private details are aggressively and repeatedly tracked in a comically inefficient Rube Goldberg surveillance machine, with your identity bought and sold for immoral uses that prior generations would have only imagined in a sci-fi novel.
e.g.
Even reading this blog has likely triggered dozens of surveillance trackers, each adding data to your digital profile (the device you are using, how long you stayed on this page, your physical location, mouse and/or touchpad movements, everything) -- this profile is then sold, where yours and billions of other profiles are endlessly compared and experimented via machine learning models with predictions of what you'll buy next, where you'll go, who you'll likely vote for, and of course: your level of conformity into this draconian system that no one asked for.
Meanwhile, Nostr continues the tradition of a decentralized Internet. There are no identities other than what you choose to reveal. The default is complete privacy through pseudonyms -- specifically through public/private keys.
An "identity" in Nostr is simply a public key. All messages are signed by a corresponding private key. You can create as many keys as you want. That is, as many pseudonyms as you want. You can even use new keys every time, effectively providing anonymous access without any hurdles.
Meanwhile, payment integration is baked in natively with lightning. Rather than monetizing through attention, engagement, and other measures that did nothing but fuel the dystopian nightmare that is our modern surveillance state -- instead Nostr monetizes through, well, money. Rather than desperately track personal details and whorishly seek attention, Nostr simply uses Bitcoin over lightning rails. Anyone can pay anyone, all pseudonymously.
And since Nostr is a protocol, different clients can use Nostr for a variety of use cases, effectively disrupting almost all products and services from those FAANG companies. Like what the Internet did to publishing houses and record stores, Nostr is poised to do to our labyrinthine social media hellscape.
If Twitter, Facebook, Tik-Tok and the others are to survive the next decade, it will likely be as Nostr clients. Or Facebook will go the way of Kodak, Google the way of IBM, and so on -- replaced by more competent companies that understand the direction of society. If you don't think this could happen, consider that this is what already happened when these FAANG companies were young start-ups and supplanted the old tech giants, all building on top of Internet protocols like HTTP.
work in progress
Creating Keys¶
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Creating a verified username¶
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Linking to a Lightning Address¶
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