Шта је Ностр и зашто га Битцоинерс воле?

Bitcoin maximalist Jack Dorsey significantly contributed to the popularity of social media platform Nostr overnight on December 14, when he chose to цвркут about it. Thousands of Bitcoiners joined the platform thanks to his publicity of the platform, which promises to be a credible decentralized social site that could displace Twitter.

His recommendation gained 428,000 organic impressions. The next morning, Dorsey донирао 14 bitcoin (then worth $250,000) to Fiatjaf from Bitcoin gaming company Zebedee. Fiatjaf is the lead maintainer of Nostr and a developer on Damus, Nostr’s leading implementation.

Bitcoiners hastily planned a Nostr конференција. It already has hundreds of confirmed attendees scheduled for March 19-21.

So, what is Nostr? And why is the Bitcoin community excited about it?

In short, Nostr обећава to become a credibly decentralized social media platform that could displace Twitter in the same way that Facebook displaced MySpace. It’s not built on the Bitcoin blockchain per se, but most implementations of Nostr support Bitcoin payments over Bitcoin’s Lightning Network. According to Forbes, Nostr is an elegantly small protocol, a sort of “smart client, dumb relay” model that forms a solid base for building customized social media.

Опширније: Оффлине Битцоин Лигхтнинг плаћања ће ускоро бити могућа

Nostr’s primary innovation is a persistent public key that can be ported to any social media brand and retain its following. Imagine the ability to permissionlessly transfer one’s Instagram followers when creating an account on Snapchat, for example.

Звиждач НСА Едвард Сновден ецхоед Bitcoiners’ excitement, claiming that Nostr could replace Twitter and Instagram. He also affirmed the value of decentralized social media to fight censorship. Snowden alleged that the government put pressure on corporate-owned, centralized social media to curtail users’ speech.

Why the name “Nostr”?

The name Nostr is derived from variants of “nuestro,” a Spanish word meaning “ours,” including the Portugese “nosso.” Nostr is also an acronym: Notes and Oтхер Sтуф Transmitted by Relays. 

Nostr says it will make it easy to find people on social media. Discovery works using public keys that users can append to their existing accounts on social media platforms like Twitter, Instagram, or Telegram. Notable early adopters of Nostr include Jack Dorsey, Vitalik Buterin, Edward Snowden, and pro-crypto Senator Cynthia Lummis.

Twitter owner Elon Musk did not seem to like the idea of competition. He initially баннед accounts that (according to him) had the “primary purpose” of promoting Twitter competitors like Nostr or Mastodon. However, Twitter later повучено Musk’s decision.

Next steps for Nostr

The relatively small number of Nostr developers are mainly trying to keep up with the influx of users. They’re also working on further integration of the Bitcoin network. Users can already send bitcoin tips to other users. Users can also use Bitcoin’s Lightning Network to change their Nostr usernames.

Developers are interested in using Bitcoin and its Lightning Network to help Nostr relays prevent spam attacks like Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS). The owner of one GitHub repository already објављен an implementation called “Expensive Relay” which requires users to pay a relaying fee to publish events (imposing a fee is a common tactic to prevent spammers who overload free communication channels).

Nostr is new and very much in development. Bitcoin Magazine звао for Nostr to solve issues with public key management like the requirement for users to post keys on Twitter to verify their accounts. Fiatjaf has предложено one way to solve that.