The CEO of Tether has a new project making what he calls "unstoppable apps", just like bitcoin is the "unstoppable money". But he sees anything using relays as flawed in this respect. He had some comments on Nostr that wound up on the cutting room floor, but may be of interest here:
> "The issue with Nostr, [which] has become popular, is it has relays. The relays are part of the equation. Without the relays, Nostr cannot work … There was [once] Kazaa, Nutella, Limewire – all had relays and all were shut down or all failed. The only peer-to-peer protocol that worked and could not be shut down was BitTorrent because it did not have any point of failure. So that's our benchmark. We could have taken many shortcuts to make it easier for us, but it took six or seven years to develop something that is truly resistant to the wrath of God."
The new company, called Holepunch, has developed a protocol called Pear Runtime that is solely P2P. Its first flagship app is a video conferencing and chat app called Keet, and it supports Lightning wallets. I suspect Nostr at least served as some inspiration.
South China Morning Post
Stablecoin giant Tether backs ‘unstoppable’ chat app to take on Big Tech
Tether CEO Paolo Ardoino’s new venture Holepunch has launched a peer-to-peer messaging app called Keet to aid the mission of ‘financial freedom...
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