Thread

Replies (17)

Yeah, I have slowly been putting my ideas down about this. I guess I have time to ramble... Calle and Laan are software. We code, and we are code. While we are software and abstract, for us to run ourselves and our code we need computers, and computers are physical things. We are bits; our computers are atoms. Unfortunately, our computers, bodies, and communication networks are made of atoms, and they are subject to physical attack. I believe as a cypherpunk, our main concern is defending against physical attack. We tend to think we exist and work in cyberspace, but we really have to concern ourselves with meat-space. We have a couple of tricks up our sleeves. One is obviously cryptography, and I think 90% of the heavy lifting of NOSTR and Bitcoin is getting everyone to physically secure a private key. An emphasis on PHYSICAL. Securing a private key is a physical process, not a software process. It is instantiating the key into atoms, defending those atoms, and keeping them private. NOSTR is good here because as a protocol it remains loose enough to innovate on. Once everyone has a private key, you can go a long way without having to define the networking. Relays, snail-mail or carrier pigeon: you know that this event is from me to you, because we use keys. I think that the cryptography part is pretty well understood, but we have another trick up our sleeves: the commodification of hardware, or maybe even better: the "roachification" of hardware. It happens to turn out that in our universe, once a computer can do some very basic functions, it becomes "Turing Complete" meaning the computer can run ANY software in our universe. Some Turing computers have more memory and some are faster, but they can all run any software program to some arbitrary number of steps. If/when the aliens land, they will be able to run Microsoft Windows on their computers (god help them), and we will be able to run their software. It's an amazing fact about the universe we live in. This means that you, I, and our code are SUBSTRATE INDEPENDENT. It doesn't matter what the computer is made of: silicon, carbon, DNA—it's all the same. It doesn't matter where the computer is. As long as it can compute. So while we live on/in computers, and depend on them, they are interchangeable, and fundamentally a commodity on a physics level. Our code is special; our computers are a commodity. If we recognize this underlying fact about our universe, we can utilize it in our code to give us a great advantage. Bitcoin's strength is not that it defends its computers; it's that it treats those computers (the nodes, the mining ASICs) as the commodities that they are: redundant and expendable. There is no special computer in Bitcoin. In my estimation, NOSTR comes the closest of the communication protocols in understanding this. A core tenet of NOSTR is that relays are dumb. Expendable. Commodities. We want the world to be awash with them such that they are like roaches. You stomp on one, and two more appear. They need to be easy and cheap to run. So I would say that the two key ingredients of NOSTR are: 1. Keys 2. Commodification of hardware. There are things about NOSTR that I think could "use improvement," but I love it. Once I discovered NOSTR and saw that I could take my overly important home computer, separate the software from the hardware, turn the hardware into a commodity, and spread my software globally across the internet such that it is everywhere and nowhere, I was hooked. One of my goals is to be able to walk up to any standard computer, enter my key, and have the entire world that I built in cyberspace available to me. My code, my communications, all there. My money is controlled by me. It is everywhere, and nowhere. My code and my network can now be controlled by me. It will be everywhere and nowhere. Now if I could only upload all of myself from my brain, and save it from this slowly dying computer I am running on.... that would be something. It's actually a good thought experiment, and way to critique a protocol. Imagine you upload your brain to the internet, and you don't want to die. How would you design the network that you live on? The physical infrastructure as well as the protocol? We should think about this question because it is ultimately what we are doing.
Nostr is simple, it’s understandable and requires no permission to build. Nostr has the core primitives right: uniquely identifiable signed events with npubs. Nostr also solved the semantic interoperability issue with kinds. Define your own kinds, agree on others and get on with building. Finally, the relay architecture, along with uniquely identifiable events removes a dependency on any one database instance. Data can be anywhere.
I think nostr is nothing but a large group following rough consensus. so far we've agreed upon signing messages with secp256k1, this is fundamental. Next we agreed upon the structure of our messages, note the signatures still stand even if our agreement on the signatures broke. Next we agreed upon relaying these messages through websockets over to relays, note the structure and signature still work even if we chose to ignore the relaying mechanism. I think it is this resilience the fact that I would still know its calle even if you ignored everything else and signed your message on paper and sent it through a peacock. This is what makes nostr special, we agree upon stuff that works. Thats all that matters. That it works.