Thread
"Nostr will fail unless everyone runs their own relay."
Nostr isn't designed to scale in that manner because it doesn't have routing like lightning.
This claim is similar to saying Bitcoin fails if everyone isn't running a node. While it's preferable, it's by no means necessary.
It need not be perfectly decentralized, just sufficiently decentralized.
Whether that means dozens / hundreds / thousands of relays is up for debate.
Replies (12)
To me, relays are like room on the internet
What equipment do you recommend for a node?
Nostr isnt designed to scale at all. Connection oriented networks dont scale very well. But they can do a decent enough job.
Sufficiently decentralized is orthogonal to scaling and imho a red herring. We know what scales through observation and we know what doesnt scale through observation.
Nostr was under 100 users 2 years ago. It's done very well to get where it has, but it wont overtake the internet, and isnt designed to. It's a very useful tool, and unlocks a lot of developer innovation and creativity. Working as expected.
We should also expect nostr to "fail to scale" (referencing the Andreas Antonopolous talk) as it experiences growing pains. There are surely multiple paths forward for scalability.
There are indeed multiple paths forward to scalability. But nostr hasnt really explored this yet. There's a lot of hope that the gossip model will solve things, but no evidence that it will.
the only obstacle to everyone running a relay is inbound routing
the rest is just a matter of distributing relay lists
What's the most reliable website to check the number of reachable #Bitcoin nodes?
Is this gonna be like the block size wars
I hope it doesn't fail, I have too many cards to show you all!
