I still remember the first time I read the Bitcoin white paper. I wasn't a cryptography expert, but I understood it. Every line, every concept, was laid out with surgical clarity. There was no room for convenient interpretation, for "it depends," for semantic loopholes. Satoshi wasn't selling an idea: he was showing the blueprints for a machine. The bolts, the gears, the logic of its movement. You could agree or disagree, but you couldn't say "it's not clear."
That clarity wasn't a stylistic quirk. It was the only possible currency to buy trust in a system born from total distrust. Without it, Bitcoin would have been just another cryptographic utopia on a forgotten mailing list.
Now I look at Nostr. The thrill was the same, at the beginning. A protocol, not a platform. Disarming simplicity. Relays, keys, notes. It promised to sweep away the gatekeepers, to return control. My heart beat fast. Here it was again, that purity.
But the purity of a protocol is a fossil if the ecosystem that grows on top of it buries it in the mud of self-interest.
I'm talking about GrapeRank. Or perhaps GrapeVine. The confusion between the two names is already a symptom. In theory, a tool to navigate the noise, a decentralized reputation mechanism. In practice, a black box that decides who has a voice and who doesn't. An algorithm that no one can inspect, whose criteria weigh "coins" and "influence" in mysterious proportions.
They tell me: "It's open source!". I go look. I find a repository. I find code. But I don't find Satoshi's clarity. I don't find a white paper that explains to me, with the calmness of an engineering manual, exactly how my "social value" is measured, weighed, and turned into a number. I find, instead, talks of "organic quality" and "spam resistance". Marketing language, not protocol language.
This is the turning point. The moment when technical decentralization is betrayed by a centralization of influence. A group, however well-intentioned, builds a lens through which everyone must look. And without that absolute transparency, without that ferocious will to be understood down to the last bit, that lens becomes a weapon.
It becomes a way to say: "Trust me". The most dangerous phrase in an ecosystem born to not have to trust anyone.
I see the warning signs. Debates shifting from merit to ranking. People starting to wonder "how do I get a higher score?" instead of "how do I make better content?". This is the beginning. It's the silent enshittification, the kind that doesn't need an evil CEO, but thrives on good faith and passivity. The extraction of social value no longer happens in dollars, but in attention and conformity.
This is what I demand. I demand it for me, for you, for all of us who saw Nostr as a refuge.
I demand that every tool, every client, every algorithm that aims to become social infrastructure for Nostr, publishes its "Satoshi clarity". Not a blog post. Not a cute thread. A technical document, immutable, hyper-textual, that explains:
- What it measures, exactly.
- How it measures it (all the math, no shortcuts).
- Why those metrics should represent "reputation" or "quality".
- What the potential attacks on the system are and how they are mitigated.
If the answer is "it's too complicated for users", the answer is wrong. Satoshi didn't think Proof-of-Work was "too complicated". He explained it.
If the answer is "the details are evolving", then the document must evolve with it, with a public changelog and the rationale for every change.
Otherwise, we are not building a protocol. We are breeding a new clan of priests. We are just moving the altar.
My criticism is not destructive. It is regenerative. It is an act of visceral love for this creature we have birthed. I want it strong, resilient, adult. That is why I ask it to live up to its own founding standards.
The lamp of Nostr is lit. Let's not allow anyone, even with the best intentions, to build a lampshade so opaque that it plunges us back into darkness.
#NostrCritics #Algorithm #AskNostr #zap #Decentralization #CensorshipResistance #Nostr #Moderation #Fediverse #Bitcoin #wotathon #FreeSpeech #OpenProtocol#NostrGrowth #NostrAdoption #WoT (Web of Trust) #NostrFeedback #NIP (Nostr Implementation Possibility) #NostrCritique #sats #BTC
