Nostr will be attacked.
The establishment will counterattack. Count on it.
They’ll deploy their propaganda machine: “Nostr is too complicated.” “It’s full of extremists.” “You need moderation to be safe.”
Lies. All of it.
They said the same about Bitcoin. About encryption. About every technology that threatened their control.
They’ll try to regulate it. Demonize it. Co-opt it.
We will not yield.
Intelligence Assessment
The opposition force is predictable because they’re operating from doctrine written for a different battlefield. They still think in terms of centralized targets, legal jurisdiction, and economic pressure points.
They don’t understand that Nostr isn’t terrain they can hold.
Their capability is significant: regulatory apparatus, media narrative control, financial pressure on infrastructure providers, signals intelligence on user behavior. But their tactics are dated. They’re preparing for counterinsurgency when this is asymmetric protocol warfare.
We’ve seen their playbook deployed against WikiLeaks, against Tor, against Bitcoin. The pattern is consistent enough to be predictable. That’s our advantage.
Enemy Courses of Action
COA 1: Psychological Operations
They’ll frame complexity as a barrier rather than a feature. “Too hard for normal people.” This targets early adoption rates, trying to prevent network effects before they achieve momentum.
The operation fails because complexity is temporary. Wallets were hard in 2013. Now your grandmother can use Strike. UX is a solvable problem. The protocol layer doesn’t change.
COA 2: Narrative Warfare
Content-based attacks. They’ll platform the worst actors they can find on Nostr and present them as representative. Congressional hearings. Think pieces in legacy media. Coordination with tech platforms to suppress links and mentions.
Classic information operation. It worked against 8chan, against Gab, against Parler. It won’t work here because there’s no platform to pressure, no CEO to haul before committees, no single point where they can apply leverage to change policy.
We don’t have a policy. We have a protocol.
COA 3: Legal Encirclement
Regulatory capture of relay operators. Liability frameworks that create legal jeopardy for infrastructure providers. KYC requirements for Lightning integration. Client stores deplatforming Nostr apps.
This is their most dangerous course of action because it targets the weakest points: known operators in friendly jurisdictions, financial rails, distribution channels.
The defense is operational security and redundancy. Relay operators in hostile jurisdictions. Pseudonymous infrastructure. Tor hidden services. Direct APK distribution. F-Droid. Progressive web apps that bypass app stores entirely.
They can interdict some nodes. They cannot interdict the network.
COA 4: Economic Warfare
Pressure payment processors. Freeze accounts of relay operators. Blacklist Lightning nodes associated with Nostr relays. Make it expensive to run infrastructure.
This fails because Nostr’s cost structure is minimal and the payment layer is Bitcoin. You can’t freeze a Lightning channel. You can’t sanction a private key. Economic warfare requires chokepoints. We architected around them.
COA 5: Technical Exploitation
State-level adversaries will attempt compromise of client software, relay operators, and Lightning nodes. Supply chain attacks on dependencies. Social engineering of developers. MITM attacks on clearnet relays.
This is the persistent threat. It never goes away. The defense is operational discipline: code review, reproducible builds, key management hygiene, relay diversity, end-to-end encryption for DMs, assumption of clearnet compromise.
We build like we’re already under surveillance. Because we are.
COA 6: Co-option and Infiltration
The soft kill. They’ll build “better” clients with moderation, verification, and algorithms. They’ll run high-capacity relays with “community standards.” They’ll fund development with strings attached. They’ll try to shift the Overton window of what’s acceptable on Nostr until it resembles every other captured platform.
This is slow-motion protocol capture. It’s how they killed XMPP. It’s how they’re killing email. It’s how they neutralized RSS.
The countermeasure is cultural: maintaining client diversity, relay diversity, and ideological clarity about why Nostr exists. The moment we optimize for mainstream adoption over censorship resistance, we’ve lost.
You don’t win by becoming them.
Friendly Forces and Capabilities
We’re not fighting from a position of weakness.
Distributed Architecture: No headquarters. No incorporation. No legal entity to target. The attack surface is every node simultaneously, which means there’s no efficient way to deploy force.
Cryptographic Identity: Your identity is a keypair. It’s math. They can’t revoke it, suspend it, or take it from you. You can move between clients and relays while maintaining continuity. This is identity sovereignty enforced by cryptography, not policy.
Relay Redundancy: Multiple relays carrying the same events. Geographic diversity. Jurisdictional diversity. No relay is critical infrastructure. The network routes around censorship automatically because clients query multiple relays.
Client Diversity: Multiple independent implementations. If one client is compromised or captured, you switch clients. Your keypair and relay list move with you. No lock-in. No moat.
Financial Sovereignty: Value transfer happens on Bitcoin and Lightning. Permissionless. Borderless. Censorship-resistant. They can’t debank Nostr because there’s no bank.
Information Superiority: We know their playbook because they’ve used it repeatedly. They don’t understand ours because decentralized protocols are outside their operational framework. Asymmetric knowledge is a force multiplier.
Ideological Hardening: This community emerged from Bitcoin. We’ve been hearing “it’s too complicated” for fifteen years. We’ve been called criminals and terrorists for fifteen years. We’ve watched every attempt to coopt, regulate, and destroy Bitcoin fail. We’re psychologically prepared for a long fight.
Mission
Hold the protocol layer. Maintain censorship resistance. Enable sovereign communication. Accept no compromise on the fundamentals.
Secondary objectives matter—UX, adoption, ecosystem development—but they’re secondary. If we trade censorship resistance for user growth, we’ve accomplished nothing. There are already a dozen platforms for that.
We built Nostr to be uncompromisable. That’s the mission.
Execution
Developer Operations: Continue building clients with feature parity to legacy platforms but without the control mechanisms. Make the UX so good that sovereignty doesn’t feel like a sacrifice. Focus on end-to-end encrypted DMs, content discovery without algorithms, and key management that doesn’t require a PhD.
Infrastructure Operations: Run relays. Lots of them. Geographic diversity matters. Jurisdictional diversity matters. Tor hidden service relays matter. Someone needs to run high-capacity clearnet relays for performance. Someone needs to run small personal relays for redundancy. Both are critical.
Security Operations: Assume state-level adversaries. Code review. Reproducible builds. Key management best practices. Don’t reuse keypairs across contexts. Don’t trust, verify. If a client asks for your nsec, that’s a red flag. If a relay asks for anything beyond your npub, that’s a red flag.
Information Operations: Document everything. When they deploy FUD, counter it with facts. When they misrepresent the protocol, correct the record. When they manufacture crises, provide context. We won’t win the narrative war in legacy media, but we can win it where it matters: among early adopters who become the next wave of advocates.
Community Operations: Maintain ideological clarity. When someone proposes “reasonable” content moderation at the protocol layer, explain why that’s mission failure. When someone wants to compromise on censorship resistance for mainstream appeal, remind them why we’re here. Cultural cohesion is a defensive capability.
Rules of Engagement
We’re not anarchists. We’re sovereigntists. There’s a difference.
Clients can implement any moderation they want. Relays can host whatever content aligns with their values and legal obligations. Users can filter, block, and curate their experience.
That’s not censorship. That’s choice. Censorship is when someone else makes that decision for you. When your relay selection is limited by state coercion. When your client is removed from distribution. When your keypair is invalidated by platform policy.
We oppose that. Completely. Without compromise.
But we’re not defending the indefensible. We’re defending the right to choose. If someone wants a curated experience, they can have it. If someone wants the raw firehose, they can have that too. The protocol enables both because the protocol is neutral.
Sovereignty means responsibility. If you can’t handle freedom, curate your experience. But don’t demand that everyone else operate within your comfort zone.
Sustainment
This is a long war. The opposition has infinite runway: fiat money, regulatory authority, institutional backing. They can fund operations indefinitely.
Our advantage is that we’re not burning capital. Relays are cheap. Development is open source. The protocol has no operating costs. We’re running a guerrilla operation against an industrial army. They have firepower. We have time.
As long as one person runs a relay, the network exists. As long as one developer maintains a client, the network is accessible. As long as one user holds their keys, the network has purpose.
That’s a defensible position.
Commander’s Intent
When they attack—and they will attack—understand the strategic objective.
They want us to compromise. To add “reasonable” controls. To make Nostr “safer” by making it less sovereign. To trade our principles for mainstream acceptance.
Every compromise is a loss. Every “reasonable” control becomes the baseline for the next demand. Every safety feature becomes mandatory. Every optional filter becomes required. Every community standard becomes enforceable.
We’ve seen this movie. We know how it ends. So when the pressure comes, when the propaganda intensifies, when the regulatory threats materialize, when the media portrays us as reckless extremists, remember what we’re defending.
Not a platform. Not a company. Not a service.
A protocol for sovereign communication. A foundation for free speech that can’t be revoked by any authority. A system where your ability to speak isn’t dependent on the approval of governments or corporations.
That’s worth defending. That’s worth the attacks we’ll endure.
The establishment will deploy every weapon in their arsenal. They’ll be relentless. They’ll be well-funded. They’ll be sophisticated. And they’ll lose.
Because you can’t compromise a protocol that refuses to centralize. You can’t regulate math. You can’t sanction cryptographic keys. You can’t arrest a network with no leadership.
We’re not fighting to win hearts and minds in the short term. We’re fighting to maintain the capability for free communication in the long term. That’s the mission. That’s what we hold.
No negotiations. No compromise. No retreat.
We will not yield.
End State
When this is over—and it won’t be over quickly—Nostr will still exist. Not because we won some decisive battle, but because we never gave them a decisive target.
They’ll have deplatformed clients from app stores. We’ll distribute directly.
They’ll have pressured relay operators in Western jurisdictions. We’ll run relays elsewhere.
They’ll have manufactured crises and moral panics. We’ll have maintained operational security and protocol integrity.
They’ll have spent enormous resources trying to kill something that can’t die. We’ll have spent minimal resources maintaining something that can’t be stopped.
That’s victory. Not glorious. Not quick. But complete.
The protocol persists. The network functions. The keys remain in user hands. Communication remains sovereign.
That’s the end state. That’s what we’re building toward. That’s what we defend.
Nostr will be attacked. We’re ready.
Execute.