Reinventing the social web: How Nostr and Bitcoin are bringing about a decentralized revolution

Author: Lyn Alden; Compiler: Block unicorn

It would be very powerful if you could transfer your digital identity, content, and followers from one social ecosystem (such as Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, or Substack) to another.

Imagine if you could post content and send messages in any of these ecosystems and just use the same digital identity instead of separate accounts. Imagine if you had more control over the algorithms and user interfaces to discover content in the ecosystem and interact with other people in the ecosystem.

Nostr is a public domain communication protocol that stands for "Notes and Other Content Transmitted via Relays," and it is becoming a trusted way to increase this interoperability between different ecosystems. People have been planning and developing technologies like this for a long time, but with Nostr, the concept is actually being launched in some way and providing a real-world experimental platform for people around the world to build on.

In a nutshell, it's an open source protocol that enables decentralized social media, but there's a lot more to it. It’s a simple set of foundational building blocks that, if widely adopted, could gradually reshape “the web” as we know it. Rather than a set of separate, siloed social ecosystems, we could move toward a more interoperable set of ecosystems that decentralizes more power to content creators and audiences rather than middlemen companies.

At the very least, even if adoption is low, it’s an alternative to the current way of doing things for those who want it, and a powerful one at that. I currently use Nostr as one of my two most active social media ecosystems, alongside Twitter, and I’ve also found that the social graph aspect of Nostr has already made my Bitcoin/Lightning wallet experience better.

I first wrote about Nostr in April 2023, in an article called “The Impact of Open Money Networks and Information Networks.” Since then, my book Broken Money, published in August 2023, seems to be the first printed book to mention Nostr.

Since then, development on Nostr has been proceeding at a rapid pace, and I’ve gained a clearer understanding of some of its key value propositions, which is why I’m writing about it again now.

Here’s an example of an article on Nostr that summarizes what Nostr is about:

This article is organized into three modular sections for easier reading:

• Part I: Decentralization of Social Media

• Part II: Building a Public Payments Directory

• Part III: Potential “Other Stuff”

An easy way to get started with Nostr is to visit Primal.net. This is a popular open source client for Nostr that’s available on desktop, iOS, or Android.

But as we’ll see in this article, there are countless ways to use Nostr, and that’s the point.

Part I: Decentralization of Social Media

Before we dive into social media, let’s take a high-level look at how email works.

When you use email, you're typically using a client that's built on top of a communications protocol called Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP). As a user, you don't have to interact directly with the technical details of SMTP; you just need to know how to use your chosen webmail client application (such as Gmail) and let it handle the technical details for you.

SMTP is a public domain communications protocol that belongs to no one person. It's like a shared language that clients can choose to use to communicate with each other. Communications protocols, like spoken and written languages, can have very large and lasting network effects once they become dominant. SMTP was invented in 1981 and is still going strong.

A key factor in the success of communications protocols is that they tend to be very simple, with most of the complexity and customization pushed to higher layers and/or the edges of the network, leaving little room for obsolescence at their core. Communications protocols can be updated over time in a backwards-compatible way if necessary, much like how languages ​​evolve.

Gmail, Apple Mail, Outlook, Yahoo, Proton, and other webmail clients all use SMTP because that's how they can interoperate. Someone who uses Yahoo can send email to someone who uses Gmail. Someone who uses Gmail can send email to someone who uses Outlook, and so on. They're an interoperable ecosystem.

Email clients don't have to make sure they're compatible with every other individual webmail client; they just have to make sure they're compatible with SMTP so they can interoperate. There are a few other protocols involved in email, but SMTP is the main one.

Personal webmail clients are controlled by companies. They're centralized. They can add features and unique user experiences for their users. They can decide how to filter incoming email, or what options they give their users to filter incoming email. They can decide to ban certain users from using their service. Their governments can block them from accommodating users from certain jurisdictions, or force them to hand over their users' data. They can choose to filter out incoming email from small self-hosted webmail servers and only accept email from other large companies, thus fostering some oligopolistic tendencies.

But SMTP itself is decentralized because it is in the public domain. Essentially, no one can be "banned" from using SMTP. It's like being "banned" from using the English language; but it's not true because no one owns or controls it.

However, the social media ecosystems of Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, TikTok, etc. do not operate like email and SMTP. A Facebook user cannot message a Twitter user and vice versa. If someone decides to leave Twitter and join TikTok, they can't take their followers with them. The way Web 2.0 has developed is that a small number of large, centralized, isolated corporate ecosystems have grown up, which use their own internal communication methods and are generally not interoperable with each other. They designed themselves as walled gardens, and they control the user's identity instead of the user controlling it. They use some underlying Internet and web protocols to ensure that they can interoperate with the user's device, but other than that, most of them try to keep everything in-house.

Nostr works differently. It is a very simple public domain communication protocol, just like SMTP for email, but it was written more for social media. Users are in control of their own identity.

Each Nostr user creates a unique public/private key pair. The public key is their permanent identifier, and the private key is what they use to sign various events to publish them and prove that they came from them. In addition, their private key also allows them to read direct messages sent to their public key by other users, or claim electronic cash tokens sent to their public key, and perform other similar private actions.

Nostr's ecosystem consists of many relay servers and application clients, built by various companies and individuals, all of which use the Nostr communication protocol. Each user can use their private key and the desktop or mobile client application of their choice to create "events," which can contain written content, updated profile information, or a host of other things, and post these events to multiple relay servers around the world to store them and make them public. The user's client application periodically contacts and retrieves events from multiple relay servers so that they can see what others have posted. Users can choose which relay servers to connect to.

The importance of the key pair is not only as an identifier of who you are, but also as a verification of your content. Every piece of content you post on Nostr that is associated with your public key is signed by your private key. Therefore, a malicious relay server cannot arbitrarily post a large amount of fake content and attribute it to you, nor can it change the content you post. By signing your content with your private key in the client interface, you are verifying it.

In fact, using Nostr feels much the same as using any other social media. You can open the client application on your computer or phone and post content, read content, watch content, comment on content, and so on. What makes it unique is that if you don't like using one client, you can enter your private key into another client (securely on your local device) and take your digital identity, followers, follower list, and posting history with you. Or, you can use several different clients at the same time for different purposes or on different devices, but still have the same digital identity, followers, follower list, and posting history on all of them.

Each Nostr client (such as Primal, Damus, Amethyst, Snort, etc.) can decide what its user experience will be like, what features will be implemented, how spam will be managed, and so on. Users can change clients, use multiple clients, or even create their own.

Nostr has different types of relay servers, and anyone with basic resources can decide to run one. Most users won't do this; they'll just use the client. But various companies and advanced users can run limited or full-featured relay servers to meet the needs of themselves and/or their customers.

In other words, Nostr separates the client layer of social media from the public domain communication protocol layer just like webmail clients separate the client layer of email from the SMTP public domain communication protocol layer (or even more radically). This allows for more interoperability and gives ownership of the user's digital identity back to themselves.

Technical Best Points

On the one hand, centralized social media companies like Facebook, Twitter, or Tiktok run a centralized server. It's efficient, but it has to be permissioned and closed. The company that runs it decides what content classification algorithms to run. They decide who can create an account and who is banned. They decide what types of content are allowed or banned. They can read your private messages. They can delete your content, even change what you post, and can technically exploit your account to post content you didn't create. They can delete some or all of your followers. They can make your account follow or unfollow any account. They can be forced by governments to do certain things or share certain data. They can decide what payment methods, if any, users can use in the ecosystem and create all kinds of cross-border regulatory friction. They can even prevent outside developers from interacting with the ecosystem by blocking large amounts of information and data.

But on the other hand, it's impractical for every social media user to run their own server. That would be very redundant and expensive, which is why people don't do it.

So Nostr is in an interesting sweet spot on this spectrum in terms of decentralization and practicality. It's decentralized and distributed because it has many application clients and many relay servers that regular users can switch between, while advanced users or companies can make their own. But it's also efficient because, in reality, most users will only use the client and benefit from the many relay servers that exist. By controlling your own key and automatically using it to sign the content you post, it prevents any kind of tampering or forgery of your content by others, including the relays of the ecosystem.

Storing and accessing content on dozens of relay servers is more conducive to decentralization than accessing it on one central server. If a relay decides not to accept your post, that’s OK, because you’ll be sending your content to multiple relays for redundancy and accessibility. This is much better than other decentralized social media like Mastodon.

Nostr is simple, so it can be developed quickly and cheaply, with high redundancy and interoperability. Many other digital identity schemes have been around for a while and are more complex, but they’ve mostly existed in theoretical form, while Nostr is already in use and has an early user and developer network effect around it.

At this early stage, some of the user experience details have more friction than centralized social media companies, and Nostr’s development does have some significant challenges to solve, especially in terms of user interface speed and private key management technology. However, its openness also allows it to make huge advances in some areas compared to centralized social media, such as ownership and verification of personal identity and content, and the development of “zaps”.

Tip on Social Media with “Zaps”

Nostr itself is not a blockchain, but it does leverage the Bitcoin network and its various layers for micropayments.

In addition to “liking” someone’s post, retweeting, or commenting, most Nostr clients also allow you to “zap” (i.e. tip) someone’s post. This is a tip, paid in units of Bitcoin called sats, that is instantly transferred from your wallet to theirs. Just like the number of likes and retweets displayed on a social media post, on Nostr the number of tips is displayed on the post.

From a content creator’s perspective, this allows you to make money directly from content creation. From a reader’s perspective, it enables you to financially support the people who create content you like while engaging with it. Nostr’s ecosystem provides a publishing layer with transactions built into it related to publishing content.

This is a voting mechanism with proof of work built into it, even if the creators themselves don’t need the money. “Likes” are free, but “zaps” cost money, even if only a little. This is a variable that client creators and algorithm creators can incorporate to help people discover relevant content and fight spam.

Some other social media ecosystems have also adopted tricks, but the power of Nostr zaps is that they are open source and interoperable. You can plug different wallets into your various Nostr clients. Someone can send zaps from their custodial lightning wallet to someone else’s non-custodial lightning wallet, and vice versa. This allows for domestic and international payments, including micropayments. Recently, Chaumian electronic cash (ecash) zaps have also been developed on Nostr.

Some wallets can store value in other units, such as dollar-denominated stablecoins or dollar-denominated e-cash tokens, if the user wishes. There are all kinds of possibilities.

I think these zaps are much more important than most people realize, but I’ll save those details for part 2 of this article.

Choices for content discovery

In early June, at the Oslo Freedom Forum, I had a conversation with Jack Dorsey (co-founder and former CEO of Twitter, co-founder and current CEO of Block) about Nostr, as he is a big supporter and contributor to Nostr. You can watch that conversation below.

We all know that social media companies can restrict who can use their platforms and how, and in many cases, governments can force them to remove certain types of content. However, Jack Dorsey stressed the additional importance of algorithms and content discovery mechanisms, and I agree with him.

Social media algorithms can feed us information that makes us angry, polarizes us, and keeps us hooked with dopamine. It can amplify the rhetoric of governments or corporations while reducing the influence of others. It can gather information about us at a level of detail that even our loved ones don't know, and then use that information to bring out the worst in us in each other.

Here's what Jack Dorsey said when he chatted with us:

This may sound a little crazy, but I think the current free speech debate is a complete red herring. I think the real debate should be about free will.

We can feel this right now because we are being programmed. Our behavior is influenced by the content we claim to be interested in, by these discovery mechanisms that tell us what is interesting. As we interact with this content, the algorithm continues to build more of this bias. But even if the algorithm is open source, it's actually a black box. You can't 100% predict how it's going to work, what it's going to show you, and it can be tweaked and changed at any time. Because people have become so dependent on it, it's actually changing and affecting the free choices we have.

I think the only way to solve this problem is not to work harder to open source the algorithms, or to make it easier for the algorithms to explain what they are doing and why they are doing it, but to give people choices. Giving people the choice to use the algorithms of a party they trust, giving people the choice to build their own algorithms that can tap into these networks and see what they want and move them off. And giving people choice, really building a market around algorithms where people can choose, “I want to use this algorithm because of these reasons, I no longer trust that party so I won’t use this, or I don’t want to use anything: I want to be the discovery mechanism myself.”

That’s really the biggest problem, the reason these companies have become so big and so valuable is because they solved the discovery problem on the internet.

We talk a lot about the public square, but the public square can’t be owned by one company. The public square is the internet by default. But the problem with the public square is that it’s very hard to discover and match what you’re actually interested in. That’s the value of Google; it helps you discover. That’s the value of Facebook; it lets you discover your friends. That’s the value of Twitter; it helps you discover the news of the day and interesting content.

But if we can solve the discovery problem in an open source way, in a free agent way, where you can choose how you see the world, choose which algorithms to use, or understand how they work, and can turn them off and see everything, that's really powerful, and that's what we need.

But we haven't seen a lot of progress yet. Twitter took the first step a while ago, where we gave you the ability to turn off the algorithms and just see the people you follow. But the problem is, you're going to miss a lot of content because there are tens of thousands of tweets coming in every day, and you need some help. But to be able to trust that help, I think you need to be able to choose it and have control over it. Otherwise, it's actually attacking our free will. It's programming the way we think. We can try to resist it, but it knows us better than we do because we're telling it our preferences all the time, explicitly or implicitly. It feels really dangerous to continue to rely on it without giving us a choice.

— Jack Dorsey, June 2024

For social media, Nostr is taking the digital public square back from corporations through a public domain communications protocol, at least for those who decide to use it.

In Nostr, content can be stored on multiple relay servers around the world, so no centralized entity can remove it. Nostr lets users choose which client to use, and thus which discovery algorithms to use, and allows users to customize their user interface, while their identity and followers go with them as they move from one part of the ecosystem to another. It integrates payments and monetization through different interoperable wallets. It challenges closed silos and proposes to connect them back together in an interoperable way.    

How to try Nostr

Some of this may sound complicated, but it's actually quite simple. Every technology we use is more complex than we experience as users.

First, you can try Nostr by downloading Primal, one of the most popular clients, available for desktop, iOS, and Android. You can find it at Primal.net or in the app store. I also use Primal as one of my preferred clients as one of their advisors.

Many clients will help you generate a public key "npub" and a private key "nsec" to get started. The npub will become your public identity, and you should write down your nsec and store it offline, like a password that only you know. This private key enables you to control your account and transfer your identity and subsequent information to another client as needed. If you lose your phone, or your preferred client disappears for corporate reasons, that's fine. As long as you hold your nsec private key securely, you are in control. So this is the main technical part that needs to be taken very seriously. And, you should only enter your private key into well-reviewed open source clients.

With Primal, you can also quickly generate a Lightning Network wallet with minimal personal information, which allows you to send and receive zaps on Nostr. In addition to sending zaps to people who have this wallet, you can also use it to send or receive Bitcoin payments to others outside of Nostr via the Lightning Network.

Alternatively, you can check out other Nostr clients. For example, my favorite iOS client is Damus. And on PC, I also like Snort. In many cases, you can plug different wallets into whatever client you are using. You can try different wallets with your favorite client, or try a completely different client and wallet setup.

Especially for desktop use, one of my favorite Nostr-related applications is the Alby browser extension, which acts as a signing authority and wallet for the desktop client and other applications and websites. It can generate and/or save private keys for you, helping you minimize the number of clients you need to enter your private keys into, reducing security risks. If you choose to start with a desktop experience, consider checking out Alby first, as an optional step, which can then be used to sign for a variety of desktop clients, including Primal, Snort, and more.

That's the power of Nostr: customization and interoperability.

Part 2: Building a Public Payment Directory

For me, one of the most exciting features of the Nostr ecosystem is that it happens to be the best global public payment directory built to date.

In fact, it was this feature that got me interested in Nostr again after my initial experience.

Bitcoin and Nostr together are like an international, decentralized, open-source version of Venmo. It’s not just a payment method, it’s also payment discovery.

Let’s review what this means. I’ll explain with an example.

A little over a year ago, I did someone a small favor worth a small fortune, and he asked me to give him a Bitcoin or Lightning Network address to repay me. I told him not to worry about it, partly because he was an acquaintance of mine, and partly because I was too lazy to send him a QR code, payment string, or my LNURL address. So I casually declined. However, he persisted and asked for repayment again. It’s worth noting that he needed my permission to pay me because he didn’t know my payment information, which is actually an interesting friction if you think about it.

I was about to decline him again, but then I responded, “I mean, it’s really not a big deal, but if you insist, you can message me on Nostr.” It turns out that because I recently joined Nostr and connected my Bitcoin/Lightning Network wallet to my profile, he no longer needed my permission to pay me. He can just look up my information and pay me unilaterally.

Besides using physical cash, paying someone is usually a pretty frictionless process compared to how simple it should be. Making payments digitally or through a bank usually involves a number of steps on both sides, the payer and the payee. It’s a bilateral process.

First, the payer has to ask the payee for their payment information. What’s their checking account information? Or what’s their Bitcoin/Lightning address? Or what’s their Zelle-linked email address or phone number? Do they have a point-of-sale method that accepts debit/credit card payments? Second, the payee has to provide the payment information. This could be a string of numbers, or a QR code, or a human-readable LNURL or Bolt12 Lightning address, or confirmation of Zelle details or something similar. Third, the payee has to take that information and execute the payment.

In recent years, some countries and services have begun to simplify this process, enabling so-called payment discovery features. For example, Venmo combines the social graph with a payment method, so you can simply find (“discover”) your friends on the app and pay them.

However, useful services like Venmo in the US are often closed-source, centralized, proprietary, and often only work in one country or region. They are not interoperable and not global. They usually require providing some kind of identity information to the company to verify the account.

What if someone wants to find and pay someone internationally? What if someone has established a reputable online identity that is separate from their real-life identity, such as a human rights activist in an authoritarian country or an anonymous content creator, and wants to be able to easily receive payments or donations without revealing their personal identity?

The combination of Bitcoin’s Lightning Network and Nostr provides a payment method with payment discovery capabilities, and does so in an open source, interoperable, and international way.

Another example, this time I am the payee. Over the years, when I attend investment conferences, I often have to attend various events, dinners, etc. I often find myself in an Uber with other people, or we have an informal group dinner. When someone offers to pay for an Uber or dinner for everyone, I usually say, “Tell me the most convenient way to pay you.” Or if it’s at a Bitcoin conference, I’ll say, “Give me your Lightning Network address and I can pay you.”

Like me, they often respond, “Don’t worry, you can pay next time.” Part of this is generosity, but part of it is inconvenience and friction. No one wants to pull out their phone, exchange QR codes, or go through the process of paying someone with the payee’s payment information at that moment.

But if the payee can just say “I’m on Nostr,” or the payee already knows they’re on Nostr, then things become much easier. It’s a Venmo-like experience, but it’s international, interoperable, and open source. The payer can unilaterally pay the payee at any time, with a message attached.

For example, my friend Preston Pysh paid for several of the Ubers we shared at events, but he always refused our payment. If he doesn’t provide me with some sort of payee information, there’s nothing I can do about it. I don’t provide him with payment discovery, which means I have no way of confirming where to send a digital payment. Good thing he uses Nostr, so for the sake of writing this post, I just sent him a unilateral Lightning payment from my Mutiny wallet.

Mutiny itself isn’t even a Nostr client. It’s a Lightning wallet that happens to use Nostr as an optional payment discovery tool. Since Nostr is a public domain communication protocol, a wide range of applications, including Lightning wallets, can use it.

Thanks to Nostr, I can easily look up a large number of Bitcoin enthusiasts and pay them using the various Lightning wallets I use. These wallets may use Nostr directly, such as the Mutiny wallet. Or I can manually apply some elements of Nostr to my other wallets, e.g. I can look up someone’s LNURL on their Nostr profile and paste it into any Lightning wallet that doesn’t use Nostr directly.

Nostr has implemented a self-built decentralized public payment directory that works globally. It provides payment discovery capabilities for wallets of all types.

Why this is more important than it seems

In theory, it would be great to have an international option to join a payment directory. This is a giant public database that everyone can put their payment information into, so that payers can look up payees and pay them. We already have centralized local payment directories, like Venmo in the US. But imagine a directory that is open source, globally available, controlled by no one, redundant across multiple jurisdictions to prevent being banned, interoperable across different wallets and payment types, and has tons of privacy options.

If we had this, we could easily make payments to anyone unilaterally.

In practice, however, it quickly becomes clear why such a system doesn’t exist yet. What incentives are there to put your payment information in one directory versus another? What incentives are there to update the directory if your payment information changes? What incentives are there to stop thousands of spammers from pretending to be Preston Pysh or Lyn Alden? What incentives are there to stop people from entering all sorts of fake payment information for semi-public figures? Who will control and maintain this massive international payment directory? Whose servers will it run on? What if a powerful force wants to shut it down?

Nostr’s growth is being guided by payment directories like this because it has assembled the right incentives to solve these various problems.

Miljan Braticevic describes Nostr as having four functions:

1. Identity layer

2. Trust network

3. Messaging layer

4. Publishing layer

All of these functions work very well together when building and maintaining a powerful global public payment directory.

As a starting point, the decentralized social media aspect of Nostr provides an incentive for people to establish a known identity on it using a public/private key pair, and use Nostr's client and relay ecosystem as a messaging and publishing platform, at least as a backup to get started. This is a way to broadcast information from a source that only you control (as long as you keep your private keys safe) to multiple relay servers that other clients can access, independent of what happens to your other social media accounts (such as being hacked, disabled, or otherwise).

There is also an incentive to associate a wallet with your profile, so that you can receive "zaps" from readers on anything you post, and any Lightning Network wallet user can look you up and pay you. This process is so simple that some Nostr clients even have wallet functionality built directly into them.

But there is also the problem of spam and impersonation that plagues any open payment directory. How do you know if someone is really who they say they are? What if one well-known person has a thousand impersonators? This is where Nostr's trust network helps a lot.

On Nostr, people can follow each other to receive content and information, because this is a social media ecosystem, not a pure payment directory. If you see an account for Jeff Booth with 10 followers, or an account for Jeff Booth with 100,000 followers, you can probably tell which one is the real Jeff Booth.

But we can go a step further. I link to my real Nostr profile on the sidebar of my website to help verify that my Nostr identity is actually me and my number of followers. I also follow Jeff Booth, which I do because I want to receive his posts, but it also helps signal to others, whether humans or algorithms, that it is indeed the real Jeff Booth. So his identity has been indirectly verified through my website, just one step. I have multiple ways to communicate with Jeff, so I can confirm that it is him or if his digital identity has been otherwise compromised. There are other people I know who are also following the same Jeff Booth profile, many of whom are also verified through their website.

This network of trust helps to organically distinguish between real accounts and imposters, no matter the scale. Number of followers, specific high-impact followers, and various real-world anchors (like my website linking to my real Nostr identity) all help to build a self-organizing network of trust. Even on a smaller scale, once you’ve verified with a few friends that their account is real, then the people they follow can help build a real network of trust within your circle of friends.

Other social networks have aspects of a network of trust, of course, but the difference here is that the open nature of Nostr allows us to take this network of trust and apply it to other things, like payments.

So in addition to a decentralized social media ecosystem, we have a decentralized global public payment directory that has great incentives to create it, and it also has built-in protection against impersonation.

While Nostr is still niche as a social media ecosystem, this payment directory is already having a notable impact on Bitcoin/Lightning wallets. For the Bitcoin ecosystem, many types of bilateral payments are now becoming unilateral payments, which improves the user experience, especially within a circle of friends.

Money and communication are inherently inseparable. They complement each other. Transferring money is a social activity. Nostr’s open source nature enables clients to integrate interoperable cross-border payment methods better than any centralized social media ecosystem, which gives it a unique value proposition over the existing ecosystem. It makes these payment methods even better by building a self-organizing social graph.

Part III: Potential “Other Stuff”

As mentioned earlier, Nostr stands for “Notes and Other Stuff Transmitted Via Relays.”

Besides enabling decentralized social media and a decentralized payment directory (two very powerful and mutually reinforcing features), what else can it do? What else is there?

There are already dozens of apps that integrate Nostr. It’s one of the simplest of the social media communication protocols, so it’s very quick and cheap to integrate it and build things that leverage it. Whether it's short-form content, long-form content, Twitter-like experiences, Reddit-like experiences, Pinterest-like experiences, Telegram-like experiences, Instagram-like experiences, podcasts, music, videos, photos, recipes, reviews, marketplaces, there's a Nostr app for it. And there will be more. We'll see which ones stick around.

It's still early days, and most apps are self-funded and still rough around the edges in some ways, but more are being built every week and existing apps are improving. In addition, some pre-Nostr apps are retooling their backends to become Nostr apps.

Because Nostr is a communications protocol, it's in the public domain, and so any app that wants to integrate it can do so. Apps that integrate Nostr can interoperate with other apps that integrate Nostr. By adopting Nostr's radically simple shared language, apps allow users to seamlessly use their existing online identities, social graphs, and data.

The main motivation for application development teams to integrate Nostr is that it allows the application to tap into Nostr's existing network effects and user base. User identities, user social graphs and trust networks, and data availability all already exist.

Building an initial user base from scratch is difficult for an application, but Nostr can help with that. If you make a new app and interact with Nostr, any Nostr user can immediately use your app, and the virality of social interaction is already built in.

In contrast, large ecosystems may be slower to integrate Nostr than emerging ecosystems because large ecosystems already have huge network effects and user bases. But as Nostr scales, the more incentive some ecosystems have to integrate with it.

Money and Data: Parallel Networks

While the Bitcoin protocol and the Nostr protocol do not inherently require each other, they work very well together. They complement each other. They are both distributed, redundant systems, as Bitcoin's nodes and Nostr's relays are spread all over the world.

A blockchain is a distributed database that maintains a global consensus state, meaning that every participant in the world agrees on the current state of the database. Since the current state is based on the changes from the previous state to the current state, this means that every participant must agree on the complete history of all past states since the blockchain was created in order to reach a consensus on the current state.

In other words, whether you are in Tokyo, London, Cairo, New York, Cape Town, Sao Paulo, or anywhere else, there is an objectively true and verifiable answer to the exact number of Bitcoins currently in existence, as well as a complete list of Bitcoin transactions. You can look up any confirmed transaction in Bitcoin's history since 2009, and there is no dispute about its details. This global consensus is updated on average every ten minutes and covers the world.

Each unit of information that is carried out to maintain the global consensus state is very expensive, so the network needs to make many trade-offs to keep the cost relatively reasonable. Bitcoin, as a decentralized settlement layer with its own currency unit, sacrifices complexity and throughput as much as possible in order to allow anyone with a basic computer and an internet connection to verify and continuously synchronize with the global consensus state. For this reason, most complexity and throughput must be achieved by building layers on top of Bitcoin, rather than doing it directly on the base layer.

On the other hand, most things, other than cryptocurrencies, don’t need a single global consensus state. A lot of complexity and cost can be saved by not having a global consensus state. This is why most people think blockchains might help solve problems that don’t actually require blockchains.

For example, imagine if all of the email clients in the world had to repeatedly agree on the exact number and complete history of all emails ever sent. There is a single true global consensus state for all emails. This would be completely unworkable. There is no global consensus state for emails, which means there is no official agreement about the current state of all emails. Each of us only cares about the emails that are important to us. I care that my webmail client stores my emails until I delete them, and reliably delivers my emails to the recipients. If someone in China emails someone in Kazakhstan, it doesn’t matter to me, and I and my webmail client don’t need to record and catalog all the emails between China and Kazakhstan. Entities in China and Kazakhstan don’t need to track my emails. Trying to put "all email on the blockchain" would be extremely clumsy and would not do any good. If all webmail providers wanted global interoperability, it would be important to have SMTP as a shared language so that someone from China or Kazakhstan could email me and vice versa. But no one, except intelligence agencies, wants to track all emails in the world, past and present, forever, and even they don't have the ability to do that completely.

No one indexes all websites on the entire Internet, and no one reaches a global consensus on the state of every website. Google is the world's largest website indexer, but even they don't own all the content, they only index the most relevant parts.

Facebook, as a massive centralized server and ecosystem operator, can reach consensus on the current state of all content on Facebook (although at great cost), but as a closed company, it is the only entity that can reach consensus. With this power, Facebook's operators can ban people from using Facebook, can modify content or remove content, or decide which content is more engaging to users than other content, etc.

Nostr has no global consensus state, and this is exactly why it works so efficiently. Relays on Nostr don't store everything, though the big relays store most recent content, and a lot of past content. It would be too costly and too frictional for all relays to coordinate to make sure every relay stores everything. That would require all kinds of restrictions that would limit Nostr's growth. Users can run their own relays if they want, and store and serve all their own content forever.

As a user, I want relays to store my content and make it accessible to me and others. I want relays to store other people's content that I'm interested in, and serve it to me when I want to access it. I don't really care if relays agree on the status of every piece of Nostr content; I just care that the network can efficiently serve the content I want to the people who need it. In fact, I want to be able to access basically all content written in English in the Nostr ecosystem, and I want as many English-speaking users as possible to access my content. But I don't need to dig into Chinese relays and keep track of everything that happens there. Americans living in China, however, might need to make sure they're paying attention to those relays so they can use them. But maybe neither of us know much about relays in Brazil, and that's OK. If for some reason we need to know more about Brazil and do content discovery, we can opt in to that process.

Just like a frequent Nostr user might be willing to pay a cloud storage operator or webmail client for premium services, a frequent Nostr user might be willing to pay certain relays for a higher degree of data availability for content than a user who only posts cat memes to friends. Nostr provides this flexibility, with a very simple and decentralized foundation, and then how much data availability we want in the ecosystem is up to us and the resources we are willing to spend to get it.

While still in its early experimental stages, Nostr is very powerful. It stores arbitrary data redundantly around the world in an open source manner and provides verification that the data has not been tampered with no matter which relay it is on and which client is reading it. But much like email, Nostr does not have to keep trying to reach global consensus on all this data. This capability provides a great set of building blocks for developing new and better interoperable applications.

The Bitcoin ecosystem benefits greatly from Nostr's social graph and global network of data availability, while the Nostr ecosystem benefits greatly from Bitcoin's open source and reliable global network of currency.