> With our unique financial rewards model, scale matters. The more justice you unlock, the more monetary compensation you receive.
> In fact, we pledge to distribute to tippers $200 million out of every $1 billion we collect.
What? Donating 20% of profits is great, but this sounds very weird. Is the only thing that drives this revenue donations? In which case, why do we need a rent seeking intermediary? Nostr has bitcoin tips built in, and you don't have to pay anyone to send money to whomever you want.
Pretty sure that's 20% of revenue, and I'm assuming that their business plan relies on skimming from settlements, not just taking donations. But they are also paying investigators and lawyers out of all of that.
If this is a business, which it sure seems like it is, then this is such a messed up idea. Exploiting whistleblowers and the whistleblowing system for profit. And they're trying to incentivize whistleblowers with money too.
Whistleblowers take all of the risk here, and only get 20% of the proceeds. Seems like a pretty shit deal, besides being confoundingly greedy.
There already are people you can trust, who aren't anonymous, who are professionals bound by ethics, and who aren't out to sue for profit: Journalists. investigations@icij.org
> Nostr has bitcoin tips built in, and you don't have to pay anyone to send money to whomever you want. Apart from that, using a tiny niche platform like Nostr doesn't feel like a good comparison if you want to show how "others" are doing it.
Have you tried actually paying with Lighting and Bitcoin before? You definitely are paying someone a fee for mining / processing the transaction.
There is nano which doesn't have any fees at all if you are going into that, but personally I would recommend some chain like polygon or stellar etc. with low fees and to use stablecoins like USDC on top of it, personally, the fees are so negligible, and if they are still an impact, maybe pay them on nano but polygon's fees are in cents iirc, there are other low cost stable coin based tokens too i guess.
For whistleblowing though, Monero would be top tier.
Also I am pretty sure that there are already systems which can give a list of numerous crypto accounts from one thing but still monero would be my best choice for such kind of things tbh given how usdc can still hold/censor your money in a somewhat degree y'know, maybe there are some freedom usd things or something but at that point, having them in monero makes more sense.
These are the few applications of cryptocurrency which can genuinely be used (I am a bit of crypto skeptic because I don't like what the community has become, my only respect is for monero community really and some nano contributors or some chain developers in general but they form a very small portion and the markets don't move because of them and no matter how much trust I have in a project, I don't trust markets and I don't want to play a fool's game compared to stock markets where there is genuine productivity in conservative stock markets generally speaking although that productivity is also de-linking thanks to AI in S&P 500 )
To be really honest, I just don't like crypto personally except stablecoins and that too in just a very small degree, That is my personal experience that I am not going to take part in something which feels like an speculative asset no matter its use-cases as most of these would just converge on one or two and if not, they would have some niche use cases and their use case right now is feeling more and more like a ponzi scheme more and monero is the only one which doesn't feel that way really.
Couldn't agree more with this. Another way to describe this kind of honesty is as "integrity", or in other words the coherence of your inner and outer lives. Hypocrites are always in a contest against themselves, which is a kind of self-sabotage. Insisting on personal integrity forces you to align your stated values with revealed preference, sharpening both.
Nostr is essentially a compromise between p2p and traditional web architectures. It cuts with the grain of the internet by using web servers, while reducing the dependence users have on servers by using keys for identity and digital signatures for authenticating data.
The effect is that users have "credible exit" (among other things), which has been discussed for years. This doesn't really create any new "use cases", which is why the use case is often described as "whatever, it's the new internet".
What it does do is introduce a very different set of trade-offs which favor user control over platform control (with the attendant UX trade-offs (or at least a different set of UX idioms)).
The reason the focus is on social is because that represents the majority of applications that do exist, the original motivation for building the protocol, and a value proposition (censorship resistance) that lots of people can relate to.
I don't want to be mean, but this post has exactly the problem the person you're replying to was complaining about. The person you're replying to, I think, would like an explanation that reads more like "It's like Twitter, but not tied to a mega-corp, just for you and your pals". I don't know if that description actually fits Nostr though because, like the person you're replying to, I have a pretty hard time understanding what Nostr actually _is_.
My point is that question is sort of a category error. It's like asking what type of business the internet is for, or what the use case of smart phones is.
Here are a few things built on nostr, with specific use cases:
primal.net is a twitter-like client with bitcoin micropayments and long-form articles (also see coracle.social, nosotros.app, jumble.social, Amethyst, Damus, yakihonne.com and many others);
zap.stream is a twitch-like client for live streaming;
flotilla.social and chachi.chat are group chat clients;
dtan.xyz is a client for torrenting on nostr;
satlantis.io is sort of a travel ratings thing;
zap.cooking is a recipe website;
yakbak.app is for voice messages;
nutstash.app is a cashu wallet built on nostr;
cashumints.space lists cashu mints that advertise themselves on nostr.
What's neat is that all these clients can do things the way they want to, but remain interoperable, which means that new developers can create an app and immediately have access to all existing nostr users and their social graph.
>It can be used to some extent via a browser using web clients, but it's best used alongside extensions for authentication and key management
Just wonder can the key just sit in the IndexDB? And it is decrypted on the client side (when user enters password to decrypt the key) to sign a message to send to peers or relay, they can verify your identity by checking against the corresponding public key.
The question isnt a category error and deserves a direct answer.
If I follow what you're saying the answer could have been: "it's a framework/set of protocols for building a Twitter that can show all the stuff on other compatible Google+/Facebooks"
If you have a preference for this style of definition, then we could say that
Nostr is a protocol that's well suited for creating decentralized applications that need publicly verifiable identity, censorship resistance and event based communication.
For example, https://zapstore.dev/app is an Android AppStore that uses nostr to provide a decentralized way to verify the developers and remove "fake" apps.
The criticisms are either implementation dependent (not checking signatures, which defeats the entire purpose of the protocol), or based on a very early proof of concept encryption scheme which has since been superseded (by NIP 44, which was independently audited). There's nothing substantial or actionable here (any more).
The cryptography was thrown together in the very early days as a proof of concept, that reached some level of adoption because of how nostr suddenly grew at the end of 2022. The community has since largely switched to a new standard (NIP 44) which has been independently audited, although there are some popular clients that haven't yet transitioned.
I am less on HN these days, but as far as I have seen:
Telegram is still judged by its very early releases, still called "unencrypted" while it is about as encrypted as your bank transactions (they definitely aren't e2ee either).
Signal can do what they want including dabbling in crypto currency without being open about it. Signal can also have extremely "interesting" bugs (didn't it at some point send messages to random people?) and glaring security issues (relatively trivial remote code in the desktop client IIRC a few years ago).
Last I checked WhatsApp was supposedly also good since they now use good encryption despite now being owned by Facebook, sending my social graph to them and sending peoples entire backups (including chats with me) unencrypted to Google for "free" (IIRC) backup.
That said these days I am definitely looking for Telegram alternatives.
Your bank doesn't operate in Telegram's threat model! You are never concerned that your bank's servers are attacking your transactions: if you can't trust your bank, you're fucked anyways. That's precisely what's not supposed to be the case about a messaging service!
It's very unlike mastodon in that server operators have minimal control over user identities and content. Spam control is still a work in progress, but has come a long way through web of trust and more responsible relay operation. I invite you to give it another try!
Very thoughtful points. One thing about nostr is that it does tend to balkanize due to the technical architecture, allowing for different groups of people to use it in different ways (different relay policies, client features, filtering, etc). But the tradeoffs you list are real, and enforce real constraints (the biggest of which is bare keys as identifiers). Many of these constraints can be designed away, which keeps me optimistic. We've had 30 years of research and development into password management, but far less into end-user key management. Even if nostr itself has some fatal flaw, I think a lot of interesting ideas are coming out of it, just because it provides a very different set of affordances for digital spaces.
Alternatively, you could use nostr, have your users pay for the database, and get access to rich content types, an existing social graph, and application interoperability.
OP and developer here, Flotilla's not quite primetime-ready, but I saw the Revolt post and decided to proffer my own alternative. Happy to answer any questions.
> In fact, we pledge to distribute to tippers $200 million out of every $1 billion we collect.
What? Donating 20% of profits is great, but this sounds very weird. Is the only thing that drives this revenue donations? In which case, why do we need a rent seeking intermediary? Nostr has bitcoin tips built in, and you don't have to pay anyone to send money to whomever you want.