# Pigeons: Pricing the Unsaid Value4Value rewards what has already been said. We need a way to price what remains unsaid. Once an event is signed, anyone holding a copy can relay it. But before that event exists, only its author can produce the signature we want. Your nsec gives you a monopoly over your signature. For information retrieval, we propose a demand-driven, paid event-retrieval model layered on top of the existing outbox and gossip models. We call it the Pigeon model. Pigeons are Nostr relays with laser focus on earning sats. Nothing else. They relay events from the depths of the Mariana Trench to the top of Mount Everest for nothing more than a couple of millisats. And when the event we want does not yet exist, they can relay our demand all the way back to the person who can sign it into existence. A Pigeon earns a retrieval fee for delivering an existing signed event. When no satisfying event exists, it can carry a commission back to the publisher. The first payment prices distribution; the second prices information. The outbox model primarily answers a supply-side question: where does this author publish events? That works well for following particular authors, but it does not fully address information-seekers, like us. A user looking for answers may have a burning need for replies to a root event, events matching particular tags, or contributions from a trusted set of domain experts, not merely everything published by one pubkey. Outbox discovery also does not compensate relays for the potentially expensive work of finding and delivering those events. It does not hold relays responsible for missing events: relays serve events for free, and publishers are expected to find relays and push events to them. Outbox pulls from where publishers pushed. Pigeons pull toward demand. In a paid retrieval market, a client offers several independent Pigeons a filter, a time range, a budget, and acceptable per-event prices. Each Pigeon searches its local storage and sources missing events from wherever it can: outbox and gossip discovery, other relays, or directly from publishers. The client verifies that each delivered event has a valid signature, matches the filter, and satisfies any pubkey-list requirements. It then pays with Cashu for valid events it has not already received. Payments can be batched and priced to cover retrieval, delivery, and payment overhead. After querying the first Pigeon, the client can use Negentropy with subsequent Pigeons to reconcile their sets and request only missing events. It can also keep moving the filter’s timestamp backward and pay for progressively older events. Retrieval continues until the user is satisfied, additional results stop justifying their price, or further Pigeons produce no useful new information. This provides as much practical completeness as the buyer is willing to pay for. It does not guarantee complete retrieval because Nostr has no global view. No relay can prove that an event was never created or that every surviving copy has been found. Pigeons compete on coverage, price, speed, and reliability. A Pigeon that deliberately withholds events so they can be sold later at a higher price risks losing its reputation and ceasing to be clients’ first-choice provider. Meanwhile, Pigeons that consistently find rare or missing events can charge for that additional value. This model also improves the other incentives: - Relay sustainability: readers pay for retrieval, so useful Pigeons receive revenue rather than bearing read costs entirely themselves. - Privacy: clients can choose Pigeons independently of authors’ outboxes and pay with Cashu, potentially over Tor. This reduces dependence on co-opted outbox relays and payment-layer identity leakage, although the selected Pigeons still see the query. - Censorship resistance: if every popular outbox relay is blocked, a Pigeon inside your regime can still take your sats, find the events elsewhere, and sell them back to you. When we are looking for answers from people in oppressed regimes, demand gives Pigeons a reason to pull those events out. - Bandwidth: set reconciliation avoids repeatedly transferring events the client already possesses. - Spam resistance and paid anonymous access: payment puts a price on retrieval abuse and gives relays a reason to serve Tor and VPS users instead of treating every anonymous reader as a DDoS risk. Buyer-specified pubkey and content requirements make unwanted answers unprofitable. - Replication: Pigeons can buy events from one another and resell them, causing valuable signed events to propagate toward demand instead of remaining only on publisher-selected outboxes. The demand signal can also reach publishers. A publisher can ask Pigeons whether paid demand exists for its events. If users want answers from that publisher but no suitable event exists, a Pigeon can carry a commission back to the publisher and pay for a signed response. Publishers therefore gain a way to discover and monetize demand. Instead of pushing events to your outbox relays and hoping to be found, you will find the whole world pulling events from you if it deems them valuable. The result is a pull-based information market: readers express demand through filters and payments, Pigeons compete to satisfy that demand, and information creators can be compensated for producing valuable signed supply. Outbox and gossip remain useful publication and discovery mechanisms underneath; paid retrieval adds the missing economic and information-seeking layer above them. ## What Should One Query? We believe this is a key missing piece for Nostr's widespread adoption. If new users must follow pubkeys before they can find anything, only to discover GMs and GNs, there is little reason for them to explore Nostr. What if there was a map of everything under the sun and beyond on Nostr? A map of all the topics the Nostr community might have explored on their own? What do Bitcoiners think about Bitcoin storage solutions? That is an obvious question Bitcoiners must have explored! In the upcoming post, we will explore how maps and coordinates help us fetch information relevant to our needs: the information superhighway foretold in *The Sovereign Individual*. A teaser from Rin: Map is Not Territory By: Information Seekers Haruto, Kira and Rin We would love to hear your opinion on this.