Obligatory contrarian Lightning Maxi take coming in hot...
Nostr's roots are as an iteration on how GUN was used in ShockWallet and Lightning Pages, as a means to have a web-friendly overlay network to connect Lightning to WebApps
This continues to the primary usecase for Nostr today even as a leaner and more flexible successor to GUN.
Users are funneled through the Lightning ecosystem for connecting LN to WebApps: Zap Signaling, NWC, kind 21000, accessing sat monetized services, and and more, is why any users are here to begin with. Heck, even these notes are about Lightning.
Without the network effect of Lightning as a native payments layer, Nostr its just another combination of websockets and json.
Anything that it's capable of is only in context of it making better Lightning Apps, because key-based identities, webservers, and json aren't otherwise novel.
Replies (4)
Gun a very different project. I know it well. Nostr is a cut down version of SSB. Martti came over from gun to nostr, too.
Not very familiar with SSB but im assuming it doesn't use web relays, that's the key feature inherited from our use of GUN
Enabling apps that work in any browser and solve the networking issue is and ultimately what enables distribution where lightning can't reach.. keys and data only matter where they can be delivered to
I appreciate the contrarian take. I don’t have as much background on the full history of nostr — so thanks for contributing that.
I wrote what I did because some people look at nostr as tribalist around bitcoiners and I just wanted to say that the beauty to me is that it’s a different layer of technology that’s not closely coupled to a cryptocurrency belief — at least not today.
However, I don’t think the incentives of nostr will work long term without internet native money. At some point relays need to get compensated for the resources they contribute. Bitcoin is the only reasonable way to do this, imo.
I also don’t think advertising-based business models will work given the protocol structure, so again, we need bitcoin to help mediate the value exchange among people who create/consume on the protocol.
Yep the death of advertising is my thesis in lightning.video, the incentives of users paying for hosting are a micro level are much better.. nostr as the overlay for that transaction metadata is going to reshape the Internet
