Happy Sunday #Nostr !
Here’s your #NostrTechWeekly newsletter brought to you by NostReport (npub19md…6vzk) written by greg (npub1r3f…7ex2)
The #NostrTechWeekly is a weekly newsletter focused on the more technical happenings in the nostr-verse.
Let’s dive in!
Recent Upgrades to Nostr (AKA NIPs)
1) (Proposed) NIP 93: Backwards compatible alt-urls
Links break, blogs get moved, domains get changed, and companies go out of business. These can all lead to situations where content on Nostr may get stale because links in notes are stale.
This proposal introduces a concept of alt urls for links in notes. When first publishing, that helps create multiple pathways in case one link is broken.
What’s really interesting is being able to correct broken links after a note is published. Since most Nostr events can’t be updated, users can instead submit a kind 4001 event referencing the original event and propose alt-urls. This could be done by the original author or good samaritan users helping keep Nostr content up to date!
Author: fiatjaf (npub180c…h6w6)
2) (Proposed) NIP 88: Recurring Subscriptions via Zaps
One of the most powerful things Nostr could provide to content creators is a better way to get paid with fewer middlemen and much lower fees. This proposal from PABLOF7z (npub1l2v…ajft) uses Zaps as the foundation of a Patreon-style subscription for content creators.
Content creators can publish subscription tiers (and their prices) as a kind 37001 Nostr event. Then subscribers can publish a “subscribe” event indicating they want to enroll in one of the subscription tiers.
Users will then pay the subscription fee via Zaps, which can be verified by the content creator. Finally users can publish a “stop subscription” event to indicate they will stop paying and receiving benefits from the content creator.
To make this easy for all involved, there will likely need to be substantial client work to help content creators facilitate their subscription tiers, verify subscriber payment, and distribute paid content automatically so they can focus on the content creation itself. But this would be a tremendous improvement over Patreon just on lower fees alone.
3) (Proposed) Rewrite of NIP 46: Nostr Connect / Remote signing
Nostr Connect (not to be confused with the Nostr Connect Chrome extension mentioned later in this report) is an attempt to give users complete self-custody of their Nostr private keys, where they won’t need to enter the private key into any client, while still making day-to-day Nostr operations easy and convenient.
In this model there is a “remote signer” which may be a hardware device or a different app on a mobile device, and clients will work with the remote signer to perform operations where a private key is required (decrypting DMs, signing Nostr events, etc).
This rewrite of NIP 46 simplifies the protocol while taking into account real-world learning since the original introduction of the NIP. There is an explicit eye towards helping codify what nsecBunker has to offer. It is a huge improvement to security, privacy, and the ease of self custody.
Author: fiatjaf (npub180c…h6w6)
Notable Projects
Shipyard as a DVM 🚢
Shipyard is a project that gives more robust publishing tools to content creators (scheduling posts, reviewing and responding to mentions, etc). PABLOF7z (npub1l2v…ajft) is working to make Shipyard a DVM so that clients can provide the “schedule post” functionality to users without having to build it into the client itself.
Nostr Connect Chrome Extension 🔒
Every time I am asked to give my private key to a Nostr app, I cringe. For mobile apps I know there’s not much support for remote signing yet, but for web-based clients we should all be able to use a browser extension. Up until now they haven’t been the best design or nicest to use browser extensions. reya (npub1zfs…w445) changed all that!
This chrome extension is much better designed and it’s far easier to manage permissions that you’ve granted to various clients in the past. It quickly became my daily driver for web-based Nostr operations. Great work!
140 Character Relay 🐦
The original Twitter restricted content to 140 characters, and that form factor facilitated a unique set of content creation. Whether it’s nostalgia or a desire to see if going back to 140 characters would help recreate the unique feel of early Twitter, we now have a relay that enforces all notes to be 140 characters max.
Author: PABLOF7z (npub1l2v…ajft)
TrueVote ☑️
Using the combination of Nostr and OpenTimestamps (therefore Bitcoin as well) TrueVote creates a decentralized, verifiable voting system.
From what I can tell, folks can submit votes via a Nostr event (signed by your private key to verify it was you doing the voting), with timestamps verified by OpenTimestamps to ensure the vote happened when the Nostr event claims.
As outlined in Nostr is Bitcoin’s Layer 3 talk from NostrAsia, this application of Nostr highlights how Nostr seems to be the missing link for freedom tech. Bitcoin is great for payments and immutable history (for example: timestamp assertions) but it is missing the identity and coordination layer.
Nostr in the context of TrueVote unlocks the certainty of “one Nostr account, one vote” which can be incredibly powerful for many applications. As long as the person conducting the vote whitelists who can vote, this is cryptographically secure as well as transparent (votes can be conducted in public and verified by all).
Fascinating to see this in use.
Author(s): brett (npub1u8u…c3c3)
Latest conversations: Custodial Solutions
With the recent news about Wallet of Satoshi pulling out of the US market, it’s important to keep the topic of custodial solutions top of mind.
Custodial solutions (for Bitcoin or for Nostr) offer immense benefits for ease of use and convenience, but they are susceptible to all kinds of interference that may leave users holding the bag.
Ideally we only need self-custody
Self-custody maximizes freedom: freedom from fraud and rug pulls, freedom from the whims of a regulatory environment, freedom from reliance on third parties that may just go out of business.
Ideally, everyone would self-custody all the important things: money, data, their home, their food, and their water. But doing so is incredibly expensive, time consuming, and requires expertise. Humanity is able to support a population of 8 billion people because of the specialization of labor. At some level we end up trusting others with important aspects of our lives.
Technological advances and engineering effort allow humanity to grow AND decentralize. Bitcoin is a breakthrough that makes it possible to decentralize money and enables self-custody of one’s life savings. Nostr is making it possible for people to self-custody their data and still have all the conveniences of modern digital life.
Whether they be used for Bitcoin, Nostr, or anything else, custodial solutions are the backup until we’ve engineered solutions good enough that the average person can easily self-custody.
How to spread freedom tech
The goal of building freedom tech should be to make freedom accessible to more people. If we build solutions that increase access to financial or communication freedom, then that’s progress. Just because that number isn’t 8 billion doesn’t mean it’s not progress.
Custodial solutions for things like Bitcoin and Nostr make freedom more accessible to more people. If given a choice between a million people using a custodial lightning wallet or not using Bitcoin at all, I’d argue you’d rather they use custodial solutions for the time being. We can always draw them towards self-custody later.
It remains a noble goal to get everyone to self-custody, but it requires work to build self-custodial solutions that work for average people.
Building easy self-custody takes work
There are ways to make products that are as easy to use as custodial solutions and still give the user complete control. They just take orders of magnitude more work to build.
Self-custodial lightning wallets like Phoenix, Breez, Blixt, and Mutiny Wallet are good examples. They have done a ton of the work to make a lightning node friendly to operate, which means that more people will have access to self-custodial lightning.
Before these solutions you’d have to run a Bitcoin full node, then set up your Lightning node, and manage channels with Thunderhub or RideTheLightning or other lightning management apps. It’s a lot of work! Far more people can now run self-custody lightning because of their work. It’s far easier so people are more likely to try it, and eventually adopt it deeply.
There’s still more work until someone non-technical in my family could use self-custodial lightning without needing help, but this is real progress for freedom tech.
Nostr: self-custody that’s great
Nostr is inherently more self-custodial than any existing social media. Your private keys control access to your data, you can move your data from one relay to another, you can download backups any time, and you can control what clients can do with your data.
Any use of Nostr is head and shoulders above existing social media. There are some folks offering more custodial or centralized services within the Nostr community (opt-in moderation, custody of keys, hosted relays, etc), and that’s ok, because those are the first step in building something average people can adopt.
Every single day there are Nostr devs putting in the work to make self-custody of your life on Nostr easier, so that more people have full access to the freedom that’s possible via Nostr. In the meantime, we may need to tolerate some more-centralized solutions to bootstrap the user growth and economic activity necessary to fund the next wave of improvements.
Until next time 🫡
If you want to see something highlighted, if we missed anything, or if you’re building something we didn’t post about, let us know. DMs welcome at NostReport (npub19md…6vzk)
Stay Classy, Nostr.