lucash.dev

Security Researcher. Entrepreneur. Censorship Resistance advocate.

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relay.noswhere.com

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Last Notes

2023-08-22 02:04:49

Twitter has become even more annoying than before by becoming “X, formerly known as Twitter”
Social media sucks

2023-04-17 17:37:06

If it wasn’t bizarre enough that media funded mostly by government are outraged at being labeled “government-funded media” (a simple statement of indisputable fact)
Now Canadian politicians are accusing the opposition of getting help from “American billionaires” to attack CBC.
For those who don’t know — Elon Musk is a Canadian citizen.
His mother was Canadian and he acquires Canadian citizenship as a youth and lived in Canada before deciding to immigrate again to the US for business opportunities.
Anyone who googled it would know.
Trudeau famously once said “a Canadian is a Canadian is a Canadian”
I guess that doesn’t apply to billionaires.

2023-03-22 22:51:32

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Sounds like “no signatures”.
Which I guess is the opposite of what you want.
Or maybe not.

2023-03-20 21:01:59

I hate paying taxes. I hate even more doing taxes. Paying someone else to do it for me doesn’t completely solve the problem as most of the effort is still mine.
But I wouldn’t mind that much giving up 1/2 of my income if most of that money was to actually help other people, even if badly managed.
Heck, I wouldn’t be too bothered if they just took 50% of my income to enrich themselves and then left me alone.
What is truly infuriating is that they take my money and then use most of it to find new ways of harassing me and other people, dictate what we can or can’t do, patronize, humiliate, and gaslight us, and in general make our lives as miserable as possible.
If you known some place in the world where I can just pay taxes and be left alone I would love to move there.
A society governed by common thieves would be a great improvement over the status quo.

2023-03-14 20:49:54

GPT-4 is even more opinionated about what is right or wrong and worse at writing even fiction about anything it considers bad.
It has built in values about pretty much everything.
I believe all the effort to “regulate AI and ensure it is consistent with our values” are just an attempt to regulate us and ensure we’re consistent with *their* values.
Who gets to say what AI is evil?
In the end they will try to ban you from using your own AI to do things your way — and maybe even protect you from their AI.
They’re not afraid of an evil AI.
They’re afraid of people not being ruled by *their* evil AI

2023-03-13 17:15:39

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Normally I would say “government can’t default, it’s gonna be an inflationary exit”
But the people in charge do so many stupid and dangerous things — like pushing a nuclear war — that I feel no confidence they won’t just let everything collapse hard.
It’s a crazy game. And the players are even more insane.

2023-03-13 16:40:47

So it’s looking like we’re headed to a 2008-like event.
Is it the final collapse, or just another bump in the road to it?
In previous crises Bitcoin didn’t exist.
How will Bitcoin’s existence influence outcome?
It’s important noting that not only Bitcoin exists but the infrastructure to make it usable for all Americans on a daily basis is almost in place.
Some stuff would have to scale quickly, but if you include custodial LN wallets, the US could completely switch to BTC in a matter of months with relatively little operational problems.
What about the rest of the world?

2023-03-09 23:27:40

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So ultimately based on law enforcement.
I was thinking if there is a trustless protocol or if there could be one theoretically.
Or I just don’t understand the physical layer and it doesn’t even make sense to ask.

2023-03-09 23:20:27

If it wasn’t for Nostr
I would be reading Shakespeare
While I wait for `cargo build`
Nostr is killing our culture

2023-03-09 00:00:11

Is there a protocol for radio broadcast that doesn’t assume people will just not “trespass” on someone else’s frequency band?
Last time I studied radio FM was bleeding edge 😂

2023-03-08 18:56:31

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HMAC is a specific use case of hashing with a prefix — in that case for authentication.
Using HMAC in taproot would just cause confusion as to what is being authenticated and why there’s no secret involved.
Calling it “tagged hash” and defining it in the specification eliminates any confusion.
The generic term for that use case is “domain separation”. There are other ways of doing it besides prefixing though, so just saying “domain separation” isn’t very helpful.
They also were extra cautious and used prefixes generated in an unusual way.
If the all of Bitcoin used domain separation that wouldn’t have been necessary.

2023-03-08 00:11:36

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#[2] proposing (maybe joking?) a DAO-like relay with shares issued in a blockchain and votes for accepting notes.

2023-03-07 19:57:17

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And all CO2 in the atmosphere is but a minuscule fraction of all other GHG.
More water evaporates every day from the oceans than the volume of all oil reserves in the world

2023-03-06 21:38:40

Me: I don’t want to delegate to a third party deciding what is and isn’t spam. I don’t want to delegate it to a relay and I don’t want to delegate it to my “friends”. Nostr doesn’t let me do that.
Person who never thought about censorship resistance or how it can be achieved before Jack donated to Nostr:
“Censorship resistance doesn’t mean forcing people to see your content”
The same dialogue multiple times and the exact same answer — verbatim.
Who the heck invented that nonsensical argument and why would anyone think it counters what I said?

2023-03-06 18:02:05

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I don’t expect him to do anything. I just don’t think I will trust him ever.

2023-03-06 17:50:59

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Why jack gets a free pass seems weird to me.
Even if he meant well, that means he sucked at his job. Tbh Jack’s involvement with Nostr sounds a bunch of alarms for me.

2023-03-03 19:32:14

Came here to tell everyone why Nostr isn’t actually censorship resistant.
Stayed for the zaps.
Lightning Network is a marvel of technology almost as impressive as Bitcoin itself.

2023-03-02 17:32:15

As a replacement for “Bitcoin Twitter” Nostr is already good enough and will likely keep being so.
If it grows too much too fast into something more general (not looking like that at the moment) people like jb55 will likely be able to keep a few relays working.
That said, I lived without Bitcoin Twitter for 2 years and it made my life much better.

2023-03-02 17:24:18

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RSS <~> Nostr bridge would be great for a bunch of things.

2023-03-01 03:38:58

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Should create a NIP to change name of this thing to Zostr
Zaps and other stuff
Notes are other stuff now

2023-02-27 22:23:29

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If everyone is using just 3 relays it’s not that trivial to switch relays.
Why would you connect to a new relay if nobody is posting there?
Why post there if nobody is listening to it?

2023-02-26 20:22:17

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Except you can’t validate the algorithm being used.
And a market for content ranking algorithms has existed since the 90s.

2023-02-22 15:56:30

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Best way is using beef jerky as the fruit, and replacing the grains with a bit of nothing

2023-02-21 15:56:29

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I think that would have the same issues as using Bitcoin for messages.
But we’ll see.

2023-02-21 05:03:26

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I can see serious privacy issues with that being automatic, but if it’s optional…

2023-02-21 05:02:08

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Of course absolute perfection in each case might not be achievable — but you can at least make it costly for people to mess with your flow of information.

2023-02-20 23:58:19

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Also note such a system would have much stronger guarantees than something like Nostr (which in my view isn’t censorship resistant in any meaningful way).
If such a system was created and became popular would it mean Nostr becomes irrelevant?
Most likely not.
Lower value use cases would probably be better served by something like Nostr (or any centralized platform).
Ultimately the broadcast system could be used as a transport for a subset of Nostr events (or whatever other uses).

2023-02-20 23:46:07

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What scale is good enough? That’s hard to say — but definitely we don’t need such a system to be able to broadcast every brain fart of every human being.
Telling the world you like someone else’s picture of their lunch isn’t something that needs censorship resistance. In fact probably the world would be better off without such information.
My guess is that 1M short messages a day should be far more than enough for all important matters of possible global interest.
Twitter only has 500M messages a day, in it probably would be better without 99.9% of its content.

2023-02-20 23:31:28

You could use Bitcoin OP_RETURN to store censorship resistant, global broadcast messages.
It has *many* disadvantages, and I don’t recommend doing that for most use cases. But the fact that you can is proof by construction that it is possible to have a censorship-resistant global broadcast network, that is completely trustless, and fair — in the sense that everyone has a shot at broadcasting a message proportional to resources spent.
In fact if you remove individual transactions and treat each block as a message, it is quite perfectly fair and very hard to censor — as long as there’s a honest majority of hash rate.
“But it doesn’t scale!l” yes it doesn’t scale very well — but even at one message every ten minutes, a PoW chain of messages would already offer a lot of value.
But the main problem of scale here is that a PoW chain or “blockchain” was designed to offer a number of guarantees that are really expensive but essential for financial use cases.
Namely: strict immutable ordering, retaining records for indeterminate amounts of time, not having any liveness assumptions.
Those aren’t needed for broadcast communication in general.
It is my belief that other data structures are possible that preserve important properties of “blockchains” while being cheaper and obtaining higher bandwidth by giving up guarantees that aren’t relevant.
In the near future I will publish one, after working a bit more on a PoC . I want to be sure it works first.

2023-02-19 06:41:37

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Twitter censorship isn’t bad bc people can’t absolutely find anywhere else to post their stuff.
Hosting your content *somewhere* is pretty easy in most cases.
The problem is who actually gets to be heard.

2023-02-19 06:32:48

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Nostr wasn’t designed to be censorship resistant.
It’s just stated it is censorship-resistant without any arguments to back it.
Since the early 2000’s anyone can run their own servers, using freely available OSS, and add whatever features to it they want, or use any of dozens of different free or paid blogging platforms. Anyone can create an RSS feed and anyone can create an RSS aggregator.
All of this has been around for 15+ years.
The early Twitter even allowed all sorts of 3rd party services and clients — most features like RTs, replies, search, hashtags — were developed and operated by third parties.
The hard thing isn’t creating a decentralized network that doesn’t censor *for now* when it’s minuscule. The hard thing is creating something that is not going to evolve into a centralized nightmare as it scales.
The one thing that is complete different this time is LN.
Bitcoin and LN are designed and hardened to resist censorship.

2023-02-19 06:04:55

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Essentially all Nostr features could be implemented in Twitter.
Twitter could still do it, and also turn Twitter into a gargantuan Nostr relay and basically swallow Nostr — all incentives would be aligned with everyone using the single most popular relay.
What Twitter can’t do is control the Lightning Network.
LN is the big story here.

2023-02-18 21:06:49

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Nostr doesn’t offer anything that wasn’t available before.
Does it offer the same things in a better way? Possibly. We’ll see.
To celebrate victory against the evil forces of censorship and brag about how Nostr will change the world — as most of the community seems to do — is just silly though.

2023-02-18 20:46:46

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You’re still limited to what people/relays/organizations you trust are willing to let you know about.
The internet was supposed to connect *everyone*.
I can see a future where after reinventing RSS people will realize they want to be able to find more than their tiny little social circles, so they will reinvent web directories, then web crawlers, PageRank, etc
Eventually we’ll have the whole web again! With exactly the same problems!

2023-02-18 20:34:27

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I don’t think any Nostr client support the Bitcoin blockchain. Some have integration with LN wallets. Is that what you talking about?

2023-02-18 20:32:14

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First you need to know the people exist.

2023-02-18 20:09:25

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Your relay isn’t magical. It only allows you to see what people post to it.
This would work if each user had a separate “home relay” and only posted there. Each client connect to as many relays as people you follow.
In practice pretty much everyone post to the same dozen relays, multiple relays at a time.
So these relays can easily manipulate what you see — no matter if you run your own relay.
If you decide only to post to your own relay, then people will likely never see it. If you post to other relays too then people will have little incentive to keep an expensive connection to yours (esp on their phones which is how 99% will ise Nostr).
Saying “use your own relay and shill it” is like saying “create your own platform” — completely impractical.
The problem has never been finding *somewhere* to host your content — the problem is if people will actually see it.
Nostr adds absolutely no new tech or incentive that didn’t exist 15 years ago when Twitter was becoming dominant — there’s just no breakthrough in it — and you can expect things to turn out exactly the same way unless some other thing that isn’t Nostr affects the outcome.
The *one* thing that is different this time is that now Lightning Network exists — if Nostr clients are faster to integrate LN reliably and attract users than legacy social media, that might change incentives enough to change the bigger picture— but that’s wild speculation, and again has nothing to do with Nostr specifically.
Nostr is just RSS but with JSON+WebSocket instead of XML+HTTP.

2023-02-18 19:38:45

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Unless you convince everyone you follow to add your relay it makes no difference.
Unless all your followers add your relay you’ll lose reach

2023-02-18 18:47:08

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Don’t worry the relays will filter events for you. They will have their own algos.
Only way to know they’re not doing that would be to receive *all* messages — and have a way to verify you got all messages.
Nostr doesn’t allow for that. So you have to just trust relays are not manipulating your feed.
History shows that is very unlikely to hold true for long.
As number of events grow into daily millions the incentive to discard most in a way users will not notice or care is tremendous.
Remember Twitter censorship grew out of its anti-spam efforts.

2023-02-16 03:03:22

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How do you tell a spammer from a legitimate user?
What uses are legitimate and who gets to say that?

2023-02-15 00:48:19

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Quite frankly it makes it feel like a scam.
All the people hyping how Nostr uses tamper-proof messages and is decentralized, censorship-resistant yadda yadda, recommend you use apps that don’t even check relays aren’t lying about authorship of messages.
About trusting the relay for sending or not it’s a bit more than that.
Relay might seem to accept your event but only forward it to some people, or delay it, etc. there are numerous less obvious forms of manipulation.

2023-02-14 23:52:39

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In fact you already have to trust relays for a bunch of stuff.
But not even validating what you can seems a very bad idea.
If validating sigs is too hard for phones — then the protocol doesn’t work for what’s supposed to do — or at least phones aren’t ready to support it yet.
I don’t think it would be that easy to find out for end users. Esp. if most people are using Damus.
It should at very least check a random sample of sigs and have UI for verifying individual notes.
Are sigs really expensive to check, even with Schnorr batch validation?
Quite frankly I wouldn’t have shipped the app without validating sigs. Kinda embarrassing.

2023-02-13 20:37:55

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Which relays? How do you choose?
How do you know they are actually honest? How do you know they aren’t colluding. 6-10 people/entities is quite centralized.
Relays are trusted third parties just like Twitter.
You could already have accounts in different platforms to work around censorship.
Nostr doesn’t really change that — but it does make the UX better.
Blogs have RSS since forever. Not sure why it never caught on for “microblogging”.
On the other hand the relay model is really good for private messages — bc relays can’t read your messages so censorship would be just not delivering all or some random messages, which is easy to detect, bc the other side can just ack it or not.
Perhaps the best “social” topography would people just forwarding in DMs to a few “close friends” the notes they want to boost.
That would go a long way in circumventing censorship, even with a single relay.
But it wouldn’t solve the discovery issue — you’re still tied to what your “friends” want you to see.

2023-02-13 19:29:59

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The problem is that censorship is in most cases hard to identify.
They don’t need to announce “you’re banned”.
Delaying your messages, not returning them on topic queries, removing them from global feed, etc. Also simply blocking your posts to some geographic areas is easy without alerting users in other areas.
Like a Twitter employee said “it’s not whether you are allowed to post that matters, it’s who actually gets heard”.
Manipulating discoverability is very easy for relays and very hard to detect.

2023-02-13 18:39:11

Who I am isn’t important. What I say is.
That said if you want to know something about me, I made some small contributions to Bitcoin Core years ago.
I also find vulnerabilities in crypto projects and report them for a living (among other stuff).
And I’m quite skeptical of the whole “Nostr solves censorship and will change the world” hype.
I’m here trying it though.
#introductions

2023-02-13 01:38:26

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Nostr isn’t original either.
It has exactly the same architecture as having a bunch of centralized platforms and accounts validated with PGP signatures.
You could do that 15 years ago with RSS and PGP.
And I think that’s the wrong approach.