Nostr is an interesting place
Nostr is an interesting place
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19 comments
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I ended up having to block the word Bitcoin. It's just too much.
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I know. It's such a nice protocol, too.
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Nice idea, but implementation is pretty much flawed. It doesn't property scale to large usage without a gazillion problems emerging.
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Besides not being able to scale.
- Excessive network usage - over 10x compared to activitypub
- Relays auto-deleting old posts
- No actual blocking implemented - only client side
- Post editing doesn't always work
- Notifications and posts getting lost between clients
- No moderation for scammers or trolls
- Unable to block people from following
- Metadata leaks - like everyone knows who you muted
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I don't have any issue with Nostr, it honestly doesn't interest me very much at all. But since it came up, let me tell you a little anecdote:
A few months ago I opened the Wikipedia article on Nostr, which states in the last sentence of the overview that:
Nostr was created as a result of perceived moderation issues on Twitter, as well as both technical and cultural disagreements with other protocols such as ActivityPub and Secure Scuttlebutt.
for which it cites the original blog entry where the protocol was introduced. Since I was interested in what these disagreements might be, I read through the post. And while I did find out what the criticisms of AP and SSB were, I also had a different train of thought going on too:
After reading the short summary, I thought to myself "Well that sounds like a nice hobby project, but isn't that just BBS with crypto (and over the internet instead of telephone lines)?" That changed, however, when I read somewhere else that relays can also query other relays for their posts, after which I though "Well that sounds like a nice hobby project, but isn't that just NNTP with crypto (and over the internet instead of usenet)?"
Again, none of this is an issue for me and I don't really have any problems with the protocol itself but what did rub me the wrong way was that towards the end of the blog post, in the Q&A, it says the following:
This is very simple. Why hasn't anyone done it before?
I don't know, but I imagine […]
and idk, not actively looking for prior art seems a bit lazy to me ¯(ツ)_¯
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Can you elaborate?
I'm thinking about using it as a broker for a little family-group oriented word game, because the servers that do what I need already exist and include the NIPs I'd want, and truly, Nostr servers have been the simplest, least resource demanding servers I've run. There are copious libraries in every language for writing clients. It seems ideal.
I'm not concerned about scaling, but I am curious about what those issues are, as I haven't heard of any.
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Nah, it's intentionally energy wasteful in order to control inflation.
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Supporting Bitcoin is like supporting the model T to the bitter end... despite a million better options... all of which are a pyramid scheme instead of money.
Monero is the only legitimate crypto I've seen to date. You can tell because most countries have essentially banned all onramps to acquiring it. Can't have anonymous transactions, of anonymous amounts, with anonymous parties... because that would be woke DEI pedo terrorism... ya know, like every cash transaction in history!
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Say what? Which part?
There's a NIP (or several, probably) about Lightning, but all NIPs after NIP-0 are optional. Nobody has to support, process, or transact Lightning. Nodes do no cryptocoin processing, unless they're designed for it, and mostv aren't. It uses cryptography, but so does Lemmy: the "s" in https is for SSL, which is cryptography.
I've run Nostr nodes, and I'll probably use Nostr in my next project as the message broker for a networked game; the protocol is simple, nodes are simple, lightweight, and trivial to run, and most can be configured to federate with whichever set (or no set) of other nodes. It's far easier to run Nostr nodes that don't participate in the whole Lightning cryptocurrency part than it is to make them exchanges.
So, why do you say that it's intentionally wasteful? Matrix and ActivityPub are far more wasteful, aggressively replicating data between federated servers. Even "lightweight" AP nodes are massive consumers of CPU and storage just because of how chatty they are. Nostr nodes are positively eco-friendly by comparison.
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The rate at which new bitcoins enter the economy is controlled. When the processing power of the mining network increases, the difficulty of the mining problem is artificially increased to keep the rate of minting the same. They throw out perfectly good solutions to the problem of creating the next link in the blockchain, to control inflation of bitcoin value.
You'll also notice the difficulty level for this block. The Bitcoin network aims to produce one block every 10 minutes or so. The system is designed to evaluate and adjust the mining difficulty every 2,016 blocks or roughly every two weeks (based on the number of participants). This doesn't always result in a block time of 10 minutes, but it's close.
https://www.investopedia.com/tech/how-does-bitcoin-mining-work/#toc-why-mine-bitcoin
The mining difficulty number represents 2,016 divided by the average time it took to mine one block in the last period, multiplied by the old difficulty level, or:
= Old difficulty x ( 2,016 ÷ average time to mine in the last period )
The lowest difficulty level is 1.0. The higher the number, the more difficult the solution is to find. The difficulty level on Dec. 5, 2024 (measured on December 1) was 102.89 trillion. You might see this published as 102.89T.They are spending 100 trillion times as many processor cycles on bitcoin mining as is actually required to maintain the network. Every bitcoin transaction could be done at 100 trillionth the current energy cost. The only problem is, it would devalue bitcoins and crash the market like a Venezuelan dollar. So Bitcoin is designed to intentionally flush the energy output of a small country down the toilet to keep itself valuable.
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Excellent summary. Thanks.
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19 comments