The future. Nostr and Bitcoin

I always liked Twitter. but something changed when Elon bought (or stole?) the @America handle and used it for republican partisan politics. Or when he censored President Maduro. Not that I like Maduro, but how is it that we allow someone to censor the existance of other people? Remember when Twitter censored the account of the president of the United States, Donald Trump? Censorship can happen in other ways, too.

Governments can censor people on social media: Recently Brazil prohibited X because Elon wouldn’t shut down some accounts the brazilian goverment asked for. Let’s remember that X is also prohibited in China, Russia, Venezuela and Turkiye (until recently). He did the right thing by not censoring those accounts - The wrong thing, however, is that he has the capability to do so. He’s effectively God: He can choose what to show you, who can see it, when and how.

And it’s not only Twitter: Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, TikTok - All can decide when to censor you, or how to engage-bait you.

Nostr solves this.

Nostr is a protocol for decentralized and censorship-resistant social media. It utilizes the Bitcoin Lightning Network, a fast and secure payment system built on top of Bitcoin, to facilitate micropayments directly between users. This eliminates the need for algorithms and subscriptions, empowering creators and promoting a more authentic online experience.

You can pay nostr creators per post. This is impossible in any platform that I am aware of. You can also pay to the lightning wallet linked to the npub (your nostr identity). So it is extremely easy to reward good posts.

Think of nostr like the next step in social media evolution, similar to how Wayland improved upon the X11 display server. There is nothing bad with Legacy Social Media, but Decentralization will win in the end. It’s already happening. Most of the tech people I follow, George Hotz, Brewster Kahle (Internet Archive manager), Jack Dorsey (Twitter co-founder) are using decentralize alternatives constantly. Farcaster, Mastodon, Bluesky, Nostr, etc. - I’m particularly bullish on Nostr because:

  1. Mastodon and Bluesky save your identity in a single server. A single point of failure and censorship. This is bad.
  2. Farcaster runs on the Ethereum blockchain, which I don’t like mostly because of their transaction validation mechanism, which is proof of stake (and why would social media need to run on a blockchain?).

Just as there are various email clients (Outlook, Gmail) built on the SMTP protocol, nostr allows for diverse applications like Primal, Iris, and Snort, each providing different experiences to their users. Be it an Instagram-like feed, a Twitter-style timeline, or a text-focused platform, nostr offers flexibility in how you consume and share content.

Nostr is censorship resistant. Your identity is spread across multiple relays (servers), making it incredibly difficult to delete your messages (they would have to delete your presence from every relay). This portability extends beyond social media – you can take your identity to apps like FountainFM and earn rewards (zaps) for listening to podcasts. There are many other interesting apps, you can even live stream and monetize through zap.stream, and allow viewers to directly tip content creators in satoshis (Bitcoin smallest unit).

I am super bullish on nostr and bitcoin but I do recognize that clients may be buggy and Bitcoin may be difficult to understand for non-tech people. This is why I’m promoting nostr so much on technical spaces on Twitter - because we need to keep building the protocol, relays and clients. We are responsible for its success. Not a centralized company.

It’s super easy to start building nostr apps. I myself built a nostr client called Kapestr in Rust. It’s ugly due to skill-issues (lol), but you can start pretty fast. Or maybe you can go primal client github repository and fork it. You can start learning nostr super easily. Maybe nostr.com or nostr.org are good places to start.

I recommend reading The Cypherpunk Manifesto, Broken Money by Lyn Alden and The Bitcoin Standard.

Bitcoin is the most secure blockchain. It uses PoW (Proof Of Work) as the consensus mechanism, there is no single point of control, and it has no CEO (neither does nostr). People I’m interested in, Victoria Villaruel, Nayib Bukele, Jordan Peterson and Elon Musk among others, have shown support to bitcoin. Which makes me happy, and also adds support to the case of Bitcoin.

Looking ahead I think the future is bright. Nostr will continue to improve, Many other projects like nostr will arise, Bitcoin will be used more and more, AI agents will transact in internet-native money, and stuff I can’t even imagine.

The future is decentralized, secure, creator-driven and incentives will be the correct ones again.