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NOSTR: Social Media 2.0

Episode IX. Block height: 793000. Become a nostrich and prepare yourself for the age of censorship and control. Why NOSTR matters, including a step-by-step guide for set-up.

Carl ₿ Menger

Jun 7, 2023

El Salvador: The country is harnessing its energy resources and constructing a renewable power generation park to fuel the growth of Bitcoin mining. In the meantime, Bitcoin difficulty exceeded the 50 trillion mark for the first time in history.
Gen-Z: The members of Generation Z have had their futures stolen by monetary mismanagement, but they are poised to rebuild with Bitcoin. Bitcoin offers hope for the future.
Regulation: SEC sues Binance and Coinbase. Accuses crypto exchanges of mishandling funds (Binance) and of breaking market rules (Coinbase). Further, U.S. Senator Elizabeth Warren has renewed her call for tighter regulation of cryptocurrencies, highlighting their role in illegal activities.

All humans should have the right to speak, though no one is obliged to listen. Unfortunately, central institutions are increasingly taking the right to patronize and tell you their “truth”, which threatens the foundation of our free and democratic society by restricting the right to express oneself freely and without interference, a fundamental right throughout history.

Attacks on our freedom of expression have been mounting lately with numerous examples: The European Union in particular (Twitter) and the U.S. are leading the way (Restrict Act). Central institutions are a welcome target for state overreach, because they offer a single point of failure, namely the company itself. And I think this raid against free speech just gets started, and will soon reach their totalitarian peak with the introduction of CBDCs creating an Orwellian style surveillance state.

“The ruling class in every age have tried to impose a false view of the world upon their followers.” George Orwell

The Age of Censorship

Therefore, I call this period the age of censorship and control. Just as we need censorship resistance money in the form of Bitcoin, so do we need the opportunity to share information without a centralized third party that is able to control the flow of information. ‘Decentralize everything’ and empower the individual, because once the Orwellian state is in place, it’s too late to take action.

For this reason, it is all the more important to have a network where information can flow freely, without a single point of failure, that cannot be censored or attacked by central institutions. That's exactly the reason why I think Nostr (combined with Bitcoin via ‘Zaps’) is so important.

In summary, Nostr is a revolutionary protocol for social media because it provides a decentralized, magnetizable, incentive-aligned, market-driven, and open-source platform for social interaction. Nostr has the potential to create a new era of social media that prioritizes user sovereignty and free market competition: Social Media 2.0 is born.

I’ll promise I try to keep it short and crisp, providing you with a practical Nostr guide including a step-by-step instruction on how to use the Nostr protocol. Let’s get started.

What is NOSTR

Nostr is a decentralised cencorship-resistance social protocol layer to ensure free speech. Thus, it is not an app or a service that you sign up for. It is a protocol, an open standard upon which anyone can build.

The protocol is based on very simple & flexible event objects and uses standard elliptic-curve cryptography for keys and signing. Because Nostr doesn't rely on a few trusted servers for moving or storing data, it's very resilient and thus enable cencorship-resistance communication between its clients.

Why NOSTR matters

Decentralization

Nostr is a decentralized protocol, which means that it is not controlled by any central authority. Instead, the network is just a collection of independently-run data relays (servers). This means that Nostr as a whole is not vulnerable to censorship or manipulation by any single entity.

Pseudonymous

Unlike many social media platforms, Nostr does not collect user data and sell it to third-party advertisers. No email address, phone number, or government identity is associated with your Nostr account. Just like Bitcoin, the system is only aware of public keys and cryptographic signatures for authentication.

Monetization

Nostr provides a unique monetization system for content creators. Unlike other social media platforms, which rely on advertising revenue to pay content creators, Nostr allows content creators to monetize their content directly with Bitcoin (via ‘zaps’).

Open source

Nostr code is available for anyone to view, use, and modify. This allows for transparency and collaboration in the development of the protocol. Anyone can contribute to Nostr.

How NOSTR works

Private and public keys

Each Nostr account is based on a public/private key pair. A simple way to think about this is that your public key is your username and your private key is your password, with one major caveat: Unlike a password, your private key cannot be reset if lost. Your public key is generally presented as a string with the prefix npub1 and the private key with the prefix nsec1: Make sure you store your private key somewhere safe and don’t share it with anyone!

With the help of your public key, others can find you. Your private key allows you to publish notes, interact with others and verify that it is you that is doing so through signing. It also enables you to migrate to other clients. Imagine, you have an account on Twitter and want to switch to TikTok. Using Nostr you can do that without telling anybody. You just use the new client by signing in with your private key.

With Nostr, everybody runs a client (Damus, Coracle, Gossip, Nostros), the window through which you look at the Nostr protocol. To publish something, you write a note, sign it with your private key and send it to multiple relays (servers hosted by someone else, or yourself). To get updates from others, you ask multiple relays if they know anything about these other people. Very simple!

What NOSTR means

Notes and other Stuff

A note is an event, a normal, simple, short, plaintext note, intended to be used in Twitter-like feeds. Nostr is just getting started, so we will see what they mean with ‘and other stuff‘.

Transmitted

Notes are transmitted through different relays. Simply speaking: Clients fetch data from connected relays and publish data to other relays. You are able to transmit and/or receive messages by signing them with your private key, similar to sending and receiving Bitcoin transactions.

Relays

Relays are kind of the backend servers for Nostr. They allow Nostr clients to send messages, and they may (or may not) store those messages and broadcast them to all other connected clients. Simply speaking, relays are doing nothing besides accepting notes from some people and forwarding to others.

Note: If all the relays that you have used in the past go offline, all your posts will be irretrievable. This is one reason that Nostr allows users to connect to many relays – this ensures some degree of backup.

Although a relay can block a user from publishing anything to it, they can't stop anyone from publishing to other relays or from you running your own relay and transmitting your own messages. Since users are identified by a public key, they don't lose their identities and their network of followers if they get banned from one relay because they simply can connect to another or run one on their own. This is exactly what makes Nostr decentralized and cencorship-resistant.

If you're technical and want to ensure that your speech is absolutely uncensorable, then you can and should run your own relay. This ensures that you always have a copy of all your Nostr posts and interactions for all time. If you are running your own Bitcoin node with Umbrel (Step-by-Step guide), you can easily run your own Nostr relay (Step-by-Step guide) together with your Bitcoin node.

Note: If you notice that your Nostr client feels slow, it's most likely due to the relays that you're using. It might be worth adding a few more relays to your client to make the experience more enjoyable.

Getting started

You will access Nostr (the protocol) via a client. Clients can be web, desktop, or mobile apps, fetching the data from relays and also generate new data and push your message to other relays.

Here are guides to a few different clients:

Coracle (Web)
Damus (iOS)
Gossip (Desktop)
Nostros (Android)

I am using DAMUS so in the following I will take you step-by-step for accessing NOSTR (the protocol) with DAMUS (the client).

Creating an account

Download Damus from the App store
Create an account (Choose a username; Add something about you)
Copy your public key and save your private key somewhere secure

Congrats, you just created a Nostr account. Welcome to the Nostr family! Feel free to add me and/or ohters:

Click on the search icon at the bottom of the screen in the DAMUS App.
Type in my public key:
npub10wv37amdqnv8edw5yktgsxr62g8k4lqkk2u66fk6c6uwuakzssxsf4v22x

Hit follow, shoot me a message and I’ll add you as well.

Add a profile picture

Go to nostr.build
Choose a media, click upload and copy the image URL
Go back to your Damus App
Click on the top left image, click on ‘profile’ and ‘edit’
Paste the image URL into ‘profile picture’
You can also add a ‘banner picture’, informations about you, a website etc. When you finished, click ‘save’

Adding Relays

Click on the top left image (your new profile picture)
Click on ‘relays’
Go to nostr.watch and select a relay
Go back to Damus and type in ‘connect relay' and the name of the relay you want to add (i.g. wss://bitcoinmaximalists.online)

Adding Zaps

And the coolest stuff are ZAPS! ‘Zaps’ are like tips transmitted via the Lightning network. Zaps enables you to reward content creator or get rewarded for your content by others: Empowering the individual and not a company.

Download Wallet of Satoshi (or Muun, GetAlby web, …) from the App Store
Click on the top right and add your mail address for backup. (NOTE: It’s a custodial wallet, so don’t store your life savings in it. Use it more like a purse)
Click on ‘receive’ and copy your lightning address (looks like a mail address)
Go back to DAMUS and go to your profile
Click on ‘edit’ and paste your lightning address in ‘Bitcoin lightning tips’
You can zap others with clicking on the lightning symbol on the bottom of every post. (Hack: Tip the button for longer and customize the amount)

The End

That's it for this episode. I hope you gathered some valuable knowledge from this one. Don't keep your head buried in the sand - check out NOSTR and get started! Want help to build? Visit open bounties.

Thanks for reading and see you hopefully in the next one. Until then, remember: Decentralization matters. ₿ critical, ₿ informed, ₿ prepared. Yours,

Education for everyone

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B informed

[VIII] The Bitcoin Retirement Plan

[VII] Bitcoin in Guatemala

[VI] Bitcoin in El Salvador

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Read everything about Bitcoin Self-Custody in my episode ‘Take back control over your Bitcoin, now’ and get yourself a proper hardware wallet: The Bitbox Bitcoin only is my favorite.

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