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  "title": "Meet @Fiatjaf, The Mysterious Nostr Creator Who Has Lured 18 Million Users And $5 Million From Jack Dorsey",
  "note": "This writeup on Nostr and the key folks behind it is a good backgrounder. I've been playing with Nostr for a few weeks and it has some interesting capabilities. Micro.blog recently added syndication support for Nostr as well, [which I turned on](https://www.thingelstad.com/2023/05/31/today-microblog-added.html). Nostr feels much more like using a protocol than using a specific service. It feels more like SMTP or HTTP than Twitter. The work and experience is up to the client, and using a client like [Damus](https://damus.io) feels a lot like Twitter with some unique twists due to the decentralized nature. For example, you don't really know who or how many people follow you. Just like the Web. You publish, and others read.\n\nThe addition of micropayments via Zaps is very interesting as well.\n\n> it has developed a secret weapon: the ability to transfer bitcoin among users. Already 500,000 daily Nostr [users](https://stats.nostr.band/) have sent each other 792,000 tiny bitcoin transactions called zaps, worth $1.9 million, with dozens of companies building new applications.\n\nThe problem for most (all?) protocols is that economics are ignored and that usually means at the end you have to shrug and surveil people for advertising. A robust, friction-free and global micropayments system built on Bitcoin and Lightning is well integrated into Nostr as Zaps. I've sent and received a bunch of Zaps. This is truly novel amongst similar protocols and has the potential to create an economically viable protocol that doesn't need external support, as well as introducing an intentionally limited asset into the system to better validate activity as not-spam and importance.\n\n> Before the year was over @Fiatjaf's ideas had matured into what he calls the [Nostr Manifesto](https://fiatjaf.com/nostr.html), describing an open, censorship-resistant global social network. Computers that send short messages to each other and comprise the lowest layer of the network are called relays. Applications, like a social network or a marketplace built on top of the relays are called clients. Instead of the public key identifying a token like bitcoin it defines a user, and there is no underlying blockchain. Nostr is just a series of instructions for how to build interoperable applications.\n\nThis again reinforces the protocol aspect. Nostr can power a wide variety of applications.\n\n> But in April 2022 a slow trickle of new users became a downpour. Bitcoin engineer, William Casarin, 34, launched Vancouver, British Columbia-based Damus (as in Nostr-damus) on the Nostr protocol. Initially, it was a weekend project that simplified accessing Nostr in a Twitter-like environment. He incorporated Damus at the end of 2022, and in January, Apple admitted Damus to its App Store. Casarin, who previously worked at bitcoin infrastructure firm Blockstream devised a way for Nostr users to send the tiny bitcoin payments called zaps via the Lightning network. Shortly thereafter, @Fiatjaf added Casarin's upgrade to the Nostr protocol, letting anyone build to the same specifications.\n\nI [met Will at Bitcoin 2023](https://www.thingelstad.com/2023/05/19/got-to-meet.html) after [the Nostr session](https://www.thingelstad.com/2023/05/19/great-session-nostr.html). [Damus](https://damus.io) is for sure one of the most user friendly experiences on Nostr. Pair it with a Lightning wallet for micropayments and you have a great way to experience how this works.",
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