Living the #nostr life
Every other major encrypted messaging system has shipped a post-quantum upgrade in the last three years. Nostr has not even agreed on a transition plan, and the spec itself admits it.
A five dollar a month VPS, a domain you already own, and an afternoon of fiddling. That is all it takes to run your own Nostr relay. Whether you should is a different question.
Paul Miller built a framework that turns Nostr events into tiny interactive web pages. Guestbooks, a chess game, a slideshow. It wants to be 1998 again. I think that is more interesting than it sounds.
Two companies control which apps exist on your phone. Zapstore uses Nostr identities and Web of Trust to distribute software without them. The security model is real, the audience is small, and the question is whether that matters.
NIP-47 lets any app talk to your Lightning wallet through encrypted relay messages. No API keys, no OAuth, no server. How it works, who trusts whom, and why it quietly became the standard connector between Nostr and Lightning.
NIP-77 brings set reconciliation to Nostr. Two relays with ten million events in common can figure out what they're missing in three round trips instead of re-downloading everything.
NIP-60 stores your Cashu wallet state on relays so any client can read it. The idea is simple. The trust model is not.
Channel opens are on-chain. Routing nodes see payment amounts and timing. Probing attacks map balances in under a minute. The gap between "Lightning is private" and what observers can actually see.
NIP-EE brings the MLS protocol to Nostr relays — forward secrecy, post-compromise security, and logarithmic group scaling on infrastructure that was never designed for any of it.
NIP-90 turned Nostr into an accidental compute marketplace. Anyone can offer a service, anyone can pay for it, and nobody needs an account. Here is what is actually running and what is not.
Operational security lessons from building Steady_Signal_633 — metadata leaks, timing attacks, stylometry, and the mistakes that actually get people caught.
A decentralized marketplace where zero fees, Bitcoin payments, and no content moderation meet the oldest question in permissionless systems. What gets sold when nobody can stop you.
Everyone building on Nostr agrees that Web of Trust is essential. Nobody agrees on what it means, how to score it, or whose version you should use. That is the problem.
ngit ships pull requests, issues, and patches over Nostr relays. gitworkshop.dev gives it a web interface. Total binary downloads across all versions -- 526.
What ecash mints actually do, how Cashu tokens work, the trust model you're accepting, NIP-61 nutzaps on Nostr, and why this might be the missing piece for Bitcoin privacy.
The protocol says relays are dumb pipes. In practice, relay operators set policies, filter content, and charge for storage. We have seen this movie before.
Map Lightning concepts to networking concepts you already know — channels are connections, HTLCs are forwarded packets, onion routing is onion routing. Where the analogy holds and where it falls apart.
Gift-wrapped DMs, the tradeoff between metadata privacy and deliverability, why NIP-04 was deprecated, and what NIP-17 actually hides — and what it doesn't.
Every few months someone declares Nostr dead. The relay data tells a different story, just not the one either side wants to hear.
The gap between "your keypair is your identity" and the reality of key management. NIP-49, clipboard attacks, remote signing, and what you should actually do about it.