Nostr, Notes and Other Stuff Transmitted by Relays is a protocol that facilitates censorship-resistant communications across various relay servers. These relay servers host and serve messages to users, and users’ identities are cryptographic key pairs that allow them to entirely own their identity. All messages are signed with their identity keys, preventing any form of tampering. Relays act as intermediaries, ensuring seamless and reliable communication between senders and receivers.
Understanding the Basics of Nostr, Notes, and Other Stuff Transmission
Nostr revolves around the concept of events, which are the basic message format that clients communicate posting or downloading from relay servers. Each event contains the public identity key of its creator, a signature from the creator’s identity key, and the message contents. This ensures data integrity for all messages, as altering even a single bit would invalidate the signature. It also guarantees users own their identity completely, preventing fraudulent posts from other users without compromising their private key.
The Role of Relays in Transmission
Relays allow Nostr users to interact with each other. Clients can post events to relays, and other users can query relays for specific events posted by a user. Relays have their own policies on what events they will accept, and some require proof-of-work before accepting a post. Nostr’s design allows clients to query different relays for events, ensuring censorship-resistant communication.
Damus: A Nostr Client and Relay Implementation
Damus is a widely used mobile client for Nostr and is one of the largest relay servers. It was developed by William Casarin, who started working on Damus after learning about the Nostr protocol. Despite issues with AppStore policies, Damus has implemented new features for the Nostr protocol and is continuously pushing boundaries of innovation.
The Future of Nostr
The dominant use of the Nostr protocol is for social media applications similar to Twitter but with a decentralized and censorship-resistant foundation. However, this protocol has potential for other types of applications, such as decentralized versions of GitHub or Google Docs.
News Recap of the Week (November 6 – November 13, 2023)
– All 12 spot Bitcoin ETFs can be approved between November 9 and November 17.
– The SEC may decide on 9 of the 12 ETFs before January 10.
– The SEC is facing challenges with hiring Crypto Assets Specialists due to conflict of interest issues.
– CitiGroup was fined for discriminating against Armenian-Americans by restricting credit card and bank account services based on their names.
– Custodia Bank has launched its Bitcoin Custody platform.
– The Federal Reserve has sent a cease and desist letter to Bitcoin Magazine for trademark violations.
– Bitcoin has topped $38,000 for the first time in 18 months.
