Let's start with what I - as a user - like about #nostr:
- The idea of an open & censorship-resistant online communication/social media protocol
- The ability to unilaterally send value (zap) to other users
- The idea that a user could switch from one client to another without losing their social graph
Unfortunately, as far as I can tell, Nostr is fatally flawed and will not work at scale.
Although there are quite a few flaws in the way Nostr was designed, the only one that really matters is that, unlike with Bitcoin, there's no embedded economic model and since censorship resistance cannot be free, Nostr will end up replicating all the woes (censorship, moderation, user data monetization, shadow banning, ads, algos…) of the much-despised Twitter and co.
In Bitcoin, the block reward (aka the economic model) is what attracts actors willing to commit computing and energy power to defend the network (aka the security model), which is what fundamentally makes Bitcoin censorship-resistant and decentralized.
/// Without an economic model, you don't get a security model, and without a security model, you simply don't get censorship resistance. ///
In Nostr, both the economic and the security model are completely delegated to the humans running the relays and clients, which is the same exact system of the internet at large and given human nature, one should expect it will yield identical results, if not worse.
A possible solution to this could have been to attach economic value to each note, say 1 sat, which would then ensure that there would always be somebody willing to carry the message to the desired recipient and that they wouldn't need to monetize the network in other ways.
Just imagine what would happen if there was no block reward and/or transaction fees, and miners had to come up with their own business model/monetization strategies.
To be fair, even if Nostr had an embedded economic model, it would still face numerous challenges in becoming a successful platform such as the absence of a defensible moat, which makes it very unattractive for developers to come here and build great products.
If, somehow, Nostr does end up becoming the very much needed beacon of free speech in the world, there would be nobody happier to be wrong but me.
Godspeed.