Transcription of speeches at Nostrasia | How Nostr Win by Pablof7z

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🌟中文版: Nostr如何取胜 🌟日本語: ノストルが勝つ方法 🌟Español: Cómo gana Nostr

Today, I'm going to talk about how Nostr wins. I asked a bunch of people how Nostr wins because I wanted to see what people answered. I got a bunch of different answers, but from a few people, I got, "Do we even want to win?" which is okay. I said okay; I'm going to just address that part. Yes, we do want to win. The argument that people gave me for why we don't have to win is that they want to keep the signal of it's a few people in Nostr, so it's pure signal. If you want that, you can just create a relay white list, add the current pubkeys, and never see another person. That is not Nostr. To this date, ever again. Perfect, that's optionality; that's what Nostr is about. You have the option of interacting with Nostr in whatever way you want.

Defining Winning

Let's define a little bit more precisely what winning means. It just means adoption; it's not fancy. It just means more people using it, more relays existing, more economic activity, more businesses, more, just more. Nostr has a very cool design that it's very much you choose what you see. The way it works is you go and fetch data even at the protocol level. It is very much a protocol where you decide the nodes that you're getting. When you see airdrop spam, you went and asked for that spam; no one sent you the spam; you went and got it. So, it's pretty cool because you can create your own experience on how you feel Nostr.

How Do We Not Win

The first is how do we not win. Let's get that part cleared out because I think it helps us think.

The first one is very hard to out-Twitter Twitter. I don't think you can win by just being Twitter. They've been around for longer; they are much better funded; they used to have name recognition.

We have a bit of a mantra, a bit of a cliche that for a product to disrupt another product, it needs to be at least 10x better; it's a very well-known cliche; it's a very valid cliche.

In my opinion, we don't win (this might be a bit controversial) by censorship resistance. People don't care for the most part. Most people will see censorship resistance as a problem to be fixed. We don't win by focusing on censorship resistance; it's just not appealing. It's not appealing except for a very small cohort of people.

It is not something that conveys or pushes people to act, and wishful thinking; there's a lot of wishful thinking in Nostr. There's a lot of wishful thinking in Bitcoin. Bitcoin has already won; it is inevitable. It's pre-ordained by the gods. It leads to complacency. That's not the way we should go about thinking about how to improve things, how to improve the world because if the efficient market hypothesis is correct, then we don't have to do anything. Everything has been done, and we're good, right? That's not how we win. We win by acting, by doing things, and we don't win if we centralize. It's funny because I have in the same slide; I have censorship resistance and centralizing is the other side of censorship resistance. If we are not censorship resistance, we centralize and the other way around. Even though it's not a good pitch, it's not something that will make people move into learning about relays and all these things and private keys and all these things, it is absolutely fundamental. When I say centralizing, I mean both relays and clients; either of those could centralize or both could centralize. If we end up with a model that requires just connecting to one or two hubs, that means that we are under risk of first failing, which is the most likely case, we first failing because the network can't scale, and when there is an influx of new users, everything crushes. We've seen that a couple of times when I think was when Snowden came or when Jack came, it was one time that the basically relays were just non-functional, like the big relays or if a client owns a very large chunk of the market share, which is one of the things that has been worrying me about Nostr for quite a while. If a client becomes very popular that gains a bunch of market share, it could be very easily used to command the design of the protocol, and it could very easily capture it. That's why I've been trying to talk a lot about the micro apps and the micro apps ecosystem because if culture has a lot of power to shape things, there's a saying that culture is a strategy for breakfast, and it's very true, and establishing a culture of using micro apps and being used to create using different apps is very important because it preempts the move of a large capitalized client from capturing a lot of market share.

Not to be naive because this is still very possible; we are nowhere near being like safe on this part. To me, this is a very important one. Tomorrow we're going to have a panel about this, but the lack of an outbox model, and I use the term outbox model very loosely. It simply means having some kind of decision tree or algorithm on how you decide to which relays you're going to write and from which relays you're going to read. It's a bit technical, but it basically means how easy is for a person to run their own relay, and even though they are banned and censored from all the main hubs, they can still have a voice where the users that want to interact with that person don't even realize that person is being banned. That's the ultimate test; if a server goes down, if a relay goes down, and the users realize that it went down, then that means that the network is not decentralized enough.

Making Blaster Irrelevant Again

Basically, if there is an economic incentive to use Blaster, which is simply a relay that when you publish to it, it just sends it to 300 other relays. As long as there is an incentive to use that, then we know that we are still not there yet. There's still a lot of work to be done.

How Does Nostr Win

We went through a bunch of reasons why it would not win. Okay, if you're here, I'm going to guess what's the answer that I'm going to give. Oh, first, when I say that it's the other stuff, that doesn't mean that microblogging, the Twitter use case is not important; it's absolutely fundamental. Having a myriad of different clients, solid, well-done executed clients is a necessity; it's just not sufficient. It's necessary but not sufficient. Well, network effects are incredibly powerful; they are almost everything. There is a reason why it's very rare to see that an incumbent like a social network is replaced by something else. They can make horrible, terrible decisions. Facebook has abused their users to no end. Snowden revealed how much this was going on, and this has happened so many times yet people still flock to it. Network effects make the product incredibly sticky. When all your friends are on a network, clearing this 10x better bar, the cliche that I was referring to earlier, clearing that is very, very, very hard. And Nostr has not cleared that bar; I mean it's nowhere near close to clearing the bar where it's 10x better at anything than something else. But there are many, many good chances, there are many good reasons why Nostr has a really good chance of clearing this, and only one of them is enough.

And to me, that reason is interoperability, just the transparent like a magic interoperability of Nostr because when you have this basically for free interoperability, it unleashes something that is even more powerful than network effects; it's one of the very few things in reality that is more powerful than network effects. It's Network effects time, Network effects time, Network effects time, Network effects time. We can summarize it to raise to the power of Network effects, raise to the power of use cases. Why? Each use case that is implemented in Nostr gains a bunch of really cool properties, and it multiplies; it makes all the other products that are completely independent of the use case of this one application of this one use case, it makes them a little bit better. It's like saying eBay Network effects times Netflix Network effects times Twitter Network effects, etc. This is very powerful; we are so much at the very early stages of this compounding of network effects that it is really hard to see.

Something interesting that happened when I was going to Miami that I noticed. I created Subster, which is like a music app, and Nostr integrated support for Subster. So, users that were uploading music to Subster had their music maybe sapped or listened to, at least from Nostr users, and then Amethyst implemented Subster support, and now Coracle implemented support for web, or Subster. This is super crazy, this leaking of the different use cases that improve the product throughout the spectrum of the Nostr ecosystem. It's really wild when you think about it. It means that Facebook, which has an enormous advantage over Nostr, obviously, Facebook has to compete with the rest of the world when it comes to building stuff on Nostr, and then Twitter has to compete with the rest of the world that comes on Nostr. Like each independent, completely vertical corporation as big as they are, they must compete with the rest of the world. Right now, the rest of the world is almost nothing, but my thinking is that it's going to gain more and more momentum. But we need to do a couple of things.

The Role of Entrepreneurs

The first one that I think we need to do is we need to change the way we think and define Nostr. So far, usually, we are defining Nostr by what it's not; we say it's censorship resistant, there are no manipulative algorithms hidden, there are no Masters, so it's great, and it's real, but it's hard to relate. It's like finding, "Oh, my wife is great; she almost never manipulates me." You would talk about her beautiful attributes that she's very smart, that she's very supportive, or whatever attribute she has; you wouldn't say, "Oh, she doesn't do this really ugly thing to me," but this is the way we tend to define and explain, and even reason around Nostr, and it just puts the energy in the wrong place. There are so many positive things to say about Nostr that focusing on what it is, and it's like missing the possibilities. And when I think about how do we explore these possibilities, I think that what we need to explore these possibilities is entrepreneurs, entrepreneurs, entrepreneurs. We have a very healthy ecosystem of developers currently, and it's fantastic, and we need more. I think the groundwork that we've done in the past few months to bring more developers to be able to create applications, and create robust applications, and create applications that kind of work, which is pretty surprising. It's really good, and we've done great; the developers are coming. I see my DMs a lot, and that's fantastic; we need the tinkerers because we are still largely on unexplored territory, but we have very few entrepreneurs; we have very few businesses thinking long term. One of the things that a business has, regardless of scale, that a developer doesn't have is usually focus. I mean, a million things, but usually for these talks, it's focus on a vision for a product. Developers tend to get very excited about technology, and we want to play with this, play with that, and we end up with a bunch of abandoned wear or stuff that is buggy or stuff simply does not have a robust road map of where we are going. We definitely need to bring more entrepreneurs into the fold to help us find a bunch of things that still need to be discovered, and I think businesses are going to help us unlock these things.

Building Non-Extracting Businesses

There's a very interesting chance of creating very compelling, very powerful businesses that are non-extracting. If we think about how big Tech has evolved over the past 20, 25 years, they didn't really create that much value. Facebook has an enormous valuation, but they didn't really create it; they were just lucky; they were definitely in the right place at the right time to be able to capture the value that is intrinsically created by network effects. They just happen to be able to capture it, and they obviously execute it magnificently well, and that part of that execution is what we need in Nostr, but the value created by network effects, what's going to happen; it's just capturable or is it not capturable. I think there are many reasons to build a business on Nostr. It sounds kind of weird because businesses on Nostr, I mean there are no profitable businesses on Nostr, but that's simply that the Nostr economy is way too small; it's impossible to create a sustainable business at this stage, and I don't think businesses should be thinking about monetizing; I know some people are thinking about monetizing now; I think that's insanely early, and it's going to lead you to poor decisions; it's going to lead you to wrong conclusions; like stuff that would have worked but it didn't work yet just because the economy is so small, but why would you build a business on Nostr? Why not just build a typical SaaS or just try to deplatform Google or go Blue Sky style? There is a philosophical answer to this is and it's that Nostr aligns with nature much better, which means that by aligning that your energy and your business, you benefit from having to exert less force; it's more sound; it's more thermodynamically sound. It's like deciding whether to swim against the current or with the current. A few months ago, I emphasized that all companies with a social component will eventually become either Nostr clients or cease to exist. The compounding force of network effects is unstoppable; any business lacking this adaptation will succumb. Almost every internet activity involves a social layer, and Nostr operates as a social framework. Anything with a social aspect benefits from being integrated with Nostr. If a business doesn't embrace Nostr and it emerges victorious, nature will crush any use case not built on Nostr.

Despite these potential strengths, numerous questions remain unanswered. Censorship resistance, economic sustainability of relays, and other vital aspects have yet to be thoroughly tested. Theoretical discussions are abundant, but real-world economic activity and entrepreneurs leveraging Nostr are essential for finding practical solutions. Convincing entrepreneurs of Nostr's potential is a challenging task due to its small economy. Yet, if one looks closely, powerful building blocks are emerging, as evidenced by the growing number of developers joining the ecosystem. This trend, while promising, demands resilience and determination from those involved.

Questions and Answers

With that, I would like to express my gratitude. If you have any questions, we have three minutes.

Audience Question: Is there a concept of a Nostr United Nations?

Answer: The idea of a Nostr United Nations makes me uneasy. Can you elaborate on what you mean by that?

Audience Question: We have various builders working towards the same goal of expanding the Nostr ecosystem. Would it be beneficial to have more intercommunication and collaboration between them? Is anyone trying to organize such efforts?

Answer: Currently, there is no coordinated effort like that in place. In fact, if such an initiative were to arise, I would consider working on Blue Sky or even forking Nostr. The truth is often discovered through competition and conflict, much like how nature operates. Consensus and roundtable discussions tend to lead to poor decisions. Client competition is a healthy aspect of our ecosystem.

Audience Question: In the past, platforms like Myspace were more appealing to creators than Facebook. Why do you think Facebook ultimately prevailed over Myspace?

Answer: Facebook succeeded by initially targeting a specific niche and conquering it. They didn't attempt to be a global social network from the start. They solved one particular use case, expanded to nearby universities, and grew from there. Myspace's downfall included a major code base rewrite, a common startup killer. Such decisions can make it incredibly challenging for startups to survive.

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