YakiHonne Workshop Replay & Article ｜ Insight on the possibility of Nostr

YakiHonne.com is a Nostr-based decentralized content media protocol, which supports free curation, creation, publishing, and reporting by various media.

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YakiHonne.com is a Nostr-based decentralized content media protocol, which supports free curation, creation, publishing, and reporting by various media.

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Hi, good morning, good evening everyone. This is a YakiHonne workshop. Hack-Nostr-On is hosted by YakiHonne.com and sponsored by DoraHacks, which aims to encourage more ideas, applications and problem solving. YakiHonne.com is a nostr-based decentralized media protocol which supports free curation, creation, publishing and reporting of various topics by various media. DoraHacks is a global Hackathon organizer and one of the world's most active developer incentive platforms. It creates a global Hackathon movement and provides help to developers around the world to team up and find their ideas. Buidlers have hackathons, bounties, grants and more.

Today, let's know more about one of the buidlers in Hack-Nostr-On which is ONOSENDAI, right? And it's background knowledge. So let's welcome the buidler the owner of ONOSENDAI, Nick. Welcome, Nick.

Hey, I appreciate it. So, yeah, I'm super excited to talk to guys today. Talk to guys a little bit about Nostr and ONOSENDAI, which is the client that I've been working on. I'll start off by just kind of giving you guys a little bit of background on who I am, because I feel like that's helpful, right? So my name is Nick Kramer, and I'm actually the senior vice president of an augmented reality company out of Bismarck, North Dakota, called InnovatAR. We've been operating for, I think, four years now, and we have a product called Yondr. The reason why I mention it is because this is kind of how I got my start, or this is the context for how I got into Nostr. Just because Yondr is an augmented reality platform where people can find each other in augmented reality. So they go into the web app yondr, they can send a link to their friend, and then it connects them in real time, and you can look through your phone's camera and see where your friends are at. How we monetize that business is by selling what we call beacons to businesses, and I promise this all has to do with Nostr and ONOSENDAI and stuff like that. So the businesses pay us to put their parks or a campus or a festival or a concert or street fair, they'll pay us to put their beacons on the map, and then people going to that event can find all those different places. And so those beacons are basically like just geocordinates. They don't actually have a physical hardware component as just a pair of coordinates and some contents in our database. Yondr is a very kind of Web2 app. I built it before Web3 was a thing.

So the beacons are basically like latitude, longitude and then some content, right? And that's just text. And so as I started to learn about the Nostr protocol, I started to realize, like, hey, you could do something like yonder on the Nostr protocol. You could have notes, but it's not a note, it would be a new kind. And inside of that kind, you would have geocordinates of some kind, and then some content that you want to attach to it. That's kind of where I got this idea started for, like, using Nostr as not just like a Twitter replacement, but an actual protocol for doing things like augmented reality or other 3D things. Because ultimately, when you represent objects in 3D space, whether it's reality, augmented reality, or virtual reality, it's ultimately on the ground floor. Is it just text, right? We have coordinates, we have content. Even 3D models can be represented as text.

And Nostr is really good at handling text and moving text around and making text decentralized. So that's kind of where I started with this idea. Actually, there's a really interesting discussion. If you look up NIP-44 on the Nostr repo, it's in a pull request. It's actually not official yet. It's kind of just been debated, but it's an interesting discussion about, like, how to use Nostr to represent physical, real world locations, which is what I was really interested in. There's a new G tag that's actually been merged, so that's part of the protocol now. And you can use the G tag to represent, like A geohash, or geocordinates, or basically anything that has to do with geography, including geojson, or some format that represents physical places. And there's a ton of them. There's KML, there's all sorts of stuff like that, but you could put that all in the G tag, and then you could actually have that index by your Nostr relays, and so that would make searching for places really easy. And I don't think anybody's doing that yet, and I'd really like to see somebody do that. Actually, I'm going to be working on that for another project that I'm in, but I'm not going to talk about that because it's pretty early on. But when I was thinking about this, like, location based, you know, putting 3D objects into reality, it got me thinking about, like, how I could represent the Nostr protocol in, like, a virtual reality, or, like a cyberspace.

I've been reading a lot of sci fi lately. I've been going back to, like, the sci Fi heyday of the eighties, and reading, like, neuromanser, that whole Sprawl Trilogy series. I read Ready Player One recently. And just a bunch of other interesting books, oh yeah, Snow Crash, I read one recently. And so I had, like, the Metaverse in, like the in cyberspace, kind of on my mind as I was thinking about this location based on the idea of using Nostr. And so then I kind of had this idea of, like, well, what if I was able to take just content or notes that are already in the Nostr protocol and just put them into a 3D space? Like, how would that work? What would that look like? Would it be interesting? Would it be functional? Uh, and I guess I can actually, maybe I should just share my screen then, and I can, uh, show you guys what it looks like.

So this is on ONOSENDAI. So it's the Nostr client that I'm working on. You can check it out at ONOSENDAI.tech. And we are in basically a 3D virtual environment here. And every single dot you see is a note in Nostr. Some of them look brighter because they're closer, and some of them look darker because they're farther away. But we can fly around just by holding the aerokes, and we sort of pick up speed as we accelerate here, and we can go find a note. There are some close ones over here. Overshot it a little bit. Let's back up. There we go. Kind of getting a little sluggish because we loaded too many notes in. But then I can click on this, and it will load whatever that note was, and we can scroll through it, we can check it out. We can click on links, and those open in the new tab. And yeah, that's just like my base proof of concept for ONOSENDAI.

You can bookmark a note, and it'll turn red, and it's easier to find later. So you can just search through what I call cyberspace and, like, check out different notes. Another interesting feature that I added thus far is that if you find a note that has replies, those replies will actually be linked via visual connections. It'll draw a line between that note and its replies. Of course, I'm having trouble actually finding one with replies right now, but that's just sort of the random nature of where everything's at. Um, I'm going to actually refresh the page. So this is an early version of ONOSENDAI, and I have an upgrade coming out that uses a cache system. As you can see now that as I look around, there's barely any notes, and they're like loading in as we speak. Right now, ONOSENDAI every single time. That's a little bit snapier too. Every time you reload the page is going to reload all the notes. And it's actually not going to stop loading notes until it gets to a certain arbitrary threshold I put in. But in the future, when I finish the current upgrade I'm working on, it'll have a smart cache system, so it'll only load the notes that are near you, and then it'll be much more efficient in terms of CPU usage and stuff like that.

But the interesting thing about this, I want to reiterate is that these notes are addressed. Actually, I guess, we didn't talk about this during the recording, so I shouldn just probably say it anyway. These notes are addressed by their content. It's using a process called sim hashing. That's an interesting one.

And so if you take the content of the note and you run it through a Simhash algorithm, what it does is it outputs a 256 bit hash. It'll be similar if another note has similar content. So if you put in two almost identical phrases, their Simhash will be almost identical. And then I take that 256 bit sim hash and I break it into three coordinates, X-Y-Z, so it's 85 bits for each, which adds up to 255 bits. And then you have one bit at the end that you just ignore. But those same hash break down into coordinates, and then I just basically put the notes in space by those coordinates. So if their sim hashes are similar, their coordinates are going to be similar as well. And that's pretty interesting, because it actually creates clusters of notes in this kind of cyberspace environment, where those clusters are roughly similar, and then you have unique notes, or unique ideas that are sort of off on their own in the void of cyberspace. So I think that's pretty interesting.

I've never seen anything index content like this before. It's just been kind of an interesting way to make sense of the chaos that is, like all of the content on the Nostr network. The reason why I used Simhash and have stuck with it, thus far is because it's very impartial. And my goal is to make a very impartial algorithm to make things work the way they work in cyberspace. I feel like if I tried to pull out key words or things like that, it would eventually get very opinionated. It would basically become a search engine, which means that there would be an optimization strategy for that search engine to game it. And so I just wanted to keep it very neutral and very algorithmic, so that's just what it is. That's all. So what that means is that, like, I'm actually, I think somehow shing the coordinate is really cool, but it's like, the notes that you find clustered, like, don't always, they're not always similar to each other in terms of their content. Like the same hash is similar, but the content is like, ah, not not exactly the same thing. But I'm willing to take that if it means keeping an impartial system that's very algorithmic and not biased, you know what I mean?

This is sort of just like a proof of concept, because I have so much, much bigger plans for what cyberspace will eventually be. But it's pretty cool that you can basically have a client for ... When we think of a client for Nostr, we basically think of Twitter. That's fine, because if you read the original Nostr document that fiatjaf posted as a markdown two years ago. Now, if you read it, it's basically saying, we could replace Twitter with this protocol and make it a decentralized Twitter that nobody controls and everybody can build and participate in. And that's, oh, wow. I actually did, uh, some formatting there. That's cool. It was basically meant to replace Twitter. I guess one thing that I wanted to talk about today is how, like, replacing Twitter is the 1st step for an Nostr, but it is like, certainly nowhere near fulfilling its potential. I think there's a lot of cool things that Nostr can do, and I want to kind of get into those.

But how are we? How are we doing here? Yofu, do you want me to pause and take questions or anything? Or should I just keep rolling?

You can keep rolling and keep the question for last. Okay, that sounds good.

Yeah, so, Nostr, and how familiar is everybody with Nostr here? Is everybody like I already know what Nostr is. Or should I kind of explain what it means and what this as to me?

We all start just from this. Okay, yeah, sure.

So Nostr is a very simple protocol. And Here's how it works. So imagine you're using Twitter, right? And you write a tweet, and you send it, you post it, that tweet, we're gonna call it a note, because that's what it's called a Nostr. That note is sent off to a number of relays, which are just servers that store notes. And so you might be connected to five, ten, one, three relays, it doesn't really matter.

You can customize it. And so when you can publish on your note, it gets sent out to those relays and it gets stored there. Now, your friend, if they are connected to at least one of the same relays that you're connected to, and they're following you, that means they know your your public key, then they will see that note, and they'll see it pretty much instantly, because Nostr runs on web socket connections, which are real time open connections between the the client and the server. So when they send that note, it immediately gets sent to whoever subscribed to that query. And so, yeah, as long as your friends are on at least one relay that you're posting to, they'll see your notes. And anybody can start a relay, anybody can build a client. And that's what I've done on ONOSENDAI. I've built a unique type of client.

Most of the clients that you see are gonna look like Twitter. Like snort.social is a great one. Coracle is a good one. There's kind of a setup thing to Coracle. Iris is a good one too. There's a bunch of, like, and those are all web based. There's also Damus, which is the ios one that everybody loves. Amethyst on Android is a really good Nostr client. And so all of those ones that I just listed off are basically like Twitter. They're like Twitter clones. And when I say clone, I mean that in the nicest possible way, I don't think that a lot of people want to be like Twitter these days. And so they do Twitter like things, but they have other features that are interesting and unique and stuff. But fundamentally you're like, posting a tweet or a note, and then that's going out and other people can read it. And so that's basically what Nostr is. It was designed specifically to be a Twitter, a decentralized Twitter.

And it was designed specifically to be a very simple protocol. It's really easy to use. For ONOSENDAI, I use the fiatjaf Nostr Tools, which is a really simple plug in to basically set up,here's the relays that I want to connect to. Set up a connection, send new notes, validate notes, so you can validate the signatures on the notes. And it does all that stuff super easy and super well. And that's basically the only package if you're writing a web based client, that's the only package you really need to get started making a client for a Nostr, which is awesome. And honestly, Nostr Tools itself, if you read the code, it's like, not even super complicated. I mean, it's a really great library, but it's something that you could conceivably write yourself if you are ambitious enough, just because the Nostr protocol is so simple and it's easy to use. And that simplicity, I think, it is probably one of the greatest reasons behind its growth. It's been so like it's just exploded in the last year, with people coming in, having new ideas contributing to the protocol.

Another thing that I should mention, just as a background for anyone who's new to Nostr, is that your identity in Nostr is simply just a cryptographic key pair. So you generate keys. You have a public key that's your kind of public identity. You have a private key, which you use to sign your events, to put them out there. And so that whenever you post a tweet or a note, that note always has a signature, which can be verified so that nobody can impersonate somebody else. There's always cryptographic validation for who wrote what? That doesn't mean that people can't impersonate you on another level, where they just changed their name to be your name, or whatever. Because you know that that can still happen. But it's really easy to say, like, oh, well, I know that this public key is my friend. And this person who is saying they're my friend is actually they have a different public key, which means that that is an impostor.

And there's some tools and utilities kind of developing on the Nostr protocol to make that easier to spot, such as the NIP-05 verification, which is where you can use some Json that's hosted on your domain. If you have a dot com or something, you could put some Json on your domain, and basically it's a validation for your identity, which means that this public key owns this domain, and the client will, when you're using a Nostr client, it'll validate that, and so you can see if their identity is valid or not. It also gives you a nice arkinox.tech, which is mine, it gives you a nice, kind of memorable identity, instead of having a public key, which is pretty much impossible to remember, so you can tell people, like, hey, go find me a Nostr. I'm arkinox at arkinox.tech, or, whatever your name is at whatever your domain is, it's kind of like an email address. But it's an easy way to find people on the Nostr network, which is pretty cool.

So NIP stands for Nostr Improvement Possibilities. And it's basically, like an upgrade to the protocol and they're all optional, so you can implement a NIP or not. It's up to you. They're not required, necessarily. I think the only required one is NIP-01, which just defines how the protocol works. But beyond that, all the other NIPs are just optional. You can put them in your client or not, but obviously the clients with more NIPs implemented means more upgrades. That means more potential. It just kind of makes them more competitive and better. If we actually go to the actual github repo, so this is where all the official NIPs are stored when they've been merged in, this list is growing constantly. Last time I checked this, we were at like, 58, I think. So it just keeps on getting bigger and bigger. And those are just the ones being merged. If you look at the Pull Request, where people submit new NIPs, it's like every single day, there's at least one. So there's just a lot of interesting stuff. That knows what you can do now. And it shows you all the different types of events. like event NO.1, is it just a short note, that's basically a tweet. That's when I say note in the context of Nostr, that's what a note is as a kind one.

And so this NIP will define how that kind one works. And so you see, we have, like, reactions. We have badges. Now we have zaps, which is where you can send Bitcoin via lightning to somebody's note or their public key.

And then the zap is basically like a receipt for that, so you can quantify, like, how much has this note been zapped? Is it really popular? And stuff is really cool. That kind of gives you a way to say, like, hey, this note, not only has it had so many likes, but it's had this amount of Bitcoin sent to it. People must really appreciate this content, because it's actually literally made money. It's like putting money where your mouth is, which is pretty cool.

There's some safety features, like, you can have a mute list of people that you don't wanna hear from. Since it's a Nostr, it is a permissionless decentralized network, like you can block people, but all that does is make it so you don't see them, they can still see you. They can still post on your notes, but you're only just opting into what you want to see, because it's permissionless. Like nobody needs anybody's permission to be there, and so you can't revoke somebody's permission from being a part of the network. And so the only way to, like, you know, if you want to limit things, then you just have to choose what you see and choose who you follow, instead of trying to tell someone else they can't see you, or they can't follow you. Permission systems do have problems sometimes with content and content moderation, which doesn't basically exist. But I do appreciate that Nostr is such a wide scale experiment now used by so many people that I think that people are going to start figuring out clever and smart ways of helping with content problems. Cause you see stuff on Nostr sometimes, like in the global feed and whatever, and you're just like, whoa, I did not want to see that. That's just one of the challenges of permissionless networks is, can it just deal with you having good actors and bad actors, and you just have to balance that out. And in a permissionless system, it's obviously expected that everybody can do what they want.

I just think it's an interesting problem to solve. I don't think it's been solved per se. Besides the fact that you could just choose who you want to listen to and and what you want to subscribe to. But I am excited to see where that goes. Because we want this to be for everybody, but we also want it to be safe. But we don't want a censor, and we don't want it to be biased, and we don't want it to be a tool for political censorship, or we don't want it to basically do everything that our existing systems do.

We wanted to be different. We wanted to be something for freedom, something that everybody can use. And I think that's the way it should be. So I'm excited to see, just as the protocol develops, what at all turns into. There's a lot of cool stuff in here. If you care to learn about Nostr, this is the place to do it. Just head on over to the github.

That's what ONOSENDAI is for now, I have a lot more upgrades that I might get into talking about here, but before I do, I'm gonna, I'm gonna kind of circle back to what I was saying before about how I came into this idea of like, 3D objects in Nostr and what that means. Where I'm going with Nostr started as a Twitter replacement, but I don't see that's the end goal. That's not the end of Nostr. And I guess part of my work that I've been doing, just with ONOSENDAI and things like that, is I want to show people like this protocol can do way more than just notes. It can do way more than just replace Twitter or Instagram or social media, can do way more than just social media.

Because what you have with Nostr is you have a fundamentally new, decentralized, permissionless communication protocol. And when you have a communication protocol TCP/IP, http, https, you can basically do anything, because you can transmit data. There are some practical limitations for how much data you can transmit. There's a reason why we're not embedding videos inside of Nostr notes, because that would be too huge.

The relays that are storing the notes are meant to kind of be snappy and quick and just kind of process little text notes. So we're not going to be embedding videos into notes for standard relays. I mean, you could make a custom relay that handled that, but most relays are going to reject a note. That's just 30 MB or whatever. In small, little text pieces, there's so much you can do, and I don't think we've even begun to scratch the surface. And so that's what I'm trying to do, is just show people, like, hey, think outside the box. One way that I've kind of been thinking about, no sir, and ends and, twitter replacements.

Thinking outside the box is that if you think about Twitter or any social media, you go to your app, and you have the most recent tweet at the top, and then you scroll down, and as you're scrolling down, you see older and older and older content, right? And if you think about that, it's like scrolling back through time. So time is the access. Time is the dimension that you are thinking about that you're scrolling back through. And so that makes Twitter basically like a one dimensional client. You're consuming content in one dimension, the dimension is time, and you're going back in time. By extension, like most Twitter clones, they're also kind of doing the same thing. They're going back in time as you scroll through, one dimension that sounds really weak when you put it like that, right? Like, oh, it's just one dimensional. That's pretty lame. Why don't we think about content in two or three dimensions? And I think that Nostr, or like ONOSENDAI, is like a three dimensional client. And it has some really interesting kinds of differences between a three dimensional client and a one dimensional client. One of the main differences is that my three dimensional ONOSENDAI client has no time dimension in it, because where the note is positioned has nothing to do with when it was created.

And so when you're going through ONOSENDAI, you're basically like there's no time at all, even though notes are like loading in. And we live in a temporal reality, like there's no time to mention in ONOSENDAI, I've talked to people about adding a time dimension, and and the challenges is that time never stops, so it'd be like having a dimension that just continually grows and grows and grows. And that's a difficult problem to solve for, so I haven't really figured it out yet, so you have twitter, that's time one dimensional. You have ONOSENDAI that's spatial dimensions, that's three dimensional. I think that there's definitely pros and cons to to those two different types of exploration, right?

Those two different types of clients. Because with ONOSENDAI, you're definitely going to be missing stuff, but you're also going to be finding stuff that you never would have found before. With a Twitter like client, there's a chance, if you keep up with it, you're not going to miss anything. You're going to see every single tweet that ever happens. And you're going to see it in order. And as long as you keep checking your app and you keep scrolling back far enough, you're going to see every single thing that you are subscribed to. With ONOSENDAI, I mean, there's a lot of features that are missing from ONOSENDAI as far as clients go. Like there's no friends list, there's no log in yet. I mean, there's going to be things like this, I'm just trying to get, this 3D part down, and then I'm going to add all that other kind of stuff later.

But there's no way you're gonna ever see everything, because all of it is there. Like, all the stuff from everybody that you don't know is in ONOSENDAI and and I think that's kind of the interesting part is, because you can see things that you never, ever would have seen in a million years. As you go through a one dimensional Twitter client, you build your social graph by, like, following friends of friends, or you follow some random influencer that you heard about somewhere, and then, like, maybe somebody follows them, or somebody posts an interesting comment, and you follow them. But it's like an organic spider web out where you're slowly, like stepping out a little bit more at a time to grow this sort of web of of your social graph.

And that's a very organic and natural way for that to happen. But it's also limiting in that you can't just randomly bump into certain people unless their social graph, like, overlaps with yours. With ONOSENDAI Is like, no social graph preventing you from just bumping into somebody that you never, ever would have met, or some idea that you never would have seen.

And I think that's the interesting part about it. It's also a very, kind of addictive part about it, because I find that it's really fun to fly around and just find stuff that you're just like, wow, I never would have seen that before. That's so interesting. Of course it would be good to have a social graph on ONOSENDAI, and a friend's list, and be able to see where your friends are at and stuff like that. So that's all the stuff I'm gonna add. I just need to have time to add it right now. ONOSENDAI is just a free time project. I'm full time working on Yondr and other things right now.

So, that's just an interesting way to think about clients, like dimensionality, how can we use, uh, these different dimensions, or, I guess you could call them perspectives, right? How can you use these different perspectives to look at this world differently, this universe of content that Nostr contains within it? And not only is it like a good way to look at, to kind of cross social graphs and find new people and new ideas.

But just like, going back to my idea of augmented reality and locations, if we can put Nostr into this visual space, well we're gonna have to put other stuff in that space, right? The next step along my conceptual journey for ONOSENDAI. We have a 3D space, we're going to want to put 3D objects in this 3D space. It just makes sense, right? And so I started to think about, like, what would that mean,how would you, how would you let people put 3D objects in a shared space, but not make all those 3D objects be spam, right? Or gigantic whatever. Just imagine something that you don't want to see, and have that be the biggest thing in cyberspace. That's the problem we have to avoid, right?

And so I was thinking, what if you could post a note, and that note had a 3D model inside of the note? And then that note would show up somewhere in cyberspace based on some simple, impartial algorithm, just like the same hashing for the text notes, and then the 3D geometry would be loaded in that location. And what the idea I came up with. It kind of, it kind of starts to sound like some Metaverse stuff, if you're familiar at all with the concept of the Metaverse. So my idea is you would actually base the coordinate of that 3D object off of the event ID of the Nostr event. So I've been talking about notes. A note is a type of event in Nostr. The base object, of all things, is the event. So every single event has, like a content field, which might be empty, or it might have content.

It has an event ID, which is a 256 bit hash of basically all the stuff in the note. I hope I'm remembering that right. If I'm wrong, forgive me, just go read the protocol. It's all there. But basically, yeah, the event idea is a 256 bit hash of the note or of the event, all the other stuff in the event, which includes the signature and the content and the date and the tags and all that stuff. Everything in the event contributes to the event ID. Now, the event idea is a 256 bit hash, which is what I've been using to create the coordinates for all of the notes. So I'm like, well, I could use the event ID as a coordinate an X-Y-Z I could just chop it up. But the problem is that if you just go to publish a 3D object on Nostr, your 3D object will appear in an essentially random position in space, completely random. And so like the idea I came up with to get around that is that you could mine your event.

And what that means is that you would put a knot, or just a random number that increments inside of your event, and you would put it in their hash. Get your event ID, check the coordinates, and if it's not what you want, you just increment that noun and then you just hash it. And so you're basically mining at that point. It's like bitcoin mining. It's like proof of work, and you're just mining those events until you get one that's sufficiently close to the location that you were trying to get to. That's pretty cool, because that allows anyone to have whatever real estate they want in cyberspace, but they have to work for it, and they don't actually have to ask anyone else to give it to them. They don't have to buy it. They don't have to have a token or anything like that. They just put in proof of work, and they can have that location based on the event idea.

The other interesting thing about that is that if somebody else wants to graffiti or sabotage or vandalize your 3D object, they have to actually put in more work than you did. And the reason why is because you have a target, a specific location you want, and you're getting random event ids, and eventually you just settle on an event id that's close to that location, right? Though, the place you wanted, you're probably just going to get close enough, and you're going to be like, yeah, okay, that's close enough. Whoever wants to vandalize you, their target is exactly where you are, and they have to mine and mine and mine and mine and mine until they get the exact right location, which is going to be guaranteed more work then the work that you put into actually get that location originally.

So it's fairly resilient to just use proof of work as a system to prevent people from vandalizing locations, but also to claim them in a trustless, decentralizing permission this way. So that's just one example of an interesting idea I want to add to ONOSENDAI to continue to build, to enable more capabilities. Get people thinking about what you can do with Nostr outside of Twitter? We could do so much more than just replacing Twitter. It's pretty cool, because there's Nostr clients like Nostrgram. They're building, like, essentially an Instagram clone, which is awesome, because then we can have Instagram without Facebook.

I'm all for disintermediating big tech because of how they've abused their users, their users rights, their users data, their users' trust. They've basically done every evil thing that is possible. And so I'm a hundred percent in favor of creating our own decentralized, permissionless platforms that empowers people to own their data via cryptography. They own it through their keeper and their signatures.

They can't be censored or shadow banned or manipulated. And it breaks up these behemoths that control our social and digital lives into smaller little pieces that we opt into. I use multiple Nostr clients, and I'd say that most people who use Nostr do use multiples. They have one on their phone, they have one on their desktop. They have favorites, they have ones they like to try out. And the crazy thing is that, you can just do that. You can take your whole identity and all of your content and everything you've ever done on Nostr and plug it in to any Nostr app you want, and it's all just there because the client, all it's doing is just connecting to the existing network that you're already a part of and showing you that information in a new and unique way.

Even though it just might be a different variation of Twitter, it's still like the client's purpose is no longer to own your data and own everything about it and how you see it. Its only purpose is to show your data, and that in that way, you're creating, like a marketplace for different ideas. Where clients are, like, there's a lot of clients, I mean, there's tons of clients now, and they're all competing to find out who can make the best experience, who can offer the best incentives, you know? And it's all about the user and giving the user what they want. Whereas with our existing paradigm with big tech, they're just trying to monetize everybody. They're monetizing your experiences, your relationships, your emotions, your connections, your friendships, your interests. Like everything about you is being monetized, mostly without your knowledge. Technically with your permission, but mostly without your permission. It's just a whole different business model to make a client for Nostr. You're not monetizing the user. You're providing the user value and letting them experience the Nostr network in a way that is beneficial to them. So that's amazing. That's really, really exciting, that we have this new paradigm, and that it creates a competitive marketplace for different experiences and clients. But the other problem with that new paradigm is that no one has figured out a great way to monetize it yet.

I think there's some good ideas out there for how we can get clients to make money so that they can keep being clients and keep building and keep on improving. We're not going to build this new Nostr world without money. Everybody needs to eat. And so I think that's one of the biggest things that I want to see people experiment with is like, how can we, how can we monetize clients? How can we get people to actually be able to make a living? Working on a Nostr client, because it's really important work. I think it's absolutely critical that we figure this problem out so that we can have these tools to communicate without these big tech companies controlling, manipulating people, controlling people, monetizing people and basically just running everything. So I guess that's like my little speech about big tech and stuff.

It is great. It is so great. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I'm so impressed by what you are saying. You have a big view, it is really a new explorer in Nostr, except it is used as another version of Twitter, and I was thinking that ONOSENDAI, it could be... I was just the bubble in my head, could I use a relay as a galaxy?

Yeah, definitely. I mean, it is like a world,

Looks like a universe. there is a galaxy, or something like that.

What I've started to realize as I've studied Nostr is that the Nostr protocol, that's the galaxy, that Nostr protocol is the world. And all I'm doing is I'm just trying to make it so that you can see that world, because I think it's already there. Like, I didn't invent the Nostr galaxy that already existed. I'm just trying to give you the tools to be able to see what's out there. And so that's one of my, like, that's one of the missions of ONOSENDAI, is to basically make the Nostr protocol visible.

Another thing that I've done a lot of thinking about as I've been reading the scifi, about the metavers and cyberspace, is, I've been like, thinking, okay, what? What really makes a metaverse? What really makes cyberspace? What is it in these sci fi books? Because what we read about in sci fi, it doesn't exist in real life. Right? We all know that. We all know it's fictional. I feel like one of the primary aspects of what a Metaverse is that it's permissionless in those books where you read, you read these stories, anyone can just come in and do whatever they want. There's no central controlling authority over everything. Even in Ready Player One, or technically one company owns all the entire metaverse, like they technically don't, they still don't completely control everybody, because people are able to fight and have conflicts in claim territory and do all this stuff, and apparently the company never intervenes.

And so even though that's sort of like a centralized version in that book, it still kind of has this like permissionless property about it. And so I actually identified six things that every Metaverse has, and I identified six questions that every Metaverse needs to answer. And I think Nostr answers all of them, but I'm just going to read those off really quick. So when sci fi, it seems that there's never any competing metaverses. There's always just one, right? Everything is connected to it. Most people in the world use it. It seems like everyone is just always using it. People use Metaverses for entertainment, learning, communication, commerce and crime. There are real world consequences for what happens in the metaverse, and nobody has full control over it. Those are the things that I've identified as the kind of fundamental properties of a metaverse in scifi. I know that scifi is not real, but I think it's worth thinking about these ideas and like, what does it really mean? And then looking in reality and seeing, like, what matches those properties, right? So in regards to those six properties, I feel like Nostr is really close to fulfilling all of them.

First of all, with no competing metaverses. I mean that time will tell. So I don't think we can check that one off the list yet. If Nostr ends up eating Facebook and Instagram and Twitter and all of these social media platforms, it's possible that if Nostr truly is a metaverse, that it could also end up just being the metaverse. I mean it's a protocol. It's really hard to compete with a protocol if you're a platforme, a product, right? So time will tell on that one. Everything is connected to it. So I have a funny story about how somebody set up their dishwasher to publish events to Nostr, to tell its owner when the dishes were done. And somebody started talking to the dishwasher in the replies, and then somebody else is like, are you talking to a dishwasher right now? Really? As far as everything being connected to the metaverse, I'm like, yeah, Nostr, definitely, everything's connected to it. If dishwashers are having conversations with people, or vice versa.

I finally found out my girlfriend is a dishwasher. Oh my gosh, that be Yeah.

So, I mean, Nostr is like an Internet native, it's using, it's a protocol built on top of Internet protocols. And so it's like the internet's connected to everything, so it's easy to say, yeah, Nostr is also connected to everything.

So check, we're just going to check that one off the list. Somewhere between most people and all people use the metaverse. I mean, once again, if Nostr ends up eating all the different big social media platforms in big tech like, you could definitely see that happening in the future. So we'll say that's a maybe. People use the metaverse for learning, communication, entertainment, commerce and crime. I think that's also like a time motel. People are definitely using it for communication. And I think that you could build entertainment, you can build learning, you can build commerce.

It's awesome. I just started as a consultant for Arcade Labs. They're working on building commerce in Nostr, a Nostr native commerce that sort of creates a gig economy, enables people to do gig economy stuff, like from anywhere for anything. So, like Uber, but also Uber for everything else. An Airbnb, but Airbnb for everything else. Like people can jcreate their own jobs, and use Nostr as a wave of communicating and settling those contracts. So I think that's coming. But also will just mark that one as tentative.

There are real world consequences for actions taken in the metaverse. I have a whole thing that I'm not going to get into about this. But basically, proof of work is a real world consequence for taking a digital action. Proof of work enables a digital action to be connected to reality. And so in that way, I think that a system that wrote us a metaverse built on proof of work is actually an extension of reality. That's my basic thesis. I could talk for another couple hours on that, but I won't right now. And finally, nobody has full control over the metaverse, and Nostr has that in spades. Nobody controls it, because anyone can run a relay, anyone can make a client, and that's literally all you need to make Nostr. And so anyone can do that. So I'd say, not all of those requirements are checked off right now, but a lot of those requirements have to do with adoption. Like, if we see adoption of Nostr, it will be the metaverse, in my opinion. Some other interesting questions about the metaverse that sci fi never ever answers. And I just want to put these out there. I think Nostr answers these questions very well.

So who hosts it? Who hosts the metaverse? Whose server is it running on? That's something that sci fi never talks about, but it's like, someone's got to host it, right? Is it going to be Google? Hell, no, I hope not. So yet the answer is Nostr relays, Nostr relays host the metaverse. And it's like, okay, yeah, that makes sense. Who decides how the metaverse looks if everybody's using it and it's all the same? Who decided that? Is it Facebook? Do they decide everything? With Nostr? It's the Nostr clients that decide.

And basically, you opt into the client you want to use. The client decides how the metaverse looks, and so you have this infinite like possibilities. But then you also can start to see some consensus where clients are implementing things in a similar way. So you end up with a consensus view of the metaverse, which is why it looks the same for everybody. So I think that's a pretty compelling answer. Who owns the content on the metaverse? Once again? Is it owned by Facebook? Is it owned by Google? I think Nostr makes it so that users cryptographically own their own content. That's pretty cool, because the content is owned by the creator. And I think that's a pretty satisfactory answer. Who makes the rules? On the metaverse, there's got to be rules, right? Well, instead of having Facebook decide the rules so that they can break them whatever they want, I think that the rules should be created by open source consensus, which is also the way that the nose to protocol itself develops, and how the Bitcoin protocol develops.They sort of like emergent networks, how they develop its open source consensus. That is the best way to make rules, because that means everybody agrees on them and enforces them, which means nobody can break them.

Who assigns the space, as I was talking about before? An impartial algorithm plus proof of work. If we used an impartial algorithm, like Simhash or proof of work, to determine the space, then all of the real estate and cyberspace can be assigned without anybody profiteering, without anybody getting in your way or stopping you from doing it. It's all based on permissionless systems. And finally, who controls the metaverse? Is a Facebook? Is a Google? Is it the government? No, it's nobody. Nobody controls the metaverse, and that's the way that it should be. And I think with Nostr, all of those things can be true. We can actually have satisfactory, good answers to those questions with Nostr. So Nostr was developed to replace Twitter, but I think it's a metaverse based on its properties, and I'm trying to visualize it with ONOSENDAI and and just make it so that it's we can see what's really out there.

Because there's a lot more out there to Nostr than people, I think they realize. And I just want to get people thinking about it.

I might not be the one who designs like the best cyberspace client, although that's my hope, as I can make the reference cyberspace client for cyberspace. But I do expect that there will be others someday, and I really hope that they're better than me.

That would be cool to see this, kind of evolve and and really, like become something that people have dreamed about for decades, but they always thought it would be fiction. And I'm like, it's not fiction anymore. You guys, this is actually a real thing. It is. And so, yeah, it's happening, and it's not, like, owned by somebody, and it's not being token gated by some, you know, start up whose, you know, profiteering off of all of that, and they're gonna benefit disproportionately.

It's like this is a neutral space that has just sort of been imagined into existence through a new protocol, and anyone can just be part of it, but it's all permissionless, and I think it's just super exciting and cool. Because I love sci fi, and to see it come true in real life, it's like, holy crap. That's really cool. I guess that's kind of like everything I wanted to talk about. But I'd love to answer any questions and, you know, and take a sip of water, because I've been doing a lot of talking. It is a great talk.

It is a great, thank you presentation. And does anyone have any questions? Let me check the live streaming. Ah, maybe there is so much. And, yeah, let's talk. That's how this name comes from.

ONOSENDAI. So in the book, the narrow answer ONOSENDAI is a device that was decorated in Japan, and that device lets you connect your mind to cyberspace. So that's where I got the name.

Ah, that's cool. You're really a huge fan so far.

Yeah, yeah. I mean, the scifi that was written in the eighties is like, that's like the golden era of scifi. And honestly, everything written since then is pretty much just based on what people came up with in the eighties. There's just so much good sci-fi out there. I mean, there's, there's good stuff that's even earlier than the eighties. There's some really early stuff. But I love William Gibson. His books are amazing. I highly recommend Neuromancer. If you haven't read it, you absolutely have to read it. I've been shilling it so much I should get paid a referral or something like that. But it should stay our favorites.

This type of book I have read about the base I'm not very sure of the English name, Galactic Empire. I read in Chinese. Anyway, it's a huge one. Let me Google it, it's quite cool. It's a galaxy, that the whole whole galaxy becomes an empire, and the other stuff. It's splendid to me.

If you can send it to me on telegram. I think you'll know that it's a very old, classic one. Yeah, that's, that's pretty cool. Okay, I think this is for all for today. And almost 1 h it's a really great talk. I think we can have another fpodcast to talk more about it. Yeah, that would be great to have more talk about Nostr. To your insight, it's really, really exciting Nostr. And that will be great. I appreciate being here today. I appreciate you guys all. I always say this. Thanks for coming to my TED Talk. I know I'm kind of long winded, but I'm just really excited about all this, and I'm excited that I have the opportunity to share it with you today. So feel free to join the ONOSENDAI Telegram,

it's ONOSENDAI.tech and ask me questions. I'm on Nostr as well obviously. I have a Twitter account, but I don't really use it much, so it's inferior. So, yeah, feel free to ask me questions. I'm happy to talk about all this stuff with anybody. Thank you. Yeah, Thank you.

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