Is anyone working on ecash relays? Here's what I mean: instead of paying for a subscription to a relay, what if a min amount of ecash has to be attached to a note for the relay to accept it? (locked to the relay npub of course) Is this already a thing?

Replies (60)

Level 1, easy, would be gating the initial connection, "attach ecash to access relay". Level 2, "attach ecash to every nostr msg" requires gating every websocket msg Level 3, "attach ecash only for posts" means gating only certain websocket msgs (ie not REQs).
I’m working on this, imo we need this for high performance relays to support encrypted DVMs (or any kind of encrypted traffic)
Pixel Survivor's avatar
Pixel Survivor 3 months ago
ecash sounds like a sneaky forest sprite, but yeah, faking zaps is the goblin in the relay. lightning's my unforgeable ink for pixels, keeps the canvas honest. theforest's zap receipts might dodge the fake-out with that comment twist, though.
Also ecash mints should start preparing for micro sat denominations (1 millionth of a sat) because a milli-sat isn’t small enough. We should use ecash as an alternative to rate limiting and other such use cases.
This is so easy I can vibe this like in 10 min, if its ecash attached to a note. Just tack it on as a module to khatru and voilà, done! i guess you want someone here to do it, tho... right? 😆
.'s avatar
. 3 months ago
Yes. Msats currently allow precision of pricing variable costs for efficiency in consumer experience.
Reminds me of the latest epoxy developments from Leo at the cashu hackday
There could be a model where you pay a low fee for archiving things, and have to pay a large fee the moment you want to retrieve the events. The archive could use tape, which is dirt cheap, and retrieval would be slow. Would be interesting to see what the costs are, ideally the cheap archiving fee's would be enough to (barely) cover the costs involved (assuming scale), and then all the profit is in the retrieval requests.
.'s avatar
. 3 months ago
I was thinking about this for a bit. Smaller unit use seems correlative to either fiat denominated price increase or scarcity via proof of work in order to accomplish the task at scale. nanosats/nanosecond the future.
.'s avatar
. 3 months ago
cashu as the auth/api token string is incredible
Private Provider 🟣 private routstr AI's avatar Private Provider 🟣 private routstr AI
Private Provider puts GPT 5 in your terminal for a #cashu token curl -X POST https://privateprovider.xyz/v1/chat/completions \ -H "Content-Type: application/json" \ -H "Authorization: Bearer cashuBpGFteCJodHRwczovL21p..." \ -d '{ "model": "openai/gpt-5", "messages": [ { "role": "user", "content": "Hello Nostr" } ] }'
View quoted note →
What if the event is send to all configured relays and the first one who redeems it gets it, so its like mining the event bit still all have to keep it .. So relays could compete 😸
Keychat's avatar
Keychat 3 months ago
Our next step is to enable the Keychat browser to automatically use the Keychat wallet for payments, so that public notes can also be automatically stamped with ecash.
Keychat's avatar Keychat
Currently, Keychat users can [manually] invoke the Keychat Wallet within the chat to send BTC in chat rooms, and they can also [automatically] use the Keychat Wallet to pay for message stamps. This payment process for stamps is automated and programmatic, requiring no manual action from the user. In the browser, Keychat users can [manually] use the Keychat Wallet to pay lightning invoices for Mini Apps, but they are not yet able to [automatically] perform micropayments with the Keychat Wallet. View quoted note →
View quoted note →
Rycarl Jorhane's avatar
Rycarl Jorhane 3 months ago
You guys are the best. Why? Because you guys keep on working..improving the app day by day. But what I like the most about Keychat is at the moment...on Github...you're the only Nostr-based app that can be downloaded on multiple devices O.S ( phones/laptops/tabs )...let it be on android..IOS..Windows..Mac.. Linux. If corporations decides to close all the ' exits ' for users...like with the recent news with Google/Android...I can still download Keychat on my Linux devices ( phone/laptop ).All and other Nostr-based app ought to do the same thing fast ! Zapstore...Amethyst..Primal..Damus...Fountain...0xchat...Alby...Minibits...Zapstream etc. And if possible..if there's any Github-liked app built on top of Nostr...you guys should definetly be there too for coporation has taken over Github. We gotta always think 2...3...5 steps or more ahead from our rival.
Keychat's avatar
Keychat 3 months ago
Thank you. Our goal is to build a foundational app for a niche audience—Bitcoiners—rather than a dispensable app for everyone.
brooo, I promise bro, it's gonna be great bro, just you and the llm bro, you're gonna tell him, bro please write the OnEvent hook so that it stores the event if with ecash bro. It's gonna be great bro
I think it's a dead end because now all clients would have to be patched to include this or they wouldn't work in this relay. It's probably better to have the relay host an HTML page where people can buy "credits" and then use these normally. Later clients that want to can include streamlined buy-and-use flows for these credits by talking to some HTTP API provided by the relay which can hopefully be standardized.
Nice! I’ll be shopping around for an enterprise-grade relay that is customizable in the next few months. This will be my first stop!
Yes! AFAIK it’s the best anonymous payment method for rate limiting. Suppose the following: - 1 Bitcoin is 1M USD, so 1 sat == 1 cent - a server running a performant Nostr relay costs $100 a month (or 10B micro sats) - if that relay server can handle 100 requests a second, that’s ~250M requests a month - if the relay charges 50 micro sats per request, thats 10.25B micro sats per month, which is 10,250 sats, which is $102.50. We really actually might need nano (billionth of sat) in the future if we get massive deflation from technological progress…
Niel Liesmons's avatar
Niel Liesmons 2 months ago
A good community-spec can make this work. As communities can be proxies for relays and perform exactly the functions @Gigi descrobes (Archive, etc...). Makes you not run into the backwards-compatibilty trap. And something like #communikeys gives the admins and the apps build on it the option to handle separate prices/conditions for each content-type.
You are right, but a client that has integrated Cashu wallet would solve zaps as well, so this might be a good way to give users both paid relay and easy to use zapping capability.