I appreciate your perspective.
And Tor is indeed the adjacent network that I think about critically and economically here as a first glance when I put my critical hat on for Nostr. Which is why, in multiple of my recent posts, I purposely brought to attention critical Nostr relay economics from Peter Todd and then quote-posted Odell about how questioning the economics is rational behavior.
I do think that Nostr has stronger ethical incentive mechanisms than Tor, as a starting point. Open socials and open data combined, is a stronger selling point than open data alone. I think the ecosystem needs to improve key management and some details, but assuming we hit product market fit and decent UX for big scaling, I think there's a lot of broad support here. Or if we fail, from whatever emerges better from our ashes could do decently.
Imo, unlike Tor, the biggest relays will be run by businesses as a loss-leader for their other business activities. In other words, data availability is a cost of doing business. It's more economic, given the broader audience.
Power-users of a given social app would indeed pay $10/month or $100/month or in some cases way more as a sizable business. Advertisements aside, they do so in order to reach an audience with minimal frictions of impersonators or data availability. This covers many free users.
I admittedly partly kept my post incomplete for a humor punchline, and commented elsewhere on my full thoughts. I don't just think "psychopath hobbyists" will run the relays. They are the relay runners of last resort. To the extent that Nostr grows users in any significant way (still a big "if"), I think businesses in multiple jurisdictions will run the big relays, and then there will be many smaller hobbyist ones to fill the gaps, as far as I can see currently based on how early this tech is.
If Nostr has trouble with relay economics and there is no better option on the market, I'd be willing to donate five figures per year in support assuming my own income-generating businesses are running well enough. And there are others that might be willing to 10x or 100x that kind of number. That number only increases as freedom is impaired by more jurisdictions.
When I was in my early twenties, not rich, overworked, and put like a thousand hours of voluntary work into that forum in my post that you referenced, I was earning like $40-$50/hr. That was like $40-$50k cumulative labor hours that I provided for free to a forum I liked in my early twenties. Like a psychopath. I earn multiples of that now, and am still a psychopath. Any ecosystem that gets a few whales on its team, and a few people that are willing to work for free part-time or work for scraps part-time, can keep a network running.
And as a partner in a venture capital firm that puts seven or eight figures into a company depending on its stage, including various freedom-tech if it's economical, I'd say we're indeed looking at Nostr for any economic angle should it materialize to our criteria, and all of us as partners support it conceptually.
Bitcoin itself is a combo of 1) voluntary donations to Core devs and its associations and 2) companies building on Bitcoin for expectations of economic gain. I expect Nostr to be similar. It relies on economics for big scaling, but donations for the cypherpunk margins, for which there are legion.
And these things tend to be responsive to input. If a network is running fine and everyone is engaging happily and without big pushback, people contribute less. If the network starts to be impaired by internal or external forces and there is no better solution available, people wake up and contribute more, and influencers wake up and convince people to contribute more.
How do xmpp nodes/relays work?. That seems to have held up quite well for years maybe decades moving rich data. I have wondered if xmpp should not be the decentralized rich data base standard. Or bittorrent ? Bitorrent moves vast amounts of data. We have proven , distributed tech. Caveat : I am no expert on this.
There are loads of revenue driving activities that will justify running relays, big expensive relays, as well as small plucky ones. Todd's issue was people using term decentralised, relays are not decentralised, censorship resistance is achieved via resilience.
