the majority of non-competent distributed systems and game theory talkers who get all the airtime on this protocol don't actually understand either game theory or distributed systems. here's some hard fax: fully anonymized, private direct messages can only be coordinated over an anonymising proxy, with ephemeral messages, and thus have a huge problem with asynchrony and there is basically ZERO consistency to the data on the network. every security and privacy (a form of security policy) system has tradeoffs. the great holy grail of these uneducated, uncreative folk who say nostr can't do secure private messaging, is a type of privacy protection that is essentially a form of deliberate amnesia with a zero time window. the biggest disagreement i have with this idiotic view of what must be in place for nostr to implement this, is this: nostr's middleman, rendezvous architecture is designed for asynchronous messaging. but it can also do synchronous messaging through rendezvous, and solves the NAT routing problem that persists for anyone wishing to do p2p protocols from their home connection. nostr solves that problem. now go back to all these supposedly "private" protocols. NAME ONE THAT DOESN"T INVOLVE THEM CACHING YOUR MESSAGES ON THEIR SERVERS! not one of them. simplex, signal, matrix, telegram, whatsapp. all of them basically have relays in them. so, what was that you were saying? are you saying i can trust Signal Inc. more than i can trust my friend in germany?

in government statute books, there is always a preamble which states the aspirational result of implementing the law. a bit like the aspirational preamble that you all have accepted as the premise of nostr. meanwhile, the lawyers pore through those things, and with enough time, will find a way for you to break the law without breaking the law. the same applies to nostr. what you think it is, is one thing. what it actually is, is something a bit more complicated than this uneducated faith in the preamble of a body of rules. that's why we don't have DMs still. because y'alls don't understand what the protocol allows. same goes for name/npub mappings and namespace registration. nostr protocol is not a complete distributed system. it's lego bricks for foundational components. you have to use your imagination and logic to see whether or not it can protect privacy adequately. most of it falls to the lowest rung of dev skill in architecture, the client devs, and idiot projects like primal promote these guys in front of us relay devs, who actually have at least one level higher knowledge of how this works. you should be listening to us, and working with us, instead of pretending that relays aren't important. or you can just go back to mastodon or bluesky or x and get off my lawn.

What are you talking about? Nostr had dms very early on, and is incredibly useful for things like a marketplace where customers need to dm merchants. Your being a technocrat

I am so pleased to read this from one of the original designers of the protocol.