The longer I watch Nostr, the more I struggle to believe the8 stagnation is accidental.
It reminds me of what Bitcoin Core did to Bitcoin. The project still exists, the language of freedom is still there, but the useful parts get narrowed, constrained, and redirected until only a very specific version is allowed to survive.
Nostr should be much bigger than a Bitcoin social network. Its core design is powerful because it does not need a blockchain. It should be a neutral social and identity protocol that can support any app, any community, and any payment rail. That is the whole point. It is not beholden to one cryptocurrency ecosystem.
Yet in practice, payments are treated as if Lightning is the only serious option. That immediately limits the appeal to a niche market.
And if we are going to have Lightning forced into everything, then at least use it for what it is actually good at.
Micro payments could be powerful because they break the subscription model. You should not need an ongoing commitment just to read one article, access one feature, boost one post, store one file, use one service, or unlock one piece of content.
That is the point. Pay once. Pay per use. Pay for access when you need it. No account lock in. No recurring charge you forget about. No platform sitting between the user and the service provider forever.
A good Nostr app should be able to say: here is a useful service, here is the price, pay however you want. Use Lightning for instant small payments where it makes sense. Use Monero where privacy matters. Use fiat, cards, bank transfer, or anything else where that works better.
The payment rail should serve the application. It should not dictate the entire culture of the protocol.
Instead, whenever people talk about monetisation, everything gets dragged back toward value for value.
Value for value has its place, but it is not the same as charging for a service. It does not reliably fund infrastructure, support, moderation, development, storage, bandwidth, discovery, or long term product work.
The same issue shows up in the apps themselves. They are trying to chase normies by compromising privacy and censorship resistance for convenience. But what normal person is going to accept worse performance, a smaller social graph, and a niche culture just to use a protocol they do not care about?
That is what makes me suspicious. The obvious path is to build real apps that do something useful, charge directly for the service, and use Nostr as the open social layer underneath.
But the path promoted by the influencers always seems weaker: Lightning only, value for value, half baked social apps, and endless appeals to ideology.
Maybe it is just bad incentives. Maybe it is ideological capture. But when the same weak ideas are pushed over and over, and every commercially useful path is treated as impure, it starts to look like containment.
The best way to stop Nostr is to fund and promote versions of it that absorb the dissidents, keep them busy, and never become useful enough to threaten the platforms.
Nostr should be the open social layer for applications that cannot be captured and don't give away more user data than necessary. Right now, it feels like it is being steered into becoming a harmless Bitcoin subculture.
Not sure why I'm seeing this now and even less sure why I'm replying, but if you are suggesting that people should pay 5 cents to read a blog post, then you should read Szabo's writing on mental transaction costs.
Still a bitcoiner too, I've come to realise that bitcoin maximalism was an attempt to capture it and derail its ability to do away with trusted third parties and function as P2P money.
I wrote this before the coldcard fiasco, but now its pretty evident that there were bad actors promoting an ingroup circle jerk of substandard solutions and ideas mascurading as the only pure way.
Thanks for commenting. I’m not suggesting we should pay for everything, and I strongly support freely sharing knowledge. But where someone invests considerable skill and effort in producing something valuable, I think there’s a legitimate case for setting a price rather than relying entirely on voluntary donations.
If we want independent thinkers and truth tellers to thrive, they need to be able to earn a living without depending on advertising, grants or patrons with their own agendas. Otherwise, we risk taking their work for granted while leaving them dependent on those willing to fund it.
As for mental transaction costs, I think NWC can substantially reduce that friction.
GM 💖
We are still here. We are still building. And there are now more of us. #GitCitadel
