Big Bad John's avatar
Big Bad John 5 months ago
Nostr cannot scale for the same reason Bitcoin can't - only much, much worse. For Nostr to work in a censorship-resistant way, everyone has to have a copy of all the data of all the users.

Replies (9)

Big Bad John's avatar
Big Bad John 5 months ago
It is information that is useful to every Nostr user.
Ava's avatar
Ava 5 months ago
That's interesting. But I don't really understand, why a copy? IS it not all the data? Why would that be required? The idea is poetically interesting though. Imagine everyone having access to the conversation of humankind ...
Big Bad John's avatar
Big Bad John 5 months ago
I know that is what Nostr people think, but it is not sufficient. Yes, you should keep copies of your data, this is true of any data you care about in any use case, everywhere. That doesn't give you a way to be censorship resistant on the web, social media, search, etc. Your backups just ensure you can try again, which was true before Nostr. But 99% of people don't want to run a server, and 99% of popular people wouldn't be able to scale their personal server to be able to serve many people efficiently.
unless the data is images and video and unless you are dumb enough to think NOSTR will ever have over a million active users this isn't an issue if your phone is your only computer you are an NPC and are irrelevant anyway even if NOSTR is 100 times less efficient than some other platform as long as long as the content is text it will be more efficient than mainstream platforms like YouTube and Netflix who have to pump megabytes of data for every idea communicated as a YouTuber myself it took me a long time to accept it but Video is for people of low intelligence like @npub1acg6...p35c ( haha, just kidding Mike, about your intelligence that is, not about YouTube ! ) i used to think Internet Video was different from watching TV but it isn't. in the end Video is meant to hypnotize, not communicate. if we accept that NOSTR is always going to be text-first and only for the top 0.01% like myself then your scaling concern is unwarranted. especially in light of new tech like Starlink and the fact that it is now feasible to get symmetrical gigabit residential internet in many locations with WIFI being able to match that speed as well.
hold up there buddy, you are wrong. The internet already was censorship resistant, correct, but the issue is marginalization due to a nuked social graph. Nostr fixes this because for the most part the thing you are ''trying again'' is getting the data hosted, you don't have to '''try again'' to (re-)build your audience and to the extend you do it your starting position is way better; in first instance because your audience does not have to switch apps and in second instance because outbox (of which implementation lacks severely at this moment in time). View quoted note โ†’ The same logic is why we bother with Blossom, because it gives us a fighting chance of healing links, instead of re-uploading and creating a whole different link. As for ''Nostr cannot scale for the same reason Bitcoin can't - only much, much worse. For Nostr to work in a censorship-resistant way, everyone has to have a copy of all the data of all the users.'' I frankly don't even understand how you reach such conclusions, it is puzzling and gives me a headache.... It just seems the whole paradigm of things being event-centric and servers being trivialized (in regards to what server) due to tamperproofing is just completely lost on you...wait....is that why you are interested in Pubky, you simply dont get Nostr?
Big Bad John's avatar
Big Bad John 5 months ago
When running a full relay gets too expensive, all apps will rely on two or three of them. When you get censored from those few (or when your constantly hot key is compromised) no one really knows the authoritative source of your data anymore. This is known as "discovery", a feature Pubky has, but Nostr does not. Pubky is also scalable, because apps can utilize indexers to aggregate all of the source data from everyone's personal homeservers.
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