The reality is incentives mean that essentially someone has to pay top talent in order to have them take the hit on engagement and post here exclusively. It's like how chess.com became king by paying all the GMs to play there. And since Nostr is just a protocol it means a VC backed app project like Primal would need to do that. But then, since they have no moat in terms of the network it makes little sense to do that. So then maybe Primal would need to look at top talent posting exclusively to Primal's relay or something. And, voila, we've reinvented centralized social media. But without those financial incentives how can we expect content creators to come and post here exclusively? And without moats and ROI how can we expect capital to fund it? Like with Bitcoin, the model needs to work in alignment with human incentives. So, greed has to equal good.
I think that would be fine, actually. Nostr is just like HTTP or TCP/IP. It's just the plumbing. Maybe it will make a better web. I think it will because the public/private key pair and natural fit with Bitcoin help solve the problems of identity and also online micropayments. But the reality is, like with TCP/IP, the apps that make the biggest mainstream impact will be the ones who can make a moat and exploit their user base for maximum profit. So we can expect to see exclusive relays or at the very least proprietary elements in apps which make them sticky. You just can't be pouring millions into a project which someone down the street can then use to bootstrap a competitive service. This is the same reason Coinkite had to make its Coldcard licensing commercially restrictive. The reality of human incentives means that a utopian vision will never and can never be realized. Never.
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More people means more zaps. Nobody wants vc funded anything. Ideally, we the people get to decide with out sats