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Comment by m348e912 | Hacker News Reader

I saw Snowden tweeted about this. Anyone have a TLDR on what Nostr is exactly? And how it ties into Bitcoin (if at all)?

Update: It seems to be partly a twitter alternative perhaps using lightning network in some way. I set up an account on astral.ninja, created keys, username, saw that there were relays that were defined already. I couldn't see any posts in my feed, and when I tried to make a post it just hung and never posted anything. Suffice to say my initial experience started off okay, then dissapointment.

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It does not tie into Bitcoin. It's just a very very simple protocol of clients sending and subscribing to pieces of data, and relays that dumbly (i.e. with little processing) send data across connected and subscribed clients.

It's like a very minimal version of ActivityPub. It takes an hour to go through the whole spec and addenda.

Then Jack Dorsey got interested, gave the project a big grant (in BTC), and a lot of crypto hype flew into it. But while it is a convenient excuse to say "crypto, therefore bad", the protocol is itself completely unrelated and IMO quite neat. There is a lot of potential for systems that anyone can comprehend in their totality in an afternoon.

The relationship to bitcoin besides being created by bitcoiners is that it uses Schnorr Signatures for the secp256k1 curve - the same curve as bitcoin.

https://bips.xyz/340

A Nostr account is identified by a public key, you follow accounts by following public keys and the ability to post as an account is controlled by the corresponding private key.

Is there any place to find Public keys to follow?

https://www.nostr.directory

This tool lets you broadcast your pub key on twitter using a specified format, and the app will add you to the directory, and you can use it to find others that have also done that.

Also, if you go to https://snort.social/new, you can enter your twitter handle, and it will find everyone from you're twitter follows that you're not already following and let you sign up to follow them all.

Does this mean I could use a bitcoin hardware wallet to store my nostr keys and sign my posts?

Yes, it does assume someone writes a client that enables this.

It’s not tied to bitcoin other than it was created by decentralization loving bitcoiners. It doesn’t use blockchain or token bullshit as those people don’t believe blockchain is a silver bullet for any problem. You might see lightning invoices posted by users but that’s more of a client rendering the encoded data.

Fiatjaf who often posts here also stated that he would like to nostr to be used by non bitcoiners and even people who are antagonistic to bitcoin.

The best web clients so far are Snort and Iris, I'd try again with Snort and you should have a smoother experience.

https://snort.social https://iris.to

My favorite Nostr client (web or non-web) is Damus for iOS by jb55:

https://damus.io

It looks great, works well, the code well-written and super easy to hack on.

Damus is great and my client of choice. However, the TestFlight beta might still be filled up. If it is, I would recommend pairing a web client with an extension like nos2x/alby (chrome/firefox) or nostore (Safari).

I've been using https://member.cash

It seems to work a little differently to other clients by aggregating all the content on one relay first before sending it to the client, but I prefer this as it is faster and uses less bandwidth.

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