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Comment by larrysalibra | Hacker News Reader

All this stuff might true, but from both a user and a developer perspective it actually works today and has a vibrant community of motivated, talented and interesting people building on it AND using it.

There are ways to address all of these problems if and when they occur.

I think one of Nostr's biggest contributions is its culture of pragmatism and speed. Do something simple, quickly that works instead of sitting around worrying about every edge case (which is a what a lot of "decentralized" projects do). If you have no apps and no one using them, none of the problems you mention exist. If you come up with something ridiculously complicated (think some recent w3c proposals), you've built a massive barrier to contributors and to developer and user adoption.

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I see now. The censorship against which Nostr offers some resistance is things like being banned from Twitter, or being expelled by disgruntled moderators from a subreddit, or maybe even fired by your domain name registrar..

It's not the kind of censorship resistance which opposition in country with an oppressive regime might need, and in general not a solution against censorship by state-level actors.

Well, fair. Also, fun and lightweight, no browser needed.

One other critical bit of "censorship" and "oppression" that Nostr very much wants to route around is any restrictions on use of Lightning et. al. cryptocurrency payments directly in Nostr clients, without any intermediaries or custodians in the way. (This fear of "economic censorship" seems to be a common boogieman in cryptocurrency circles, from what I can tell. Certainly a bigger fear than state-level actors coming after you for your Nostr notes or toots or whatever.)

Whether you think that's a good or necessary thing probably tracks very closely with your beliefs about whether money and its expenditure is protected speech. Obviously that's something about which the highest courts and legislative bodies in the USA already have complex and sometimes-contradictory views, so I certainly won't claim there's a single correct answer...even if my personal beliefs fall very much on the "money is a modern social fiction in no way connected to fundamental human rights" side of the spectrum.

Software protocols aren't going to prevent the government from using physical force to will you into obedience.

Not sure what you expect?

This sounds a lot like building a car by attaching an engine and a steering wheel to a frame, and worrying about addressing problems (such as seats, gear switching, seatbelts, airbags, doors, windshield, ...) only as they occur.

Which I guess is kinda fine if you're building slow go-karts to do friendly races with your neighbor in their backyard - but instead you're already letting those out on the open roads on day 1.

You've just described 100 years of car evolution.

Similar to software architecture, you do start by defining the preferred characteristics and then working your way to the other parts.

> You've just described 100 years of car evolution.

On purpose. You can't build a car today that ignores these learnings, and safely deploy it on the open roads; just like you can't build what's effectively an open relay like it's 1997 and expect to stay safe against the threats outlined by nine_k.

You can build software on protocols like this.

Your analogy fails at the mere fact that no physical harm can result from Nostr not solving this one thing you think is 100% necessary.

The fact that Nostr is up and running and working is the undeniable fact that you don't NEED to solve every single problem known to humankind before you write some lines of code.

> You can build software on protocols like this.

I've never denied this. You can also DIY a go-kart and drive it on an open road.

> Your analogy fails at the mere fact that no physical harm can result from Nostr not solving this one thing you think is 100% necessary.

Notice how you've specifically used the term "physical harm" to differentiate from other forms of harm. Harm is harm.

> The fact that Nostr is up and running and working is the undeniable fact that you don't NEED to solve every single problem known to humankind before you write some lines of code.

...Where did I try to deny this? My analogy is very specific in that you can do all of these things, and with enough luck, nothing bad will happen.

The problem with luck is that it doesn't scale well, especially on the open road. I mean, Internet.

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