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Comment by libraryatnight | Hacker News Reader

It may need cryptography. I think the majority of HN likes cryptography. When you say crypto, and apologize for it, I assume you mean the stupid coins and all the nonsense that comes with that group of fools, and that is not required.

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It seems to me it does require cryptos. Which luckily are based on cryptography so we all get to like the path forward :)

Do you have a particular use case in mind which cryptocurrency enables here? Care to give an example of how they help solve a issue?

Two uses cases that would both be beneficial to nostr:

Decentralized namespace registries - see Farcaster.

Autonomous and decentralized mechanism that rewards & incentivizes users to run nodes/servers - see Ethereum staking, Filecoin.

No need for any of this elaborate noise. You can just charge money for services rendered like hosting your media or notes.

That describes most centralized services on the web today. Nostr and other decentralized protocols aren’t aiming to recreate the Twitter and Amazon model.

There already exist nostr user verification service providers that charge a fee for a purple checkmark, similarly to Twitter Blue.

These services exist outside of the protocol and depend on a few centralized and trusted authorities.

Another solution that is arguably more resistant to capture and censorship would be to use a blockchain to manage user name aliases - like Farcaster is doing with fnames.[1]

[1] https://github.com/farcasterxyz/protocol#22-farcaster-names

Gateway operators are paid to successfully process data (which they can do if they stay online, have a fast connection to the Internet, and so on - not a shitty Raspberry Pi)

Gateway operators are paid to store data

Gateway operators are paid to mix client-side encrypted messages and shred message metadata

Gateway operators are staking their nodes to ensure cryptographically correct operation

If you want to see more, spend some time reading how blockchain-based networks with incentives work.

How do you guarantee data availability and avoid double spending without Byzantine fault tolerant consensus?

Consensus isn't a fundamental requirement for social media or a communication protocol. Email doesn't require a blockchain and doesn't care about 'double spending' or whatever.

The previous comment didn’t ask for consensus for a social media or communication protocol specifically but rather was two steps ahead and was referring to the infrastructure that those protocols run on. Under the hood, there are various consensus mechanisms in current day social media or communication protocol infrastructure systems and those systems are needed to make sure (user) data is available. In order to run a data availability system, there’s a consensus required somewhere there. If you want to have the infrastructure provider run it “honestly”, in a protocol sense, then you need incentives for them to do so. If you need incentives, then you need kind of transactional system in a payment and accounting system sense. And that’s where you then need to care about “double spending”.

Did email ever manage to become largely decentralized? Most people use centralized services like gmail, and pay for it with their privacy. It's not viable for the majority to have their own servers

Is this the equivalent of that "MongoDB is webscale video"? Why are those issues important in a social plataform

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