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Comment by EGreg | Hacker News Reader

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EGreg·

How is this different than Secure Scuttlebutt? I remember following that for a while. Dominic Tarr invented that.

Also Dat / Hypercore from Matthias Mullie, powering Beaker Browser

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Here's a good write-up comparing SSB and Nostr.

https://mattlorentz.com/weblog/2023/01/18/nostr-v-ssb.html

In my mind, key rotation is foundational, and neither system appears to support that.

You just generate a new key and link to it with your old key.

Is that process automated / formalized, or manual / informal?

Nope, you just generate a new keypair and link to it. It rotates, has done so for years.

My counterpoint would be that key rotation, while nice isn't essential, and it comes with a lot of complexity and trade offs. In particular, it really steers the design towards integrating with a blockchain which many people have understandable reservations against.

Majority of users come from the crypto world, this hasn't been much of a priority.

If you lose your keys, that is your problem. Same thing for any other crypto wallet worthy of that name.

After using Nostr a bit, I don't think there's a huge difference between SSB and it except that Nostr has no blob sync and they abandoned append-only logs and use different signing key cryptography.

Scuttlebutt just suffers from an inaccessible implementation at the moment, but there is a team coming together to make a working implementation again.

Nostr’s GitHub page discusses the issues with SSB.

https://github.com/nostr-protocol/nostr#the-problem-with-ssb...

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