captain ☦️

captain_stacks@stacker.news

building the nostr algorithm

thecaptain.dev
Editorial Articles Media Highlights

The greatest nostr strength has always been its people. From the beginning, nostr has been a testing ground. We are getting deeper into the user experience. We may get impatient, hoping more people will come in, but this is the perfect time to imagine, build, and test. Instead of waiting for people to join and attempting to recreate the old in order to bring them in, we can choose to walk an unmarketing path, becoming both the ostrich and the egg. In a world that seems intent on removing those very qualities where nostr shines, we can walk forward, guided by the principles we value, to imagine and build the nostr we wish to inhabit.

If I'm not mistaken, Bolt12's blinded paths, when adopted widely, should replace the hold invoice approach. If Bob is provably the introduction point to a blinded path in an amount-less bolt12 offer that pays Carol, then Bob can enforce that he'll be paid when Alice pays Carol. Using this approach, it might be possible for several Bobs to be predictably paid when Carol does, assuming blinded paths can contain other blinded paths. This isn't my exact dream of a single payment being split along independent routes, to different receivers, with codependent settlement at the protocol layer, but maybe novel forms of decentralized coordination can wait for bolt13.

The builders saunter by, regularly, to much applaus. "The builders are here! Oh, this is so exciting! Have they built something new? Will they tell us that they are still building and will continue to build? Oh, I do hope so!"

Think about the revolutionary technologies of recent decades: the television, the PC, the internet, the smartphone, Facebook, AI. They all took root in the same demographic: people with disposable income in developed countries. Facebook took this approach to the extreme by first opening only to students attending elite Western universities. And now it’s your aunt’s favorite technology. Another lesson.

Source: medium.com

I think the danger here is that if we as a developer community fail to realize the limitations of nostr and try to adapt the protocol to fit every possible use case, on an ad-hoc basis, we're going to end up with a tragedy of the commons, where no developer can comprehend what must be done to get his work done, and all kinds of weird artifacts appear for end users that no one can explain.

§1.01 — There is a future, perhaps even a probable one, in which this short text – of just 64 words – has the status of a Pre-Socratic fragment, at least, minutely examined by multiple philosophical schools, determined to extract every last micro-flicker of its significance. In this obscurely envisaged culture to come, these words compose an intricate sign of what is about to arrive, not only caught in the final moment before the shift, but self-identified as a spark – intimately linked to the spark – from which the shift came. It is trawled up from the other edge, where an accumulation of techno-cultural reaction mass is about to go nova. Caught at the very lip of the reaction pile, it is a piece of critical code.

Source: etscrivner.github.io

Key Rotation: We need to find DID methods that allow us to keep the identifiers stable but still connected to the private and public key and to the controller, and allow us to rotate the keys. There are several DID methods that allow this, including DID peers, DID Key, and off-chain methods. On-chain methods can be quite expensive and not all of them give you the possibility to easily rotate the signing key.