Nostr: Bitcoiners, Christians and nude girls
This text is based on my subjective experience with Nostr over the last two months. Think of it as a light-hearted observation rather than a serious description of what it’s really like on Nostr.
Nostr is a relatively new social network that can best be described as a decentralised and freer Twitter. Twitter because it looks and acts a lot like “X”. And decentralized because it’s not so much an app as a protocol. But that’s not what this article is about.
Since Nostr is decentralized, it logically attracts fans of another decentralized project — Bitcoin. So a typical Nostr user these days is a person between 25 and 40 years old, technical or libertarian, freelancer and opponent of the state. These people are the core of Nostr. They consult on their projects, share interesting content for each other, bitch about politics, pat themselves on the back for avoiding the system because they own Bitcoin, that sort of thing.
But it must be said that the debates are infinitely less toxic than on the mentioned Twitter/X. As Edward Snowden wrote on Nostr — people are just nicer here.
But apart from the IT people and economists who are cheering for Bitcoin, Nostr is surprisingly full of Christians too. They share similar values to bitcoiners, and I personally have been looking forward to the day when these two worlds finally shake hands. Bitcoin and Christianity have a common denominator, which is freedom. In the case of Bitcoin it is freedom from the system, in the case of Christianity it is freedom from the influences of a broken world, so basically freedom from the system too. Of course, the nostriches (as Nostr users call themselves) who are believers are mostly bitcoiners too, and in the future their debate with typical IT guys and economists will definitely be interesting. By the way, there is already first podcast on the topic of Christianity vs. Bitcoin vs. Nostr, which you can find under the title Thank God For Nostr.
The varied palette is then complemented by girls who make a bit of OnlyFans out of Nostr. Not that Nostr allows any type of subscriptions. But it does have one key feature and that is the ability to send satoshis (an accounting unit of bitcoin, 1 BTC = 100,000,000 satoshis). The way it works is that you set up a light version of a bitcoin wallet, in your browser, which operation takes just about 5 minutes, link it to your Nostr account and you are ready to receive and send bitcoin to other users. And not only to users in general, but you can reward specific posts. And this is where we come back to the girls — if they want to get paid for their photos on OnlyFans, the platform takes its cut, of course. This applies to all sorts of content platforms like Patreon or herohero. On Nostr, you keep full amount of donation, because the transaction goes directly between two wallets. Compared to subscriptions, it logically works the other way around here: content first, then voluntary rewards.
I intentionally went a little over the line with the girls (they are definitely not the 3rd biggest user group on Nostr). But it’s a good example of why Nostr is good for content creators. You’re not dependent on third parties, but you get paid for your content directly from users who find it valuable. Nostr is characterized by an extreme degree of freedom — both for common users, who, unlike Mastodon, won’t get their account blocked (as mentioned, Nostr is decentralized = no administrator), and for creators, who get paid for their content without a third party reaching out for the cut.
The fact that payments are in Bitcoin is just a bonus.
Note 1 — There are more user groups of course, and it’s not that those three are the most prominent ones (except for bitcoiners). But it’s a pretty cool sample of users when it comes to diversity and possibilities of this social network.
Note 2 — Well-known users of Nostr include Twitter founder Jack Dorsey and earlier mentioned Edward Snowden.
Note 3 — There are a few technical inaccuracies in the description of Nostr’s functionality and wallets. However, they are not essential to the intent of this article.
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Honza Nádvorník
brand designer and Bitcoin fan
💜 Let's connect on Nostr — my npub:
npub1j0ht2m9jgs6mccyvkffd2dlnfusmqfx9mjlwg6fsmfwxm9rfuwdq40w6rf
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