Thread by @YumiBod

@m1sterc001guy @im_JoeFi Yeah, the purpose is not so much to protect the individuals who are speaking, because they might be in foreign jurisdictions and within their rights, but to protect the node/relay operator from liability and government intrusion. For example, in certain Communist & Muslim...

@m1sterc001guy @im_JoeFi ...majority countries, you can be prosecuted for trafficking in banned content, such as political speech that's critical of the government, nudity/porn, controversial social topics, even educational content conveyed to women. No doubt, it's impossible to police a large group...

@m1sterc001guy @im_JoeFi ...and to prevent infiltration by government agents. I'm just thinking about how to further decentralize the communication networks and to protect node/relay operators from gov intrusion. The Twitter Files exposed a very extensive cartel of gov & NGO's working hand-in-glove...

@m1sterc001guy @im_JoeFi ...to censor political, social, & health-related speech that those in power disapproved of, including unelected officials and people not holding any public office, i.e. "elites". All this was in violation of the First Amendment. Didn't matter. Practically none of the people...

@m1sterc001guy @im_JoeFi ...in government who we've entrusted to protect those rights lifted a finger to stop it. In fact, many of them were in on it. There are many parallels here to the financial crisis of 2008 and the founding of #Bitcoin. Is our right to free speech any less valuable than our right..

@m1sterc001guy @im_JoeFi ...to keep our wealth? Is this solely an American right, or should it be the same for everyone worldwide? I have a lot of friends in foreign countries, and I see how they suffer in various ways for lack of a Constitution like ours. Conversely, I see how our government has been...

@m1sterc001guy @im_JoeFi ...corrupted in ways that make some of these countries look almost more attractive than ours. So I look at where our country is headed to gauge what sorts of technical solutions we're going to need to protect against violations of our rights & lack of Constitutional protections.

@m1sterc001guy @im_JoeFi Look at what's been happening to FB/Instagram, YT, Google, Twitter, & others. The gov has backdoors into all of them, and they've demanded the take-down of both content and users in violation of their First Amendment rights. This is in the USA! I think Nostr is great, but I...

@m1sterc001guy @im_JoeFi ...find it concerning that there are relatively few large relays where most everything is hosted, and nothing is encrypted except DM's. There should be many more relays, and there should be clear incentives to decentralize. Everyone capable of hosting content should want to...

@m1sterc001guy @im_JoeFi ...do it. But I can see some impediments, especially for people in countries where there are penalties for trafficking in "contraband" information, such as American or European news, religious sermons, STL files for 3D printed guns, or anti-vax clinical studies for that matter.

@m1sterc001guy @im_JoeFi In such places, one need not even participate in conversations to be at risk of government intrusion. Merely READING or CONVEYING such information may be treated as criminal behavior. A node/relay operator risks being prosecuted as a propagandist without even posting a word.

@m1sterc001guy @im_JoeFi For this reason, I think it's important to at least have the option of requesting an encrypted connection with peers in the network, to encrypt connections with clients, and to encrypt content stored on the node/relay. I assure you, there are many people who would like to host...

@m1sterc001guy @im_JoeFi ...free speech over the Internet but fear the consequences if the content can be read by authorities. Unencrypted content is a liability. One never knows what someone else might say, post, show, incite, etc. and how it might be perceived by government officials on any given day.

@m1sterc001guy @im_JoeFi In the same way #Bitcoin users are encouraged to run their own nodes to avoid trusting 3rd party intermediaries, free speaking citizens should be encouraged to run their own Nostr relays. Speakers / content creators in sensitive jurisdictions who fear the consequences of what...

@m1sterc001guy @im_JoeFi ...they might say should have the technological capability of protecting their identity and making it very difficult to trace their posts back to their physical identity and geographic location. This becomes all too easy if nothing is encrypted. Similar to the Lightning network,

@m1sterc001guy @im_JoeFi ...we'd like to have such posts make a few hops on intermediate, likewise secured relays before reaching content consumers. Another reason for a distributed web of relays is to allow content creators with large followings to post original content on a small, obscure relay, ...

@m1sterc001guy @im_JoeFi ...such as their own (where it's stored), and have it picked up and distributed by a network of other relays that subscribe to it, or that host users who subscribe to it. This is similar to a traditional author/publisher/distributor/subscriber model. With newspapers & magazines,

@m1sterc001guy @im_JoeFi ...for example, there are authors who create content and are not necessarily affiliated with the newspaper or magazine. However, the newspaper or mag publishes articles (& photos) by the writer and archives them. 3rd party distributors such as magazine stands, clearing houses, ..

@m1sterc001guy @im_JoeFi ...and paperboys (& girls) deliver the publications to subscribers. It's not practical for a famous author to distribute his/her articles or books to millions of readers without 3rd party intermediaries. Nor is it practical for a famous digital content creator to host millions...

@m1sterc001guy @im_JoeFi ...of peer-to-peer connections directly with his/her readers, viewers, or subscribers. It requires too much bandwidth. This is a common problem with websites. We've all heard about websites that have crashed because of some page or piece of content that went viral, or because...

@m1sterc001guy @im_JoeFi of a denial-of-service (DOS) attack. Incidentally, DOS attacks are often perpetrated by political actors who seek to silence or disenfranchise their opponents. It happened to Parler, Truth Social, My pillow, InfoWars, Trump's campaign, and whitehouse.gov to name a few.

@m1sterc001guy @im_JoeFi To silence individuals, attackers will simply go to the source and try to shut it down. If this is a website hosted by a small ISP, it's easy. If it's hosted by a Raspberry Pi in someone's basement, even easier. The World-Wide Web 🕸️ is great, and it was designed to be...

@m1sterc001guy @im_JoeFi ... decentralized, but it's not that great for fleeting, impromptu, & ephemeral content like tweets, and the existing protocols don't solve the problem of scalability to distribute content to very large consumer bases. Unfortunately, this has led to centralization...

@m1sterc001guy @im_JoeFi ...by pushing prominent content creators to large data centers, such as Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, or Google for web hosting, and Facebook, YouTube, TikTok, Instagram, Twitter, or Snapchat for social media. The gov has backdoors into all of these and routinely..

@m1sterc001guy @im_JoeFi ...orders the take-down of both content and users for some of the most benign and inexplicable reasons, without warning or any way to appeal. These are not mere examples of private companies exercising their right to enforce their terms of service but government agencies using...

@m1sterc001guy @im_JoeFi ...extortion tactics, including threats of crippling regulation, to skirt the Constitution and violate the First Amendment rights of US citizens. In other countries, the tactics used by foreign governments are not so subtle. They'll often block entire sites for individuals, ...

@m1sterc001guy @im_JoeFi ...certain religious or ethnic communities, districts, cities, provinces, or the entire country. Sometimes the blocks are arbitrary, inexplicable, in connection with political rallies, visits by foreign leaders, political protests, civil unrest, etc. All they have to do is...

@m1sterc001guy @im_JoeFi ...block the IP addresses of the servers, which are well established, and it's done. VPN is a workaround for some, but it's inconvenient, and many of the known VPN servers are blacklisted, since they also tend to be consolidated in large data centers. We need to realize that...

@m1sterc001guy @im_JoeFi ...although we might think the role of government is to protect our Constitutional rights, the reality is they've been engaged in a type cyber-warfare against their own citizens for a pretty long time. The role of government has become to protect itself, not its citizens or...

@m1sterc001guy @im_JoeFi ...its taxpayers. Sorry, that's the way it is. The words of the Founding Fathers have not been honored. The current government is not the one we started with. It has evolved into something which cannot be trusted, as it no longer reliably upholds the laws on which it was founded.

@m1sterc001guy @im_JoeFi This is why we #Bitcoin. But it's also why we must now turn our attention to another huge blindspot that has left us vulnerable; our freedom of speech. In the age the Internet and ubiquitous connectivity, anyone should, in theory, be able to reach any size audience worldwide...

@m1sterc001guy @im_JoeFi ...from any connected device without having to pay a fortune in hosting fees or worry about hostile 3rd parties interfering with one's ability to connect with those who wish to read, listen, view, participate, respond, or whatever. The current network architecture has problems...

@m1sterc001guy @im_JoeFi ...with distribution that have never been adequately solved. There is no natural cascading effect to facilitate one-to-many distribution channels in a decentralized way. And there are no built-in payment rails to pay for distribution or to propagate payments back to...

@m1sterc001guy @im_JoeFi ...content creators and distributors (hosts/nodes/relays). If I create content that people demand, shouldn't I be compensated? If host and relay someone else's content on my equipment and network, shouldn't I be compensated? If I push content on people who didn't request it, ...

@m1sterc001guy @im_JoeFi ...(spam or ads) shouldn't I have to pay to be seen & heard? If I'm a content creator who's in high demand, I might have my own little relay where I post all my articles, photos, memes, videos, etc. so I don't have to trust a 3rd party and so I can sign everything as original.

@m1sterc001guy @im_JoeFi But I don't want to worry about disk space, CPU cores, memory, backups, or network bandwidth on a scale required for massive, global distribution, and I shouldn't have to pay for it, since others are willing to pay for my content. Let them pay for distribution, and pay me, too.

@m1sterc001guy @im_JoeFi If my relay connects to only 10 other relays, and those 10 connect in turn to another 10 relays, and each relay hosts 100 clients (consumers), then in just a few hops I can reach millions of content consumers without consolidating power into any one silo. It becomes difficult...

@m1sterc001guy @im_JoeFi ...to censor my content when it's so highly distributed and replicated in so many places. However, it's easy to silence me if my originating node/relay or client connection can be identified and associated with me. Thus, there needs to be a way for me to relay content to other...

@m1sterc001guy @im_JoeFi ...relays which subsequently distribute my content without revealing my local IP address or node/relay as the source. Maybe I have a trusted connection with these relays, but they obfuscate my address in subsequent transmissions of my content, so no one else can identify me.

@m1sterc001guy @im_JoeFi Nevertheless, my content should be signed by me, so that consumers of my content can verify its authenticity, since they are not connecting directly to my site/node/relay where it originates. With web browsers today, we check URLs and certificates. With Nostr, we check pubkeys?

@m1sterc001guy @im_JoeFi This seems adequate, but I'm unsure of the details of how messages are signed and verified as authentic. And we need another layer or layers to facilitate cascading relay-to-relay connections that establish trust and protect their sources. There is also the issue of how to...

@m1sterc001guy @im_JoeFi ...propagate replies back to content creators over the same or possibly different channels. Note that a "content creator" can be anyone simply posting "Hello world!" to potentially one or more content consumers. The content creator might set a fee for a certain level...

@m1sterc001guy @im_JoeFi ...of visibility in their feed, so unpaid replies are at the bottom of the list, while the highest bidding replies bubble to the top. I believe superchats in YouTube work something like this. I think the bidding process for Google ad space in web searches also bears similarity.

@m1sterc001guy @im_JoeFi Content creators might set fees that Tier 1 relays have to pay to consume their content. Tier 2 relays would, in turn, pay Tier 1 relays for that content. Tier n relays would pay Tier n-1 relays, etc. Clients hosted by each of these relays would pay the relays a subscription fee.

@m1sterc001guy @im_JoeFi Such fees might be per unit of content, periodical, or perpetual. Relays would collect their cut from client subscribers and use the remaining revenue to pay their source, which is either the original content creator or an intermediate relay. These fees could be micro-payments...

@m1sterc001guy @im_JoeFi ...of just a few sats for trivial content, or they could be more significant for valuable content, such as movies, plays, lectures, master classes, professional training, celebrity interviews, etc. Of course, this is where #Bitcoin Lightning ⚡ comes in, and it could be built-in.

@m1sterc001guy @im_JoeFi By making people pay for content they demand and making people pay to push content that is not demanded, spam and malicious bots are virtually eliminated. The fees might be very small, almost insignificant for individuals, but they could be quite costly for malicious actors...

@m1sterc001guy @im_JoeFi ...who intend to spin up large numbers of bots or propagate huge amounts of spam. If they're willing to pay, so be it. At least they're engaged in some type of commerce that makes it worth their while. Or they're a celebrity fan who's willing to buy access, as another example.

@m1sterc001guy @im_JoeFi Either way, when there's a cost, people tend to economize. So how does someone avoid paying fees? Establish a peer-to-peer connection with those you trust. Run your own node/relay. Join the same relay as your peers. Whitelist your favorite peers and set fees to zero. Negotiate...

@m1sterc001guy @im_JoeFi ...reciprocal agreements, i.e. barter. Just like the #Bitcoin Lightning ⚡ network, you can set all your fees to zero in hopes of attracting more traffic, but if you're in high demand, eventually you'll become overwhelmed, and you might have to charge for service to recoup costs.