Nostr and Bitcoin – The New Freedom Toolkit.
There’s a new way to own your social media content & financially profit from it. Here’s how.
A note from Ayelen: I'm so excited to share today's piece with you – written by Marce Romero, writer of The Nostr Report. If you’re new to nostr, don’t worry, you’ll be learning about it today!
Fifteen years ago, a tiny group of people learned about a tool that granted financial freedom to the world. Some compare this tool to the invention of the wheel, others say it's the same as gunpowder, and many pair it with the discovery of fire. This tool we now know is Bitcoin, and it’s safe to say most of the modern world has at least heard of it once.
Freedom is a big word and a specific toolkit must be built for every individual to experience it. Bitcoin is the key to opening this door but the purchasing power it grants can only happen if you can also move your ideas around freely.
For example, for a person living under an authoritarian regime, a tool like Bitcoin may allow them to experience real private property for the first time. But if they speak their mind freely in the centralized system of communications we have access to today their voice would be censored.
To be free, we need financial freedom and freedom of speech. That’s why the need for free speech protocols is important.
In a term we can all understand, free speech protocols are like the email. The email is a protocol (set of rules) for sending messages from point A to point B. The email is open for anyone to create a client (clients like gmail and hotmail) on it and that is why we have so many email providers and why we can easily communicate no matter what client people are using.
History has gifted us several attempts at censorship-resistant protocols, with the likes of Mastodon, and now more recently, Nostr. Nostr became extremely popular last year when Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey announced he was donating a large amount of bitcoin to the developer that created nostr and those who continue developing on this new protocol.
What makes nostr so unique that even Jack Dorsey decided to endorse it? It was created by FiatJaf, a Brazilian bitcoiner, who understands the danger of losing the right to move and the right to speak freely. Nostr, like email, is designed for developers to build upon, allowing them to work on any type of client that can serve as a medium of communication.
The most used case on the nostr protocol has been social media clients, where people can express their opinions on Twitter and Instagram-like platforms. These clients are not algorithm based. You choose what you want to see and where to broadcast it. No weird algorithms that censor your view of the world based on what's trending and no big tech companies profiting from your data.
On Nostr, the paradigm is so different that people who enjoy your content can send you bitcoin payments as appreciation for the valuable content you provided. And this is where the tool kit comes full circle. You can experience the freedom to say whatever you want in your favorite form, and those who appreciate it can give you value for the value you provided in their lives.
Instead of you being a product for big tech to profit from, and having them decide whether the content you created aligns with the values of the many companies that pay for access to your data, you own your content and you profit from it. Nostr even reaches the point where you hold your contacts. No matter what client you go to, you take your followers, allowing you to get all kinds of users and ensuring they have access to everything you want them to.
Nostr is just starting to be built. It still needs many more users and developers stress testing the protocol's capabilities. However, the growth and support nostr has seen in the short period of its existence is unprecedented for any other protocols that have been created. And for it to have been integrated with Bitcoin seamlessly provides a monetary incentive like no other platform does.
If, after all this explanation on why you need freedom of speech, you get the urge to open your nostr account. Watch this easy YouTube documentary by filmmaker Max DeMarco on creating your nostr account. And if you want a view on nostr history and to keep yourself updated with all the freedom and daily progress, you can read one of my favorite nostr projects, which I am humbled to be a part of, The Nostr Report.
And obviously, feel free to contact me. You can find me on Nostr at https://primal.net/marce and on Twitter with the handle @MarceMR19. Nostr might seem intimidating at first, but you will not want to leave once you feel the magic of zaps (bitcoin lighting payments for your content) and the welcoming “Pura Vida” culture.
Wow such an informative post! This makes me realize how shocking it is that we don't already have something like this. We need more options to own our data and not be censored!