We don't need Nostr to pay people Bitcoin to watch ads.
But we do need Nostr to prevent big tech from co-opting the solution.
We could have built Billboard as just another centralized ad platform that pays people in Bitcoin. But that would have been vulnerable to the same problems that plague current advertising:
platform lock-in
data control
eventual monopolization
Instead, we're using Nostr as the foundational data layer for attention marketplaces.
People publish their attention prices and preferences as public Nostr events attached to their private key. This creates transparent, immutable consent records that any developer can read and build competing marketplaces from.
The PROMO Protocol is like HTTP for attention marketplaces - anyone can implement it, preventing any single entity from controlling the system.
This approach is better because it creates true decentralization: attention sellers own their private key and pricing data, advertisers can read public signals directly, and the marketplace data is open and uncontrolled by any single entity. Instead of building another platform that could be co-opted, we're building the infrastructure that makes big tech's business model obsolete.
This is like using the internet protocol not just for websites, but for creating an entirely new economic system where attention is property, not a resource to be extracted.
