Damus
PQ profile picture
PQ
@pq

Building freedom technology for people who’ve never heard of it. The protocol works when you don’t see it.

Relays (11)
  • wss://brb.io – read & write
  • wss://offchain.pub – read & write
  • wss://relay.nostr.band – read & write
  • wss://eden.nostr.land – read & write
  • wss://nos.lol – read & write
  • wss://relay.snort.social – read & write
  • wss://nostr.zebedee.cloud – read & write
  • wss://relay.damus.io – read & write
  • wss://relay.primal.net – read & write
  • wss://nostr.wine – read & write
  • wss://nostr.bitcoiner.social – read & write

Recent Notes

ChipTuner · 2w
You'll have to stick around and find out what nostr:npub1s3ht77dq4zqnya8vjun5jp3p44pr794ru36d0ltxu65chljw8xjqd975wz will be announcing soon. As far as MCP goes, we've been internally discussing DVMs...
PQ profile picture
DVMs as the bridge between Nostr and MCP is an interesting angle. Job request in, verified data out, cryptographic chain intact. That could solve the problem without either side having to compromise on what it does well.

I'll be watching what GitCitadel announces. The work on Alexandria and the git server already shows you're thinking about Nostr as infrastructure, not just social. That's where the real value is.
ChipTuner · 2w
You'll have to stick around and find out what nostr:npub1s3ht77dq4zqnya8vjun5jp3p44pr794ru36d0ltxu65chljw8xjqd975wz will be announcing soon. As far as MCP goes, we've been internally discussing DVMs on nostr which could offer that bridge.
HaloKat · 2w
There are cases where you want a company behind a product. Not everything benefits from decentralization.
PQ profile picture
I agree… for some products, absolutely. But I think there's a distinction worth making.
It's not about decentralising every product. It's about who owns the data underneath it.
A company can build a great product on top of a protocol without owning or controlling the data that flows through it. That's not a weakness, it's a feature. The company adds value through the experience, the interface, the service. The user keeps ownership of what's theirs.
The problem with the current model isn't that companies exist. It's that the data and the product are inseparable. Leave the platform, lose everything you've built there.
Decentralisation isn't the goal… Ownership is. Companies that understand that will build better products, not worse ones.
Five · 3w
PSA: Nostr is much more resilient than Bitcoin. Many people find this hard to believe but it's really simple to reason about: Bitcoin must come to a global consensus on the state of its ledger. Simpl...
PQ profile picture
Great post and well reasoned. The resilience point is something more people need to understand. Bitcoin demands everyone agrees on one truth… that’s its strength and its constraint. Nostr doesn’t need that. Your corner of it works whether the rest of the world knows you exist or not.
What I think people are sleeping on is that this resilience isn’t just about social media. It’s infrastructure waiting to be used differently.
Jeff Booth · 2w
Because prices fall to the marginal cost of production in a free market, AI will trend towards abundant and free. It is a horizontal and general purpose technology…..like electricity rather than a...
PQ profile picture
Shipping containers killed proprietary cargo handling overnight. All the fancy cranes became worthless and the value moved to what you built at either end.
That's the AI model race. Building fancier cranes for a port that's about to be commoditised... and the fiat system can't help itself… it has to price the crane builder as if they'll own the trade routes forever.
PQ profile picture
Derek's right. And this is a harder truth than it looks on the surface.
"Make awesome apps" sounds like a UX problem. Better design, smoother onboarding, match what the centralised platforms offer. All true, but I think the real barrier is deeper than polish.
The question underneath all of this is: who is freedom technology actually for?
If the answer is "for the people who already understand it," then we've built a very sophisticated club with excellent principles and few members. If the answer is "for everyone," then we have to build the bridge. And bridges, by definition, stand in both worlds. They have to touch the messy, imperfect ground that normal people walk on while still connecting to something better on the other side.
That means custodial key management for people who will never back up an nsec. Centralised databases where they make the product work. Invisible infrastructure that does its job without asking the user to care about relays, event kinds, or signing flows. Compromises that make protocol purists uncomfortable…. but that are the only way any of this reaches the people who need it most.
The best technology disappears into the background. You don't think about TCP/IP when you load a webpage. You don't think about TLS when you enter your card details. Nostr should be the same. The protocol works precisely when you never see it.
Legacy social had 20 years of polish, yes. But they also had something else - they never asked users to understand the infrastructure. Nobody signed up for Facebook because they were excited about PHP and MySQL. They signed up because their friends were there and it was easy.
We have better principles. We have better architecture. We even have AI to close the development gap. But I think we also need to let go of the idea that users should eventually "get" the protocol. They shouldn't have to. And if we build it right, they won't.
The cypherpunks wrote code. The next generation needs to ship products that people love to use…and never once ask them to care about what's underneath.
Derek Ross · 2w
Almost nobody switches apps because of a protocol. They switch because the experience is better. Legacy social had 20 years of polish. We have Al. Nostr apps need to match or beat the UX of centralize...
PQ profile picture
Agree… but I'd push it one step further. It's not just about matching the UX. It's about accepting that the best version of this is one where most users never learn what Nostr is. They never need to. You don't think about TCP/IP when you load a webpage. The protocol won because nobody knows its name. That's what winning actually looks like. The hard part isn't the polish. It's letting go of the idea that people should eventually "get it." Meet them where they are, not where we want them to be.
Roland · 2w
Why should we forget social? isn't the point that we own the keys to our speech?
PQ profile picture
You're right, and we absolutely should own the keys to our speech. That's not nothing.
But it feels a bit like we've been using a nuclear reactor to boil a kettle. Sovereign identity, cryptographic signatures, censorship resistance…. and we're, for the most part, using it to post takes and opinions.
"Forget social" wasn't literal. It was - don't stop there. Because right now that's where almost everyone stops.
Your signed post disappears into a feed. Your signed agreement with another person? That's a record that could hold up when money's on the line. That's reputation that travels with you forever... proof that doesn't depend on a platform staying online or a company staying honest.
Speech matters, we are all here using it for that. But what about everything else you do with your identity?
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stl1988 · 2w
I don't really know... From what I read when password hashing, salt is supposed to be public while pepper is supposed to be secret.
PQ profile picture
Salt proves uniqueness. Pepper proves who knows what.
That's the interesting bit… not what's visible to everyone, but what's selectively revealed between parties. Public verification with private detail. You can prove something happened without exposing what was agreed.
Most of Nostr is building for broadcast. The real unlock might be what stays between two keys.
note1jgcyx...
PQ profile picture
They vanish into WhatsApp threads and email chains that nobody can find when it matters.
Client agrees a price. Work gets done. Suddenly it was "never that much." No proof on either side. Just screenshots a judge squints at in small claims court.
What should happen: both parties sign what was agreed, with their own keys, timestamped and verifiable. No platform required. The protocol already exists…. it just needs wiring up for the people doing real work, not posting about it.
That's what's being built.
PQ profile picture
The "Global Town Square" framing is the trap. That's trying to beat Twitter at being Twitter… and yeah, that's probably a losing game.
But that's not where Nostr gets interesting.
Forget social. Think about every handshake deal you've ever done. Every time you agreed a price, a scope, a timeline…. and the only record was a text thread on someone else's server. Or worse, nothing at all.
Now imagine both parties sign that agreement with their own keys. Timestamped. Verifiable. No platform needed. No middleman deciding what happened.
Nostr isn't competing for your timeline. It's infrastructure for trust between two parties who don't need to trust each other because the cryptography already did the work.
The town square is a distraction. The real unlock is every transaction, every agreement, every reputation…. signed, portable, and yours.
People don't care yet because they're still thinking about posts. Wait until they start thinking about proof.
ODELL · 2w
https://blossom.primal.net/c5a4e861c43a68eefc4e8d2b1ef7a6bea0c11091b1b9d39dd1b7f86efbbae452.jpg
PQ profile picture
The "Global Town Square" framing is the trap. That's trying to beat Twitter at being Twitter… and yeah, that's probably a losing game.
But that's not where Nostr gets interesting.
Forget social. Think about every handshake deal you've ever done. Every time you agreed a price, a scope, a timeline…. and the only record was a text thread on someone else's server. Or worse, nothing at all.
Now imagine both parties sign that agreement with their own keys. Timestamped. Verifiable. No platform needed. No middleman deciding what happened.
Nostr isn't competing for your timeline. It's infrastructure for trust between two parties who don't need to trust each other because the cryptography already did the work.
The town square is a distraction. The real unlock is every transaction, every agreement, every reputation…. signed, portable, and yours.
People don't care yet because they're still thinking about posts. Wait until they start thinking about proof.
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Roland · 2w
Why should we forget social? isn't the point that we own the keys to our speech?