We're joining forces with Bolt.Fun for a month-long hackathon bridging Bitcoin and NOSTR (Notes and Other Stuff Transmitted by Relays), culminating with a special three day sprint and live event in Tokyo at the Nostrasia Conference.
Help build the future of Nostr! Like the early days of Bitcoin or of the Internet, Nostr is nascent open technology shaping new types of social experiences to connect people across the globe. It carries a foundation of principles similar to Bitcoin, like decentralization, simplicity, and censorship-resistance.
Bitcoin and Nostr communities are in synergy. What started as a social protocol is quickly transforming into a space for exploration on ways to support content creators through bitcoin lightning micro payments, often referred to as zaps. Bitcoin integration to the nostr protocol strengthens Bitcoin's use case as a currency of exchange. It carves new paths to a culture of value4value.
Nostr exists outside of the rule of platforms and those who seek to control them. HODLing your nostr keys is hodling your identity and social graph, outside of KYC. By helping develop and educate on NOSTR, you are helping people escape walled gardens & gain control and choice over their identities & their money. The Internet, over time, has become centralized, help Nostr stay decentralized by supporting the growth of an ecosystem of apps, websites, microapps, relay services...
Opportunities abound in an environment ripe for innovation:
We have a growing list of knowledgeable people with skin-in-the-game to mentor and support your journey. Once your project matures, you may also have 1-on-1 guidance to help you reach your vision and discover ways of growing and funding it.
Nostr has a blossoming community open to innovation. It is also a great testing ground, as people in the community are open to giving and receiving feedback. It is an environment encouraging conversation on feature ideas as well as possible solutions to social media issues and product bugs.
You have 3 options
If you can think of it, it can be engineered! Nostr encourages permissionless building while staying mindful of interoperability and network support. Help BUIDL, design, and improve an area you are passionate about. Reimagine and BUIDL features, tools, clients... Help solve issues and create new experiences in social media.
The Nostr Implementation Possibilities (NIPs) are optional protocol features anyone can add to their clients. Improve and strengthen existing NIPs or build on new ones. NOSTR is a balance of simplicity, interoperability, backward-compatibility and innovation.
Nostr is made up of a wide range of clients and tools. To make NOSTR scalable, you can help improve its user experience and education.
Nostr cares about removing the KYC tied to our identities. To use Nostr you do not need to give up your phone number, email, financial information, or any metadata tied to your real world identity to be later harvested and sold. You are not the product. What are ways that trust can be earned to prevent impersonation, spam...?
One of the solutions to build a web of trust used today, is to tie your nostr hex public key to a domain. Although this makes it harder for bots to have nostr addresses, it is not a perfect solution. Domains are centralized through DNS. To help people who do not have their own domains or cannot easily add a NIP05 on their sites, your nostr address can be hosted as a service along with other people's. At this moment, you can highlight just one nostr address per profile. In the future, could it include your website, where you work, and other identifiers... What are other possible solutions?
Your identity in NOSTR is tied to your keys, but your information needs to be shared and found across a network of relays. To promote decentralization and censorship resistance, relays need to be easy to setup, lightweight, and sustainable. Relays get to choose what information passes through them, so they are also a form of spam prevention that could potentially also become censoring, so both the relay-runners and the individuals connecting to relays need to have choice and policies cannot be homogenous one-size-fits-all. What are possible solutions to make setting up relays easier, to make running a relay sustainable, to have new ways of discovering information...
To keep relays lightweight, images are hosted by uploading them to the web, and keeping only the links to them in the data within individual nostr notes. This has led to developing image uploading services specific to nostr, but they carry the risk of centralization or censorship. Some product makers and relay runners are looking into direct uploads to Cloud services. What are possible solutions to the handling of media (images, videos, music...)?
People have the choice to block and mute others, this gives signals to relays, which can reenact policies based on those and other signals. Relays need to be able to differentiate real signals from those wanting to game the system for censorship. Relay runners need to have the capacity to make decisions on what to allow or reject.
Make freedom of exchange fun again! Nostr extends beyond social. It is integrating ways for content creators to be supported through lightning micropayments, called zaps, for their creations. The possibilities of building niche value4value economies through the exchange of products, services, and ideas, is growing through various avenues: Marketplaces, fundraising, blogs, music, streaming... devise new robust ways of integrating NOSTR and Bitcoin of monetary and skill exchange. Seek to explore distributed, digital reciprocity and free trade. Encourage a culture of value4value.
A value4value culture is not only about the individuals using NOSTR products and services, but also about the developers and creatives building sustainable projects. What are ways of sustaining NOSTR through Bitcoin that do NOT make the individual user the product and that are privacy mindful?
Many nostr clients have implemented lightning zap payments. Imagine instead of liking a nostr note, you can zap someone's note and they can receive bits/sats in appreciation for their content. It is a strong signal to creators of the kind of content their audiences are looking for. The Apple App Store has recently banned the zapping of specific notes, per Apple's policy that makes the sale of digital content prohibited except when paid through their services. Fortunately, Nostr exists in many decentralized forms outside of app stores and the community is creating new and innovative ways to send bitcoin and free speech from relay to relay, circumventing barriers as they appear. What are solutions that can make NOSTR and zaps ubiquitous?
Give choice and control back to the individual! Create paths forward to help onboard millions of new users and restore free and uncensored speech to the world
Direct Messages on NOSTR are encrypted, but metadata is leaked. If someone's key is compromised, whoever has access to that account can read those messages. Integrating secure and reliable encrypted communication protocols, like the SimpleX messaging protocol, is especially desired by the community, as many in Nostr are aware of the risks of surveillance, authoritarianism, government and Big Tech overreach... Private communication is important for individual rights, in particular for activists and journalists across the globe.
Current lightning zap payments tend to be custodial and not mindful of privacy, though they are helping onboard people unto lightning. What are ways that people can grow into non-custodial solutions? A wider adoption of Bolt-12 would improve zap payment privacy, what are ways to encourage that development? What are other possible solutions?
Tokyo | Nov 1-3
(you can also join virtually)
If you heard of the Nostrica unconference, which happened in Costa Rica in March of this year, Nostrasia is the second Nostr World conference, bringing NOSTR and Bitcoin awareness to the heart of Asia, where freedom communication and freedom money are direly needed.
Tokyo and Hong Kong are beautiful cultural hubs with budding Nostr and thriving Bitcoin communities of their own. We are eager to spread NOSTR education and development in those regions and beyond. We will close this Nostrasia month-long hackathon with a 3-day sprint at the Nostrasia Conference in Tokyo.
We will have a dedicated workshop area and food for you to hack away on the final details of your projects. On the last day of the conference, the most robust projects will get time on stage to present. We will close the Nostrasia Hackathon with a special presentation.
We cannot wait to see what new and exciting projects are proposed for the Nostrasia Hackathon. We’re eager to welcome devs and non-devs alike to contribute to this space and help #grownostr in any small way to help onboard Asia, and the rest of the world to this robust open communication protocol and decentralized freedom of speech tool.
NOSTR.WORLD