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Nostr Overview: Twitter but not.

Overview: Notes and Other Stuff Transmitted by Relays

Nostr - The protocol

The protocol is like the internet protocol of ipv4 or ipv6. It was kept simple and minimalistic to build other layers on top of it. Think of it like a base layer and the UIUX are up to the Nostr clients. Sound familiar? #Bitcoin ⚡️

Nostr - Relays

Anyone can run a relay, but not everyone has to. Relays are servers that save and broadcast your Nostr posts/contents to clients. Relays do not talk to other relays and only forward content to clients that request data from them. Relays can limit who can post to the server and who can request data from it.

Nostr - Clients

Clients are the windows into the Nostr community. Everyone runs a client. You connect to specific Nostr relays that serve up the content they broadcast from other users that are connected to the same relay. Since the protocol itself is kept minimalistic, it is simple to build a UI on top of it but it also means each Nostr client has a little different experience. The content and data is the same but each client has the freedom of how to display the information to you.


Lightning Payment

Connect and associate your Bitcoin lightning address through your Nostr client of choice to your Nostr private key. Each Client will have a different Account settings page, but it will associate the lightning address with your private key (Nostr Profile). Then anyone in the community can send you Sats! (or Bits if you like to call them that).

Popular Lightning wallets:


Verified Account: NIP-05

NIP - Nostr Implementation Possibilities

Map your public Nostr key to something that is called an internet identifier, effectively what looks like and email. (user@domain.com). I can map this username to my domain website I own through multiple different ways, but the idea is you become a verified profile for that web domain (DNS). Only the owner of the domain can have access to add a nostr.json file to its host and thereby verifying you are a part of that domain.

There are plenty of services that provide this verification for you. They add you to their domain hosted nostr.json file and the username will have to be unique in that domain.

Ex:

References: