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@ k.
2025-01-09 21:44:14abstract
i'm writing this post to explain its title without me explaining it every time i talk about nostr or bitcoin and say im studying/working on them, and people immediately ask me about crypto. this would be helpful to clarify this for those overwhelmed with information from crypto projects advertising themselves as a decentralized system.
note: this post is not about financial markets and this stuff at all!
note 2: this post is not technical. i wrote it to make my life easier, and it may also make yours.
what happened?
around 16 years ago a cypherpunk called satoshi nakamoto published a standard called bitcoin: a peer-to-peer electronic cash system. the purpose was to define a decentralized cash system in simple terms. he used a data structure called blockchain that links some blocks of data containing changes in the balance state in the current block and adds a new one to it every 10 minutes.
later some guys started creating copies of bitcoin called altcoins such as ethereum or litecoin and more. over time the word
decentralizedbecame a fancy word and they were able to earn a lot of money using it. so, more people did it.current state
these altocins have become more famous and more people are familiar with them. now here are some points that make all of these projects different from bitcoin:
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bitcoin network has a lot of nodes running and validating network and checking transactions with a huge hash rate. anyone can join this network without any permissions. on the other hand, most crypto projects need a high-spec device and tokens to stake (since most of them are proof-of-stake or something similar) and there are a lot more tokens on hand of specific people so they can have more shares on voting. (since bitcoin is proof-of-work you won't need coins to have the right to vote)
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decentralization is not only in a network of nodes. a decentralized system has no one in charge to check its security. when we run a bitcoin core node, there is some code running and this code will take actions which are our votes. bitcoin-core code is one of the most reviewed code bases and a lot of people will observe and review its changes. on the other hand, you can simply check all crypto projects and you can see how their code base is managed. you can see lots of changes are applied by a small group of people without any review.
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there is a lot of pre-mined/minted coins controlled by teams, early users, vcs, and more in crypto projects. most of them can be mined or minted to infinity. which makes your coins lose their value over time since there is more of it out there, the same as fiat currency. but bitcoin is simple and fair: do work, get the reward. and coins are limited to 21 million. nobody doesn't have printed coins.
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all crypto projects have a not anonymous team who are out there and the government has access to them. when this team or related people to it publish unexpected stuff on social, get arrested or anything like that, it will impact the whole ecosystem the things you hold which called coins. on the other hand the first guys behind bitcoin are gone now and we don't know him at all. and we don't have anything called bitcoin foundation officially. all of the people working on bitcoin are plebs such as me and you. so, there is now a central point of failure. for a better example search for the story of pavel durove and what happened to his project called
the open networkwhen france government arrested him.
so, they are not
blockchains? you may think anything referred to as a p2p network or a blockchain is decentralized. this is not true. in simple terms, a blockchain is a data structure that we can use to store and maintain data using it. a decentralized system is something that no one can control it directly or censor it. for example bitcoin is a decentralized blockchain (and the only one), but nostr is a decentralized protocol that is not a blockchain, or hyperledger fabric based projects are blockchain, but they are not decentralized.answer to you possible questions:
- q. bitcoin is slow and requires high fees, what should we do?
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a: lighting is a layer-2 off-chin solution that help us to make zero-fee transactions with the speed of lightning.
note: lighting is not another blockchain or token, it's bitcoin itself.
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q: there are no smart contracts on bitcoin, what should we do?
- a: to be honest we don't need them. 99% percent of smart contracts are solving issues made by themselves and they don't fix any real issues. they are just super fancy. most of the real use cases they claim they can have are not implemented and don't work. and the rest is possible with nostr, really decentralized, and it's working.
then what is nostr?
nostr is a protocol. it's a set of rules which defined for communication between servers and apps on the web, mobile, or desktop. developers can write software that follows these rules to create social media and more. the resulting app is not a platform or something like that. for example x, meta, bluesky, and more. you control your client and you have the right to connect to any server managed by different people even yourself. and non of the actors in this system won't need permission for this. this is something like http. you can see a lot of websites accessible using http protocol and you can access them using different browsers. the website knows how to return stuff when someone calls them using
http://....and your browser knows how to show this stuff to you. the website you or the owner don't need to ask for permissions from something called http platform. this is just a way to and the website can talk to each other.conclusion
crypto is not the same as bitcoin. nostr is not a blockchain. any blockchain is not decentralized and any decentralized thing is not a blockchain.
this article is draft-1. if you have any ideas for improvement, please tell me or add comments. but consider that i try my best to keep this short, simple, without technical words, and clear.
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