18 million users, 5 million US dollars in funding, understand the story of Nostr's "behind the man"

Decentralization is no longer a castle in the air, but has begun to enter people's daily life.

原文标题：《Meet @Fiatjaf, The Mysterious Nostr Creator Who Has Attracted 18 Million Users And $5 Million From Jack Dorsey》

Written by: Michael del Castillo, Forbes

Compilation: Babywhale, Foresight News

Welsh software developer Ben Arc first met @Fiatjaf (Nostr dev) in 2019 when he hacked a Pac-Man arcade game to make it accept Bitcoin. After encountering difficulties using the software designed to simplify the process, Arc sent a message to the Bitcoin developers mailing list asking for help. “The only person who wrote me back was @Fiatjaf,” Arc said, and it was the beginning of a collaboration between two people who had never met but collaborated frequently.

The most famous outcome of their collaboration is naturally Nostr, a protocol that has gained 18 million users and reflects growing opposition to networks run by big corporations. In his first media interview, @Fiatjaf said he was frustrated by Twitter's increasing bans. But he couldn't switch to a competitor while retaining his fans. Inspired by Arc's idea of creating a marketplace, he set out to develop a new protocol for managing identities: first for social networks, then for everything else.

Nostr's architecture allows users to take their profile and their followers to any competitor using the same protocol, as Nostr builds a "network of interoperable networks." The concept has gained traction, with at least a dozen decentralized social media alternatives amassing millions of users in recent months, in part due to widespread dissatisfaction with Twitter's privacy scrutiny and civility policies.

Nostr, short for Notes and Other Stuff Transmitted by Relays, is not so much an actual network as a set of instructions for connecting identities. It initially attracted interest among tech-savvy developers, and then, with only a few hundred thousand users, it caught the attention of Twitter co-founder and former CEO Jack Dorsey. He donated 14 bitcoins (worth ~$200,000 at the time) to @Fiatjaf, who distributed the proceeds to the developers of Nostr.

While Dorsey was still running Twitter, he invested $13 million in a similar decentralized social media project, Bluesky, which had just opened up to a million users on a waiting list. This month, Dorsey donated another $5 million to Nostr. Nostr, which has made the network more accessible since its early improvements, has developed a secret sauce: allowing bitcoin transfers between users. Half a million daily Nostr users have sent each other 792,000 tiny bitcoin transactions called zaps, worth $1.9 million, and dozens of companies are building new applications on Nostr.

"If a giant company starts doing things on Nostr today, they may control the protocol, which is not a good thing" @Fiatjaf said, "If the protocol is created by this large company, the same thing will happen. But in the protocol After getting bigger, many companies will be gathered together, and each will make money in its own way.”

This article is based on multiple interviews with @Fiatjaf and people around the world who have joined what is believed to be a social movement he launched. Of those interviewed, only one claimed to know @Fiatjaf's real name. Some of his personal details could not be verified, but what we have been able to confirm is true and reliable.

@Fiatjaf said he was born in 1991 in the densely populated southeastern region of Brazil. From an early age, his entrepreneurial parents warned him that taxes and regulations were hurting their company. While traveling with his classmates to intern at a local Fiat car factory, he received a hat with the company logo on it. Years later, when he was making a name in an online game, he saw the hat on the table, merged it with an old identity JAF, and created an alias from it, but he refused to disclose the meaning of JAF.

While studying economics at a university in Brazil in the early 2010s, he became enamored of the Austrian school of economics, which taught that large economies were too complex to plan. He discovered bitcoin in 2011, when the cryptocurrency was worth about $15, on a website commemorating Ludwig von Mises, the founder of Austrian economics. He immediately downloaded the software and started mining. "It didn't work well," he said with a smile, "I only got 5,000 Satoshi after digging all night."

After briefly exploring other cryptocurrencies, @Fiatjaf started writing software that connects Bitcoin and other decentralized technologies, and in 2018 launched an experiment called Piln, which allows servers to charge small amounts of Bitcoin to use in decentralized databases Store files in . But his breakthrough didn't happen until June 2019, when software developer Arc asked for help cracking Pac-Man. Arc shared an idea called Diagon Alley — named after a market in the Harry Potter stories — that would theoretically allow virtual store owners to move their storefronts from Amazon to the dark web. After seeing the potential of this idea, @Fiatjaf started working on his own version, which works for any type of identity.

“A few months later,” recalls Arc, “when I was reading the protocol he had developed, I said, ‘Man, this is a lot like Diagon Alley,’ and he said, ‘That’s one of the things that influenced the creation of Nostr.”

Before the year was out, @Fiatjaf's idea had become what he called the Nostr Manifesto, describing an open, censorship-resistant global social network. Computers that send short messages to each other and form the lowest layer of the network are called relays, and applications, such as social networks or marketplaces built on top of relays, are called clients. It is not a public key that identifies tokens like Bitcoin, but defines users, and there is no underlying blockchain. Nostr is just a set of instructions on how to build interoperable applications. “A lot of the things people want to see built on Bitcoin,” Arc said, “could actually be built on Nostr as well.”

A month after @Fiatjaf independently published his manifesto, then-Twitter CEO Dorsey launched Bluesky with similar goals.

By early 2020, @Fiatjaf had gotten the attention of his current part-time company, Zebedee, a Hoboken, NJ-based video game startup that makes software that lets game developers reward players with bitcoin. After much pleading from 31-year-old Zebedee co-founder Andre Neves, @Fiatjaf has accepted a full-time remote job, putting him in charge of an internal project called NBD.WTF, which currently consists of five Bitcoin-related projects and Nostr.

“He’d spend a weekend looking at random open source projects that he created out of thin air because he believed they would be of value to other people,” Neves said. “Not because he wanted to sell it, or because he wanted to build a product, but Because he wanted to create something for other people, solve their problems, improve the world."

A Twitter controversy hastened the formation of Nostr. In January 2021, billionaire Jack Dorsey banned former US President Trump from using Twitter. Then billionaire Musk bought the company and quickly alienated many of its most loyal users by charging for services they deemed important, like two-factor authentication. Although Nostr has been in development since 2019, he has deliberately taken an unorthodox path. "No company," @Fiatjaf said, "nothing."

Nostr doesn't even have an intellectual property license. Instead, @Fiatjaf has chosen to make software a public good, potentially exposing himself and others to legal problems if some of the code in the agreement is copyrighted by others, says Florida-based Stanton Intellectual Property Law Firm Tampa partner Thomas Stanton said, "If there is a problem, he and any user can be held accountable." But @Fiatjaf is not worried, "I don't care about this kind of permission," he said, "I just want people to use It, I don't understand these things and try not to understand."

Since anyone can develop applications using the Nostr standard, it is difficult to determine when the first users of applications built on Nostr appeared. But in April 2022, the number of new users went from a trickle to a downpour. William Casarin, a 34-year-old bitcoin engineer, launched Damus on the Nostr protocol, a project originally intended to simplify accessing Nostr in a Twitter-like environment. He founded Damus at the end of 2022. In January this year, Damus launched on the App Store. Casarin, who previously worked at bitcoin infrastructure company Blockstream, designed a payment method for Nostr users to send zaps over the Lightning Network. Shortly thereafter, @Fiatjaf added Casarin's upgrade to the Nostr protocol, allowing anyone to develop to the same spec.

This new feature proved to be crucial. Until then, while many of the developers of the Nostr app were bitcoin enthusiasts, little of this was reflected in the protocol. After supporting Bitcoin payments, Damus grew from 10,000 users to about 160,000, and Nostr's total users jumped from 10 million to 18 million. About 25,000 Damus users were from mainland China before the Chinese government banned the app for allegedly supporting content deemed illegal in China. Casarin argued Damus was banned because it was a free speech tool, calling the ban a "badge of honor."

Not only are nine Nostr projects now using zaps, but the ability to send bitcoin is backed by Block CEO Dorsey. Block has become a bitcoin investment firm with a stack of $220 million worth of cryptocurrencies as of Dec. 31, 2022, and is venturing into the nascent social commerce space where payments and social media intersect. Accenture estimates that by 2025, the social commerce industry will reach $1.2 trillion.

In early 2021, Serbian-born developer Rockstar drew Dorsey's attention to Nostr. Annoyed that Bluesky CEO Jay Graber didn't mention Nostr in his detailed analysis of the decentralized social media ecosystem, he privately messaged Dorsey on Twitter and suggested he take a closer look. Much to Rockstar's surprise, a few days later @Fiatjaf received an email from Twitter Corporate Development Strategist Arnold Jun. "I read your article on Nostr and really like the simplicity of your approach," Jun wrote, "Can I chat with you?" @Fiatjaf was not pleased.

"What you're doing is dangerous," @Fiatjaf told Rockstar in the Nostr Telegram group, "We're trying to start a grassroots movement here and you're talking to JACK?"

Rockstar responded: "Life needs some stimulation, be sure to talk to him, they seem to have more people talking than doing things."

"I'll talk to that person, but I'm skeptical," wrote @Fiatjaf.

Dorsey did not respond to a request for comment for this article, but @Fiatjaf said he sent a DM asking after the billionaire told the world in a tweet that he was trying to "figure out" how to fund Nostr How can he support the agreement.

"I don't know how to answer," said @Fiatjaf, "I suggested he could fund some developers, but then he asked if he could give me the money and let me decide what to do with it, and gave me 14 bitcoins." @Fiatjaf gave Casarin half. Then, in May of this year, Dorsey donated another $5 million to a nonprofit dedicated to supporting bitcoin efforts, specifically to fund Nostr development.

While Nostr has matured, it's important to note that Twitter and Facebook also started out as relatively open platforms, restricting access to developers only when commercial interests compelled them. Nostr's business model is far from certain, and the threat of centralization has emerged. While traditional social networks generate revenue by charging for ads to support their sprawling server farms, and blockchain social networks sidestep centralization by paying users in cryptocurrency, Nostr developers are looking for a different way to stay afloat.

Zebedee and Arc's LNBits are working on a product that lets users host their own servers using bitcoin. Damus is experimenting with a tool that lets users directly support the company's growth, and it brought in $145 in its first four days. If users are not willing to pay, the Nostr app will become a "charity". “A lot of advertisers have a lot of leverage on these platforms,” Casarin said, “If we can find a way to make money and do it sustainably without annoying our users, that’s obviously a huge victory."

Further centralization risks come from within. Only insiders acknowledged by @Fiatjaf are allowed to add features to the Github codebase. An internal document shared with Forbes revealed that he had licensed seven people, but few used them.

So far, the limitation on the number of people with access to make changes to Nostr has not stopped developers from getting involved, with 7,500 people building 26 relays to support the network; there are also Nostr-based Android and iOS apps, including Go A centralized chess game, a decentralized news site for independent journalists, and several decentralized clones of Twitter and Reddit; and a plan to provide a "geolocation service" for taxis, similar to decentralized Uber. Arc is redeveloping Diagon Alley and renaming it NostrMarket, allowing users to transfer all their digital information. “The power is in the hands of the client,” he said, “and it becomes almost a form of activism.”

As for @Fiatjaf, his latest creation is an app that uses the Bitcoin network to let experts place bets on future events, with the goal of providing investors with more accurate forecasts. "I still have a lot of projects with great potential."