Subject: Re: [bitcoin-dev] Future of the bitcoin-dev mailing list

From: Peter Todd <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 7 Nov 2023 23:07:07 +0000

On Tue, Nov 07, 2023 at 11:03:30AM -0600, Ademan via bitcoin-dev wrote:
> Hi Bryan,
> 
> I don't really want my first (and last?) devlist message to be a fairly
> off-the-cuff post on this topic, but here we go anyway.
> 
> At the risk of sounding like a nostr evangelist (I promise I'm not), I want
> to suggest nostr as a potential replacement to the mailing list. A decent
> chunk of software would need to be written, but none of the alternatives
> seem particularly attractive to me. I particularly dislike the idea of
> locking into a single siloed forum service like the bitcointalk forums. I
> realize I may be in the minority of course.

Strong NACK on nostr. It's a badly designed, centralized, protocol that needs a
significant redesign to be usable. While off topic for this mailing list, some
of its many issues include:

* Reliance on single-key, cryptography that often results in people having
  their keys compromised. This is a serious problem in the context of
  bitcoin-dev, where faked messages published could easily have market-moving
  results.

* Inability to mirror relays: since nostr deliberately ignores the lessons of
  blockchains, there is no way to be sure that you have a complete set of
  messages from a given person, for a given topic, etc.

* Highly centralized design: since mirroring relays isn't reliable, in reality
  nostr operates in a highly centralized fashion, dependent on a tiny number of
  relays that can't be easily replaced if taken down.

-- 
https://petertodd.org 'peter'[:-1]@petertodd.org