These are my current hypotheses about Nostr. My purpose in writing this is to clarify (and hopefully improve!) my thinking in this fast changing ecosystem. I’d love to hear your feedback where you agree or disagree.
Clients will be highly strategic (similar to web browsers), but may or may not be hard to monetize directly
Relays incur costs in storage, bandwidth, and compute and large ones will monetize directly in part to recoup that cost
Large relays will be run by centralized players, but competition will still abound and jurisdiction-specific, community-focused, and personal relays will always be a thing
Large relays will compete to have the most complete picture of publishers, followers, and notes on the network; have better bandwidth/ingress/egress; and better geographic distribution/performance
Search across notes will become very centralized and very valuable, a credible contender to Google
Search quality will primarily come from new signals of trust present in 1) the pub-key follower graph and 2) lightning payments on notes (“zaps”)
Payments from a trusted pub-key to a note (a “zap”) will both increase the trust signal on the note for search quality and will increase the trust signal on the public key of the note’s author.
Payment will be required for the exchange of value among the loosely coupled relationships of users, clients, and relays. This will become the leading use-case for bitcoin/lightning payments volume in the next decade.
Advertising will not be coupled to consumption on clients. Consuming/participating in ads will be a user-chosen activity to earn value.
Advertising formats will become more diverse and will include more interactive/participatory experiences which will be more valuable to advertisers and to users who choose to engage with them.
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