nonni on Nostr: There’s a lot to this topic. I’m so glad this question has been asked. I’ve ...

There’s a lot to this topic. I’m so glad this question has been asked.

I’ve worked with Web5 and those SDKs since its launch. I’m currently building an incubation project with the TBD team called DCX.

I‘ve also worked with Nostr and those SDKs and built hackathon apps that integrated some of the core Nostr features.

After spending time with both, I can say with confidence that the TBD team has a lot of time and put a lot of thought and effort into architecting a cleaner and more scalable.

Nostr does have network, and yes, DIDs can be integrated into Nostr. This is a testament to the flexibility of DIDs and the DID spec. Check out this initial spec with working code examples: https://github.com/bnonni/did-nostr. I’m working on building a live app example of this did:nostr spec to showcase how it works.

TLDR: Nostr keys are a subset of DID keys in terms of functionality. Nostr keys can perform certain functions as good as DIDs such as the basic ability to sign arbitrary data and do authentication. DIDs provide a more scalable solution because they are built with support for other robust features like VCs and DWNs. DIDs are also platform agnostic meaning the second part of the DID uri can be swapped out with any storage solution you want (i.e. did:dht, did:nostr, did:btc, did:ion, did:web).

In the end, these two things are tools. The question becomes: which tool solves my problem more effectively? 🤔 my answer was / is DIDs using Web5.