marcano on Nostr: I think I get what you're saying. So if I'm to summarize in my own words: We can't ...
I think I get what you're saying. So if I'm to summarize in my own words:
We can't really *prove* censorship resistance because different groups have different censorship capabilities, but we can think it through a bit and game theory it out.
Nostr was created to combat *platform* censorship, like Twitter/X banning a sitting president or dissidents. This works well because platforms are only really able to censor within their own infrastructure. They can't reach out and control the rest of the TCP/IP network at large.
But if a *state* wanted to censor, like China and their great firewall, they could crawl the network, assemble a massive list of nostr relay IP addresses, and carpet ban them all at once. Making it very difficult/unrealistic for Nostr users to reconnect and communicate.
If Nostr is to become censorship resistant at the state level, we need relays more like TOR that can be truly anonymous (both location and operator). But the trade-off is that they are slow, low-bandwidth, and not great for the use cases like social media.
We can't really *prove* censorship resistance because different groups have different censorship capabilities, but we can think it through a bit and game theory it out.
Nostr was created to combat *platform* censorship, like Twitter/X banning a sitting president or dissidents. This works well because platforms are only really able to censor within their own infrastructure. They can't reach out and control the rest of the TCP/IP network at large.
But if a *state* wanted to censor, like China and their great firewall, they could crawl the network, assemble a massive list of nostr relay IP addresses, and carpet ban them all at once. Making it very difficult/unrealistic for Nostr users to reconnect and communicate.
If Nostr is to become censorship resistant at the state level, we need relays more like TOR that can be truly anonymous (both location and operator). But the trade-off is that they are slow, low-bandwidth, and not great for the use cases like social media.