The current plan consists in giving out money not for specific tasks, but for general open-source efforts that seem to be worth it according to my own completely arbitrary and subjective judgment and hand out microbounties to these.

The idea is that people will give a little more priority working on Nostr things that they already wanted to because they have a chance of getting a microbounty for it while if they work on another side project like a rollercoaster building game they don’t have that chance (although rollercoaster building games have other advantages).

If you have any micro project idea in your head (or half-done) message fiatjaf at https://t.me/fiatjaf and he may decide to preassign a bounty to it conditional to your completion of that same project in case he finds that to be worth pursuing. The plan is that this will work because you are already interested in the thing and not just doing it for the money, as it is the case with normal bounties.

Here is a list of themes that I currently think are worth exploring more, to serve as an inspiration: Themes

• Microapps (Nostr apps that do only one thing and do it well), for example:
  • An app for just publishing things and reading replies
  • An app for just managing your contacts
  • An app for just reading threads
• Native apps instead of web
• Pull requests that add these nice features to existing clients instead of making a new client
• New use cases besides “social” but that still deliver interoperability and standardized behavior between clients
• Bonus points if these new use cases can be interacted with with from the “social” clients in some way, e.g.
  • if you do webpage comments on Nostr you can see and interact with these from social clients as normal posts
  • If you do wikipedia on Nostr you can comment on these articles from social clients
• Usable tricks to secure keys that can still work in practice, some stupid examples:
  • A client (or addition to existing clients) that stores encrypted Nostr on the user’s Google Drive and the decryption key for that on a custom server
  • An integrated multisig server that signs stuff upon request
• Relay discovery
  • Because we should not assume everybody will always be in all relays or that clients will talk to all relays all the time forever
• Making existing things
  • Prettier
  • Faster
• Non-public relays use cases

Bounties given

February 2023

• styppo: 5,000,000 sats - https://hamstr.to/
• sandwich: 5,000,000 sats - https://nostr.watch/
• BOUNTY: Relay-centric client designs: 5,000,000 sats https://bountsr.org/design/2023/01/26/relay-based-design.html
  • BOUNTY: Gossip model on https://coracle.social/: 5,000,000 sats
  • Nostrovia Podcast: 3,000,000 sats - https://nostrovia.org/
  • BOUNTY: Nostr-Desk / Monstr: 5,000,000 sats - https://github.com/alemmens/monstr
  • Mike Dilger: 5,000,000 sats - https://github.com/mikedilger/gossip

January 2023

• ismyhc: 5,000,000 sats - https://github.com/Galaxoid-Labs/Seer
• Martti Malmi: 5,000,000 sats - https://iris.to/
• Carlos Autonomous: 5,000,000 sats - https://github.com/BrightonBTC/bija
• Koala Sat: 5,000,000 - https://github.com/KoalaSat/nostros
• Vitor Pamplona: 5,000,000 - https://github.com/vitorpamplona/amethyst
• Cameri: 5,000,000 - https://github.com/Cameri/nostream

December 2022

• William Casarin: 7 BTC - splitting the fund
• pseudozach: 5,000,000 sats - https://nostr.directory/
• Sondre Bjellas: 5,000,000 sats - https://notes.blockcore.net/
• Null Dev: 5,000,000 sats - https://github.com/KotlinGeekDev/Nosky
• Blake Jakopovic: 5,000,000 sats - https://github.com/blakejakopovic/nostcat, https://github.com/blakejakopovic/nostreq and https://github.com/blakejakopovic/NostrEventPlayground